February 26, 2024
Oakland University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Meir Shillor was recently named a Specialist in the Fulbright-Nehru Program, and he will spend five weeks this summer at the Assam Don Bosco University in Assam, India.
“I'm looking forward to it,” Shillor said. “The project is about mathematical models for the optimization of treatment of cancer. I’ll also provide a short course on epidemiological models and mentor graduate students.”
The Fulbright Specialist Program sends U.S. faculty and professionals to serve as expert consultants on curriculum, faculty development, institutional planning and related subjects at academic institutions abroad.
Shillor applied for the Fulbright after being encouraged by Assam Don Bosco Professor Tarini Kumar, who he has developed a relationship with. Kumar, a professor in mathematics is passionate about cancer research and wants to use Shillor’s models for cancer treatment to optimize the combinations of various treatments.
“I started talking with Tarini Kumar about a year and a half ago,” Shillor said. “He has some family here. He’s very passionate about cancer. I’ve never worked on cancer before but the mathematics is very similar to what we’ve done with other diseases, so I know how to go about it.”
“I will be working with him on a mathematical model,” Shillor added. “It includes reworking some of the equations. We do have a model that we want to get updated.”
Shillor has done similar work on Chagas disease, MERS and COVID-19.
“We’ve been constructing mathematical models for the treatment of diseases so I’m hoping I can contribute something to improve the outcomes of the treatment of cancer,” Shillor said. “We are going to create a system of differential equations. We get data from the field and the data is used for the coefficients in the system and then it can predict under what conditions what outcomes you will get. We did this type of mathematical modeling for COVID, too.”
Shillor said Oakland Ph.D. student Janice Moore is, “working on mathematical models for the spread of diseases,” and will help him in this project, along with graduate students from Assam Don Bosco.
Shillor has been to India once before for an International Conference in Mumbai back in 2002, but he will be in a completely different part of India this time.
“Mumbai is in the west part of India, while Assam is in Northeast India,” Shillor said. “I’ll be there during the monsoon season so it’s going to be hot and sticky.”
Shillor is excited to interact with the Assam Don Bosco students and is hopeful he might even find some to work with in the future.
“We may end up finding one or two good students to come here for our Ph.D. program,” Shillor said. “We’ll be looking for very good students.”
Shillor has been a professor at Oakland since 1988 and became a Distinguished Professor in 2015. He received the Oakland Research Excellence Award in 2002. He was born in Poland, but grew up in Israel and earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Israel.
Shillor has a busy 2024 planned as he will also be presenting a plenary talk at the Congress Emerging Trends in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics conference in Spain in May.
“It’s a big international conference so I’ll be in Spain and then I’ll have collaborations in France and Poland,” Shillor said. “Then I’ll come back for a month and then go to India. I’m going to be quite busy, but I’m looking forward to it.”