The Department welcomes a new faculty member in Biomathematics, Naveen Vaidya.
Naveen comes to us from the University of Missouri –Kansas City. Before joining UMKC, he had four years of postdoctoral research experience in Mathematical Biology working with Dr. Alan Perelson, Senior Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Dr. Lindi Wahl, professor at the University of Western Ontario. He has research experience in applied mathematics (mathematical biology), focused on application areas such as within-host viral dynamics, immunology, disease epidemiology, disease ecology and medicine, and on techniques such as mathematical and computational modeling, ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, delay differential equations, optimal control,data fitting, and biostatistics. His publications are in diverse journals, from mathematical journals to computational, biological, public health, and medical journals. He has a network of collaborations with medical doctors and experimentalists at UMKC School of Pharmacy, University of California, San Francisco, University of California, Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University.
Naveen has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, physics, and chemistry and a master’s in pure mathematics from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal. He taught mathematics and science at schools in Nepal while obtaining these degrees and then worked as a faculty member at Tribhuvan University. He obtained his PhD from York University in Toronto in 2008, and his thesis “Membrane Fusion between an Influenza Virus and a Healthy Cell: Mathematical Models” won the Susan Mann Dissertation Award and was nominated for the Faculty of Graduate Studies award. Naveen continues to maintain ties with Nepal, and he is the current President of Association of Nepalese Mathematicians in America. He served on an interdisciplinary curriculum development committee for undergraduate mathematics courses at Tribhuvan University, and he helped organize a recent Society for Mathematics Biology- and CDC-supported Biomath Workshop in Kathmandu.
Naveen’s latest publication “Modeling Pharmacodynamics on HIV Latent Infection: Choice of Drugs is Key to Successful Cure via Early Therapy” just appeared in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, http://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1 137/16M1092003
and was featured in the SIAM News
https://sinews.siam.org/Detail s-Page/mathematically-modeling -hiv-drug-pharmacodynamics-1
and at Phys.org https://phys.org/news/2017-10- mathematically-hiv-drug-pharma codynamics.html