Interesting Interdisciplinarians

In this episode, we meet Dr. Nina Fefferman, Dr. James Moody, and Dr. Ioannis Paschalidis, co-organizers of NSF's Workshop on Predicting Pandemic Emergence (http://predictingpandemics.com/). We talk about the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to pandemic response - and learn what these esteemed researchers believe is important in preparing the world for the next pandemic.

Nina Fefferman, PhD, is a Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Fefferman’s 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! Read more here: https://eeb.utk.edu/people/nina-fefferman/

James Moody, PhD, is the Robert O. Keohane Professor in the Department of Sociology, Duke University. Dr. Moody has published extensively in the field of social networks, methods, and social theory. His work has focused theoretically on the network foundations of social cohesion and diffusion, with a particular emphasis on building tools and methods for understanding dynamic social networks. He has used network models to help understand school racial segregation, adolescent health, disease spread, economic development, and the development of scientific disciplines. Read more here: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/james.moody

Ioannis Paschalidis, PhD, is a Professor in the College of Engineering at Boston University with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Division of Systems Engineering. He is Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) – a Boston University research center with 39 affiliated faculty, more than 100 affiliated graduate students and on the order of $6.6 million of annual research expenditures from sponsored research directed by CISE faculty. He is also affiliated with the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center (BMERC). Learn more here: https://www.bu.edu/eng/profile/ioannis-paschalidis/

Special thanks to Finn Mokrzycki for editing!