CORNELL BIOLOGIST TO PRESENT LECTURE AT UNM ON TUBERCULOSIS

March 25, 2003

CORNELL BIOLOGIST TO PRESENT LECTURE AT UNM ON TUBERCULOSIS

Carlos Castillo-Chavez, a professor of biomathematics in the departments of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology and Theoretical Applied Mechanics at Cornell University, will present a lecture titled, Tuberculosis: Past, Current and Future Trends, at the University of New Mexico on Thurs., March 27, at 3:30 in the Humanities Building, room 428.

Tuberculosis (TB) was believed to be on its way “out” in developed nations as well as in some developing countries. However, the recent reemergence of TB in the United States and elsewhere, the generation of new resistant strains of TB around the world, and the impact of globalization in contact patterns support the current opinion that this view was optimistic says Chavez-Castillo.

Castillo, who is on sabbatical and working at Los Alamos National Laboratories, has worked on the role that social and population structure has on the dynamics of specific diseases including HIV/AIDS, influenza, tuberculosis, Chagas disease and Hoof and Mouth disease. He is currently working on the impact of the deliberate release of biological agents into the environment.

At Cornell, he is also the director of the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI), which provides research opportunities to more than 30 undergraduate students each summer, particularly to students from underrepresented groups and nonselective universities. MTBI established and coordinates the Cornell-Sloan Graduate Fellowship Program for under-represented minorities in the graduate fields of applied mathematics, biometrics, ecology and evolutionary biology, theoretical and applied mechanics and statistics.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served following the hour-long presentation.

# # #