From her earliest days in school, Professor Jana Gevertz was
beguiled by the elegance and precision of mathematics. But as
her experience widened, she also felt the pull of biology, a
powerful, hands-on force in such critical arenas as health care.
“I love how beautifully logical math is. You can’t fight me on a
proof—there is no bias. What I love about biology is its ability
to impact people and how we live our lives. I’m drawn to the
human side of it. So for me, the ideal career was one that used
math to benefit people in society,” she says. Her eureka moment
came during her junior year in college when she took the course
Differential Equations in Biology and realized “it was possible
to work at the interface of math and biology.” That discovery
led her to cancer research, where mathematicians, scientists,
and clinicians are teaming up to exploit reams of new data—much
of it at the molecular level—to advance their understanding of
cancer growth and treatments. As a specialist in mathematical
biology, Gevert