CLOUD 9 journey to
HMC ALUMNI PROFILE MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY GRADUATE, HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
This is not a story about me- teorology, although it could be, since it contains pretty much everything else in the known universe, like poverty and mathematical modeling and infectious disease and thought- ful professors and a Mudder named Nadia Abuelezam whom you really should meet.
HOW SHE SPENT HER SUMMER VACATION
“I spent eight weeks in Uganda, working with an AIDS support organization. I did mathematical modeling and found a way to distribute medication in rural and urban areas. I extended that work into my senior thesis.”
WHAT “MATHEMATICAL MODELING” AND “HIV/AIDS” ARE DOING IN THE SAME SENTENCE “A model gives you a representation of what’s happening in real life—and then it lets you experiment with that model. The organization I worked with could see their current distribution patterns—and then experiment with ways to make them more efficient and effective.”
A CHEESY-SOUNDING YET SINCERE REASON THIS WORK IS IMPORTANT “Thirty-three million people around the world are infected with this disease. A majority of those people are living in poverty. We don’t have a cure. This is a major problem. It sounds cheesy, but it’s my way to make a difference in other people’s lives.”
A SLIGHTLY LESS CHEESY-SOUNDING YET NO LESS SINCERE REASON “I get excited by work that involves two fields I really love: math and biology. It turns out that all the most important work is interdisciplinary. I didn’t really understand that until I came to Mudd. You see it in the Core, where professors make the courses speak to each other. I saw it in my Clinic project, which utilized math and chemistry and biology and computer science. When you’ve got complex problems, the solutions are going to involve different disciplines.”
HOW TO GET TO CLOUD NINE “I’d been talking to professors about infectious disease—in every class project I’d try to incorporate it. Then I got an e-mail from a professor who was starting the class HIV/AIDS, Science and Service. As part of the class, he put me in touch with people he knew in Uganda. I was on cloud nine. That’s how it works here. What do you want to do? What do you care about? Let’s make it happen.”
H A R V E Y M U D D C O L L E G E | p r o f i l e s 5
NADIA
ABUELEZAM ’09 PH.D. STUDENT EPIDEMIOLOGY HARVARD UNIVERSITY
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