Lisette de Pillis


Lisette G. de Pillis is an American mathematician at Harvey Mudd College and holds the Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Professorship of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd. She is also the co-director of the Harvey Mudd College Center for Quantitative Life Sciences.

Education

De Pillis earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Heinz-Otto Kreiss. Her dissertation was Far Field Behavior of Slightly Compressible Flows.

Research

Her early research concerned computational fluid dynamics. In around 2000, she became interested in cancer immunology, and began doing research on population models featuring cells of three types: normal cells, cancer cells, and immune cells. By augmenting the model to include cancer treatments and applying control theory, she was able to devise techniques that could lead to more effective personalized treatments for cancer.

Recognition

The Argonne National Laboratory named her their Maria Goeppert-Mayer Argonne Distinguished Scholar for 1999–2000.
In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.