Episode 319: Holiday Covid Update, Nina Fefferman

Covid update with my favorite guest on the subject! Nina Fefferman has spent her career modeling future pandemics. Because of Covid, she’s gone from a theoretical to an applied mathematician. Her interdisciplinary makes her one of the most knowledgeable people at the intersection of mathematics and evolutionary biology. She consistently takes us on a path through the either/or fallacies of health VS economy which have become so politicized and guides us through an exploration of nuance and complexity that we should all be so lucky to journey through. More impressively, she does so in an exceedingly accessible way. If only these kinds of conversations were a bigger part of our global conversation. We are exceptionally fortunate to have humans like Nina working on behalf of all humanity and I am grateful that she took 2.5 hours out of her life to try and save the world.

Dr. Fefferman is a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department in the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on the mathematics of epidemiology, evolutionary and behavioral ecology, and self-organizing behaviors, especially of systems described by networks. While the research in the Fefferman Lab frequently focuses on disease in human and/or animal populations, and how disease and disease-related behavioral ecology can affect the short-term survival and long-term evolutionary success of a population, people in the lab have worked on problems as diverse as computer network security to social behaviors in grass-roots organizations that make the movement susceptible to radicalization. Any fun integration of applied mathematics and human or animal processes is fair game!Thank you for watching and being an inquisitive being.