Dr. Renee Fister receives NSF collaborative research award

     Dr. K. Renee Fister has been awarded an NSF RUI Collaborative Research grant to study treatment strategies to effectively reduce the clinical symptoms that cholera inflicts on infected individuals.  This is a joint venture with three other universities: Marymount University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  The study enhances the discovery of viable vaccination and therapeutic strategies through the use of optimal control theory applied to partial and ordinary differential equation systems.  The multiple institutions with teams of undergraduates from MSU and Marymount, and graduate students from Old Dominion and UT will collaborate with epidemiologists from the World Health Organization to develop more efficient and economical protocols.
      Dr. Fister, a professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received her B.A. from Transylvania University in 1990 and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1992 and 1996, respectively.  Dr. Fister is also one of the principal investigators on the NSF BioMaPS grant that teams undergraduate math and biology students with math and biology professors to study biological phenomena with mathematical tools.  She is married to Kenny Fister and they have two precious children.