Announcements
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Dear Colleagues,
I am delighted to report that Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers, associate professor in Integrative Biology, has agreed to assume the newly created role as Associate Director of the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation. As associate director, Professor Meyers will serve as a liaison with university faculty as we prioritize and establish the instructional and service goals of the division.
Lauren is ideally suited for this role in that she has one foot in both sides of the Division's mission. She teaches Biostatistics and will be teaching a new Computational Biology course in Fall 2008. In addition, Lauren was centrally involved in developing a new Computational Biology Degree and is thus familiar with the administrative mine fields that must be negotiated to ensure success.
Lauren is a mathematical biologist, working at the interface of evolutionary biology and infectious disease epidemiology.
In more detail:
Lauren Ancel Meyers conducts research at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and epidemiology. She uses mathematics, computation, and laboratory experiments to discover what drives populations of bacteria and viruses. She addresses questions like: What allows some pathogens but not others to cause large outbreaks, to recur at regular intervals, to evolve beyond our best efforts at therapeutic intervention? How can public health officials optimally prevent and control the spread of such infectious diseases? In collaboration with public health officials, she has developed new and more powerful mathematical methods for forecasting the spread of disease that have yielded both basic scientific insights and practical guidance for controlling respiratory diseases including influenza and SARS. Based on this work, Meyers was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the Top 100 Global Innovators Under Age 35, and has advised many public health and government agencies including US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), and the National Intelligence Council.
Please join Dean Rankin, Cathy and me in a round of e-applause and thanks. Lauren's guiding hand will be very important as we move forward.
All best wishes,
Sheldon