2025

Elamin Elbasha

Merck & Co., Inc.

Areas: Economics, Epidemiology, Mathematical Modeling

Elamin Elbasha, PhD, MA, is the executive director of Health Economic and Decision Sciences at Merck Research Laboratories (MRL), USA. He leads a team that assesses the value of vaccines and drugs to prevent and treat infectious diseases through mathematical models and synthesis of data. Before 2018, he was a distinguished scientist at MRL.

Dr. Elbasha’s research expertise includes theoretical and applied approaches to economic analysis and mathematical modeling of diseases. His research includes analyzing vaccines against diseases of great public health importance such as HPV, HIV, varicella, rotavirus, CMV, hepatitis (A, B and C), RSV and pneumococcal infections.

Dr. Elbasha obtained his PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota and has over 25 years of postgraduate research experience in the public and the pharmaceutical sectors. He has made several presentations at scientific meetings and has authored or coauthored numerous scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Journal of Mathematical Biology, PharmacoEconomics and Vaccine. Dr. Elbasha is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Society for Medical Decision Making, and International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). He also serves on the advisory board of the journal Mathematical Biosciences and the editorial board of the journal Medical Decision Making. He enjoys playing soccer and spending time with his family.

2021

Houston Methodist Research Institute

Areas: Biomedical Research, Biostatistics, Biotechnology, Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Modeling

Houston Methodist is a leading academic medical center that takes a multidisciplinary approach to changing the face of medicine. Doctors Cristini, Butner and Wang are a team of engineer scientists at the Houston Methodist Research Institute who use mathematical modeling to study biological problems, with a special focus on disease progression and treatment. They design and implement mathematical descriptions of the key biophysical phenomena within the tumor microenvironment. They are currently working to establish methods to use mathematical modeling to predict cancer-patient response to immune checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy. Mathematica has played a key role in this process, allowing them to rapidly implement and update model versions, perform testing and optimization, and conduct extensive analysis on large sets of patient data.

Award accepted by Dr. Joseph D. Butner, faculty fellow, Mathematics in Medicine program; Dr. Vittorio Cristini, professor and director, Mathematics in Medicine program; and Dr. Zhihui Wang, research scientist and associate professor, Mathematics in Medicine program.

2015

Paul Abbott

Associate Professor of Physics, University of Western Australia

Areas: Applied Mathematics, Computational Physics, Image and Signal Processing, Mathematical Modeling, Mathematics Courseware Design, Theoretical Physics

Paul Abbott has used Mathematica extensively for research in wavelets and few-body atomic physics and to explore problems in computational and mathematical physics. He received a computational science award for his course in computational physics and has lectured on Mathematica in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and India, and at several Australian universities. Abbott worked for Wolfram Research from 1989 to 1991, has served as a contributing editor of The Mathematica Journal since 1990, and has worked as a consultant to Wolfram Research since 1997.