AMS Hosts Congressional Briefing

Can Mathematics Cure Leukemia?

Doron Levy, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland - College Park and at the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, delivered an address on September 23, 2008 to Congressional representatives at a Capitol Hill briefing in which he presented his recent work on leukemia.

Levy discussed a particular type of leukemia, known as Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML).  He noted that new drug therapies are able to keep most patients in remission, but ultimately do not cure the disease.  Levy then described his joint work with Dr. Peter Lee, M.D., from Stanford University Medical School and his former student, Dr. Peter Kim (now at the University of Utah), in which they focused on the role of the immune response to CML.  By combining mathematical modeling with new experimental data they propose a new low-risk, clinical approach to enhancing the effect of drug therapy, possibly leading to a cure for the disease.

Previous AMS Congressional Lunch Briefings:

• November 2007, Mathematics of Ice to Aid Global Warming Forecasts, presented by Ken Golden, professor of mathematics at the University of Utah.
• November 2006, The Necessity of Mathematics:  From Google to Counterterrorism to Sudoku, presented by Amy Langville, professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston.
• November 2005, From Katrina Forward:  How Mathematics Helps Predict Storm Surges, presented by Clint Dawson, professor at the University of Texas and a member of the Center for Subsurface Modeling in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences; and Joannes Westerink, associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame.
• September 2004, Homeland Security:  What Can Mathematics Do? presented by Fred S. Roberts, professor of mathematics and director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University.
• July 2003, Mathematics is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better  presented by Joel E. Cohen, Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller and Columbia Universities.
• February 2002, Mathematics, Patterns and Homeland Security presented by Ingrid Daubechies, Princeton University.
• July 2001, Adding It Up:  Helping Children Learn Mathematics, a briefing on this National Research Council Report presented by Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Hyman Bass, University of Michigan and by Roger Howe, Yale University.
• Other previous briefings include:
  What Does Water Know About Mathematics by Mary Fannett Wheeler, The University of Texas at Austin
  Calculating the Secrets of Life:  Mathematics in Medicine by DeWitt Sumners, Florida State University
  Eavesdropping on the Internet:  Mathematics and Policy by Carl Pomerance, University of Georgia
  Mathematical Transcriptions of the Real World:  Fingerprints, Magnetic Resonance and Video by Ronald Coifman, Yale University