Tamara Awerbuch-Friedlander

Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander , PhD, is a biomathematician and public health scientist at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston , Massachusetts.¹ Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or contribute to disease. She also is believed to be the first female Harvard Faculty member to file a lawsuit against Harvard University for sex discrimination .² Currently, she is an instructor in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard School of Public Health . Since the beginning of this century, she has organized and carried out research on conditions that lead to the emergence, maintenance, and spread of epidemics . Her research encompasses sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) such as HIV/AIDS , as well as vector-borne diseases , such as malaria and Lyme disease . Awerbuch-Friedlander recently researched the spread and control of rabies based on an eco-historical analysis. Her work is interdisciplinary, and her publications are co-authored with members of different departments of the HSPH . Conditions contributing to the emergence of epidemics are complex in nature, involving biological, ecological, behavioral, environmental, and socioeconomic factors. Most of her research mathematically models these factors as systems that lend themselves to qualitative and quantitative analysis . These models can be used to explore the effect of each factor in the presence of the others as well as new interventions. Many of these models are based on data collected in the field, whether they concern zoonotic diseases such as the population dynamics of the tick that transmits Lyme disease in the Northeastern part of the United States, or sexually transmitted diseases , such as the relative probabilities of HIV1 and HIV2 infection in a cohort of prostitutes in Senegal . Some of her analytical mathematical models led to fundamental epidemiological discoveries, for example, that oscillations are an intrinsic property of tick dynamics . This means that a decrease in tick abundance in one year does not necessary imply that the same will happen in the next. She presented her work in many international conferences and at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge , England, where she was invited to participate in the Program on Models of Epidemics. Harvard Catalyst Profile for Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander, PhD AAUP 'Issues' page on Women in the Academic Profession , accessed 05/02/2013.³