Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Nina Fefferman became a mathematician because she loves puzzles. She's just been awarded $18 million from the U.S.
National Science Foundation to solve one puzzle that has the potential to change the world: how, when and why an infection in a population will spread, or cause an epidemic or pandemic, rather than dying out. Fefferman, director of the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems and associate director of the UT One Health Initiative at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has secured the funding to launch the NSF Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion (NSF APPEX) in the fall. The multidisciplinary center will focus on identifying the factors that constitute a "perfect storm" for the spread of infection across populations as well as ways humans can prevent or mitigate these threats.
"A lot of pandemic research is immunology and virology, work that happens in medical schools, but that's only two parts among the very many parts that come together to create a pandemic," said Fefferman, who has worked in pandemic preparedness for 20 years. "Think about it: A very small portion of an epidemic is what is happening inside one person. Public health is about changing the lives of an entire population.
" The individual pieces of this puzzle could include the built environment, economic resources, media, safety systems engineering, social networks and surveillance along with other fields such as ecology.