Alumna is advancing medicine with mathematical modeling

Medical therapies involve complex drug treatments customized for a specific patient or a particular disease. Ensuring the effectiveness and safety of these drugs is a time-consuming process that requires the relentless expertise from scientists searching for treatments.

Dr. Alex Ferguson, B.S.E.’16, M.S.’17, is one of these scientists.

As a principal scientist at Novartis, Ferguson uses mathematical models to make predictions about how drugs distribute in the body and how they can be effective in treating disease. The goal of mathematical modeling of these treatments is to get drugs to patients quickly and make drugs more effective.

“I find this application of mathematical modeling to biology a new frontier that will change our understanding of biology and improve lives,” says Ferguson, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from WMU and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2023.

As the medical industry gathers data about diseases, putting together an explanation of what it all means remains a big challenge for the industry. New discoveries provide insight into how disease occurs and how it affects the body at the molecular level.

“We can look at correlations in the data, but that only gets us so far. Modeling can help make sense of this big data, but it takes a lot of trial and error and expertise,” says Ferguson, adding that modeling is involved in all the nuances and intricacies that are at the cutting edge of the field.

Ferguson’s journey into mathematical modeling began at Western’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where she worked closely with Dr. Damon Miller, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“Working in the lab of Dr. Miller over my time at WMU expanded my horizon of what is possible with techniques from all fields,” says Ferguson, who earned a 2016 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship to support her graduate work at WMU.

“I interacted with faculty and students in math, biology, engineering and more and I began to realize how the future of so many fields is dependent on good collaboration from disparate areas of research.

“I started my education in electrical engineering and discovered that mathematical modeling can be used to predict the world around. I realized we could use mathematical models to explain and predict biology and I was hooked. In my undergrad and master’s programs, I used mathematical models of neurons to predict their responses.” That work is titled “Optimization and Experimental Application of Current Stimuli to Leech Pressure-Sensitive Mechanosensory Cells.”

After completing her master’s degree, Ferguson earned her Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT where she was a McGovern Institute for Brain Research fellow and was awarded a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) Impact Award in 2023.

For her dissertation research, she built mathematical models for how the brain controls the body to make coordinated movements. “I performed experiments where subjects performed tasks and I compared the mathematical models to the human performance, lending insight into how the brain works,” explains Ferguson, whose dissertation research was titled “Maintenance and Metalearning of Time Interval Representations.”

And now she has joined scientists around the world in pursuing new medical therapies and ensuring their safe development through the use of mathematical models.

“As we learn more about the biology of disease, we can build models of the body and how it is changed in disease. If we have an accurate model of how a disease works, for example Alzheimer’s is a disease which has a huge unmet need in terms of lacking good treatment options, then we can try to intervene to prevent the deterioration from happening.”

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