Workshop Leaders Bios
Dr. Adam Fagen Dr. Holly Gaff Dr. Eric Marland Dr. Raina Robeva Dr. Tony Weisstein
Adam P. Fagen is a Senior Program Officer with the Board on Life Sciences of the National Research Council. He came to the National Academies from Harvard University, where he most recently served as Preceptor on Molecular and Cellular Biology for the 300-student undergraduate genetics course. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology and education from Harvard, working with physicist Eric Mazur on issues related to undergraduate science courses; his research focused on mechanisms for assessing and enhancing introductory science courses in biology and physics to encourage student learning and conceptual understanding, including studies of active learning, classroom demonstrations, and student understanding of genetics vocabulary. Fagen also received an A.M. in molecular and cellular biology from Harvard, based on laboratory research in molecular evolutionary genetics, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College with a double-major in biology and mathematics. In addition to genetics and molecular biology, he is interested in improving undergraduate and graduate science education and other scientific workforce and policy issues. He served as co-director of the 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey, an on-line assessment of doctoral programs organized by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and completed by over 32,000 students.
Since coming to the National Academies in 2003, Fagen has served as study director for Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research (2005), study co-director for Treating Infectious Diseases in a Microbial World: Report of Two Workshops on Novel Antimicrobial Therapeutics (2006), study co-director for the 2007 Amendments to the National Academies’ Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research (2007), study director and co-editor of Understanding Interventions that Encourage Minorities to Pursue Research Careers: Summary of a Workshop (2007), and study co-director for Inspired by Biology: From Molecules to Materials to Machines (2008). He is currently study director or responsible staff officer for several ongoing projects including the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology, A Leadership Summit to Effect Change in Teaching and Learning: Undergraduate Education in Agriculture, the National Academies Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, and Research at the Intersection of the Physical and Life Sciences.
Dr. Holly Gaff is an Assistant Professor in the School of Community and Environmental Health in the College of Health Sciences at Old Dominion University and is affiliated with the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center. Dr. Gaff earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics with an emphasis in Mathematical Ecology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1999, and her B.S. in Mathematics/Environmental Sciences from Taylor University in 1993. Dr. Gaff was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco and at Berkeley as well as at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She also worked as a management consultant in telecommunication modeling and as a research scientist for a government contracting firm. Prior to coming to Old Dominion University, Dr. Gaff was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine.
Dr. Gaff’s research interests have focused mainly on studying the dynamics and control of infectious diseases using mathematical modeling and computer simulation. Her dissertation work was comprised of two projects: a fish population model for the South Florida Everglades restoration effort and a tick-borne disease model for an outbreak of ehrlichiosis in Tennessee. Dr. Gaff has since worked on modeling a variety of diseases including the interaction between HSV-2 and HIV, smallpox, plague, HPV, MRSA, Rift Valley fever and others. She is keenly interested in how spatial heterogeneity impacts the spread of a given disease and the implications that brings to controlling the disease. Dr. Gaff has also worked on projects aimed at identifying areas of potential risk and general disease surveillance. She has also collaborated on the use of optimal control techniques to identify the potentially most effective disease intervention strategies given limited resources. Dr. Gaff has ten peer-reviewed publications and has given numerous presentations at national meetings, invited seminars and career panels.
In the spring of 2007, Dr. Gaff was awarded a Quantitative Mentored Career Development Award from NIAID-NIH. The project is entitled, “Spatially-explicit mathematical model of human monocytic ehlichiosis” and provides support for four years. Dr. Gaff’s mentoring committee includes Drs. Steve Dumler (Johns Hopkins University), Abdu Azad (University of Maryland, Baltimore), Rick Ostfeld (Institute for Ecosystem Studies), Denise Kirschner (University of Michigan) and Dr. Daniel Sonenshine (Old Dominion University). Prior to this award, Dr. Gaff was a Co-Investigator on successful grants from the CDC, DHS and NSF.
Dr. Gaff is actively involved in both the Association for Women in Mathematics, as Executive Committee member and webmaster, and the Society for Mathematical Biology, as the newsletter editor and webmaster. She is an avid rugby player and is an active member for the Norfolk Storm Women’s Rugby Club.
Marland is Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Appalachian State University. He began studying mathematical biology as an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech. Marland received his PhD from the University of Utah working with Jim Keener and studied with Joel Keizer and Alex Mogilner at the Institute of Theoretical Dynamics at the University of California at Davis. Marland was involved in the 2003 MAA CUPM report on the biological sciences as well as the Math and Bio 2010 report published by the MAA (Mathematical Association of America). Marland has run faculty development workshops on mathematical and computational biology though the MAA and the Shodor Education Foundation since 2003 and was recently the founding chair of the MAA special interest group BIO SIGMAA (now past chair). He also helps organize TIMBER, a conference devoted to undergraduate research in mathematical and computational biology that is held each November on the campus of Appalachian State University.
Raina Robeva is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She holds a B.S. in mathematics and a M.S. in probability and statistics from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Virginia. Robeva has broad research interests covering fields in both pure and applied mathematics. Her work in theoretical mathematics has focused on the Markov property of random fields, and the problem of spectral synthesis in certain function spaces. Her applied projects are related to developing mathematical models for the life sciences. Robeva's research and educational activities have been and are currently supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, the Thomas F. and Kate Miller Jeffress Memorial Trust, the Commonwealth Health Research Board of VA, and the Carilion Biomedical Institute. Robeva is also the lead author of the book “An Invitation to Biomathematics” published in 2007 by Academic Press.
Anton (Tony) Weisstein received B.A.s in Math and Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Population Biology from the same institution. After postdoctoral positions in New Zealand and with the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium in Wisconsin, he moved to Kirksville in 2004. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Biology at Truman State University, where he serves as the curriculum coordinator for the introductory course sequence. A mathematical biologist at heart, Tony’s current research with undergraduates focuses on viral phylogenetics and epidemiological modeling. He is also interested in developing new curricular materials for biology education, and serves as Biology Editor for BioQUEST's ESTEEM Collection, a suite of open-source Excel-based modules for computational and mathematical biology.