Speakers and Workshop Descriptions
Keynote Speaker: Irina Kareva, Researcher at EMD Serono
Title: “I started as a bio major: how math made doing biology way more interesting “
Abstract: The goal of this talk is to share how – to everyone’s surprise, including my own – I ended up doing math for a living. I’ll tell you about my background, how and why I ended up as a math major, how I found the one niche of math that I discovered I’m quite good at and how that took me through my career from academia into industry. I’ll share some anecdotes and lessons I learned along the way, including some very useful tools and strategies that I use all the time, which will hopefully generalize beyond doing mathematics. I hope to show that math is big, and no one is good at all of it (and that's ok), and that it can be an amazing tool to do some very exciting science!
Bio: Irina Kareva received her PhD in Applied Mathematics for Life and Social Sciences from Arizona State University in 2012. Her research has been focused on mathematical modeling of cancer as an evolving ecological system, with particular focus on applying insights from ecology and evolution to understanding cancer initiation and progression. She did her post-doctoral fellowship at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, prior to joining EMD Serono (US business of Merck KGaA) in 2016, where she is currently an Associate Director in Quantitative Pharmacology Department. Her work at EMD Serono is focused primarily on calculating efficacious doses for new drugs as they go into clinical trials, but she also does basic research on more general biological topics. Outside of work, she is a classically trained singer, a tango dancer and a big fan of bike touring.