Research
Professor melds love of nature with love of math into a field of her own
Once, when Nina Fefferman was in third grade, she decided to festoon her clothes with the eerie-looking cicadas that were emerging from their 17-year sleep in the Princeton area. As she walked into her house, she said, “Look! I’m covered in beautiful bugs!”
Her grandmother simply yelled “Out!” and made her remove the insects. Fefferman, now an assistant professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, never lost her love for bugs and other critters, but she was also enamored of math.
Realizing that she wanted to combine her love of math with her love of the natural world, she explored how to meld those interests. A conservation ornithologist at Tufts took a chance on her and brought her into his lab as a doctoral candidate in biology. “A lot of his work involved mathematical models, so he asked me to help him with the models and said he would teach me the biology,” Fefferman says.
After a three-year stint at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), Fefferman moved last fall to SEBS’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. She is still affiliated with DIMACS, where she was a research assistant professor, but feels SEBS is where she really belongs. “I love DIMACS and wouldn’t give it up, but no one else there is a biologist. Here, I feel like I’m home.”
Fefferman’s broad research interests lie in epidemiology, evolutionary and behavioral ecology, and conservation biology. Her research projects include pandemic disease preparedness, funded by the Department of Defense; the protection of bird habitats for the state of Hawaii; and what virtual reality websites can tell us about human behavior in a crisis. She has received funding from the Department of Homeland Security to develop new mathematical models for biosurveillance, the detection of natural and manmade disease outbreaks. She is also collaborating with Carnival Cruise Lines to help the company improve its detection of shipborne illnesses.
Perhaps the work she gets most excited about is her theoretical research on social insects, such as termites, ants, and honeybees. She’s particularly interested in how the insects have evolved to live so successfully in colonies and whether their behavior can teach us anything about human behavior. “Dampwood termites function in very complicated colonies that are organized much like cities,” she notes. “They can’t survive on their own, the same way people, for the most part, can’t.”
Termites have an uncanny ability to detect diseases that challenge the colonies and even “vaccinate” each other against those diseases, she says. Their habit of grooming each other, which seems to strengthen their immune systems, is a little like “providing Purell® to your friends,” she says with a laugh. “They are salivating over each other on purpose, so I’m trying to find out, if a disease could have killed them all off, what are they doing right? And what is motivating them to do it? The behavior of social insects is much more of an evolutionary weeding out of unsuccessful behaviors, whereas with people, it’s more of what motivates the choices we make now, as opposed to the choices we made thousands of years ago.”
In 2007, Fefferman and a colleague published a paper in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases that examined how players of the online game World of Warcraft responded to a lethal contagion that was introduced to the game. While not a perfect reflection of how people would respond in a real pandemic, the game did offer a glimpse into reactions and behaviors that would likely take place.
“Part of what I want to look at in these virtual worlds is not just the response to disease, but the response to information about disease,” Fefferman says. “I’m very interested in how information causes people to evaluate things and to look at risk perception.”
In the fall, Fefferman will teach a new course, “Darwinian Medicine,” which is aimed at helping students understand that evolution is a living science, not something that died with its founder, Charles Darwin. The course will take an evolutionary perspective on disease processes, Fefferman says.
For example, does the body develop a fever to help it fight an infection or has bacteria evolved the ability to trigger a fever, which then helps the bacteria thrive, Fefferman asks, adding, “There are all kinds of great evolutionary questions associated with aging, obesity, cancer, and other medical issues.”