Nina H. Fefferman (born December 20, 1978) is an American mathematical modeler. She works in fields such as evolutionary biologist, epidemiologist, and ecologist at the University of Tennessee for the Departments of Ecology and Evolution & Mathematics. Her research focuses on the mathematics of epidemiology, evolutionary & behavioral ecology, and conservation biology. She studies how individual behaviors can affect an entire population.[1] She is the director of NIMBioS.
Nina Fefferman is the daughter of Julie and Charles Fefferman; her father is a mathematician at Princeton University. She is the sister of composer Lainie Fefferman.
She studied mathematics to get her bachelor's degree in math from Princeton in 1999. She later received her Master of Science degree in math from Rutgers University in 2001 and her Ph.D. in biology from Tufts University in 2005. Her thesis was on using mathematical models in evolutionary biology and epidemiology.[2]
Her most cited papers are:
In addition to being director of NIMBioS, Nina Fefferman is the PI and lead investigator for PREEMPT Institute which is an NSF funded PPIP Phase I pandemic preparedness research institute.
She has also been involved in numerous other research centers. She was a principal investigator at START (US Dept of Homeland Security Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) in a research team working to understand the social behavior and algorithms involved in the extremism of terrorism. She was an active participant at DIMACS (The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) to aid in collaborations and conferences about mathematical macrobiology. She served as a principal investigator at CCICADA (US Dept of Homeland Security Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis) to research various applications of complex systems.
She was a center co-director at InForMID (Tufts University Initiative for the Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases) as a researcher and lead in the area of mathematical modeling of infectious disease epidemiology.