Women in STEM Friday: Trachette Jackson

"Trachette Jackson is a mathematician in the field of cancer research. If you never put those two themes together, prepare to have your world expanded. Math and bio were linked for Jackson during her undergraduate studies at Arizona State University. Through her research experience and what would be a pivotal talk on how a leopard gets its spots delivered by her future mentor, she found an interest in mathematical biology. Throughout her innovative career, she has won, among other honors, the Blackwell-Tapia Prize (2010) given to those who make significant contributions to their fields as well as address underrepresentation of minorities in math, and grant funding from the prestigious Sloan Foundation. She is the second African American woman to receive that honor. This post will be exploring both her research, her experience as a women of color in STEM, and how we can be more like her. Feel free to search around for the headings that interest you most!

THE RESEARCH. How do you study cancer from a mathematical perspective? Jackson’s team will tell you.

“Our research is aimed at combining mathematical modeling, numerical simulation, and carefully designed experiments to develop a comprehensive and predictive framework for better understanding tumor development and for improving cancer treatment.”

As a tumor forms, it can develop a vascular network, a network of blood vessels, to help it grow and thrive. Angiogenesis, the formation of new connecting blood vessels from existing ones, is of particular interest to the Jackson Cancer Modelling group. Jackson explores both blood vessel formation that starts in response to a growing tumor, as well as vessels that form within a tumor that already has a network in place. Why? Becoming vascularized (gaining blood vessels) is a pivotal point that can determine the tumor’s growth and stability. Cancer therapies can target angiogenesis specifically, which is important in reducing the damaging and sometimes fatal side-effects that come with broader treatments like chemotherapy. If you are interested in some specifics of Jackson’s work, “the researchers have quantified the (usually dramatic) effects of variations in pro-angiogenic factor gradient profiles on capillary sprout morphology; predicted the dependence of average sprout extension speed on the proximity of the proliferating region to the sprout tip and on the coordination of cellular functions; and helped to demonstrate the mechanism by which inhomogeneities in extravascular tissue lead to sprout branching and anastomosis, emergent properties of developing vessel sprouts” (http://www.ibparticipation.org/…/TrachetteJacksonSIAMnews.p…).

(On the Surface of) The Math: “...most of my work uses continuous methods [such as differential equations]. But now there’s a big buzz in the field for combining [discrete and continuous mathematics], looking at both continuous and discrete methods. For some things it makes sense to use continuous models, but for other things, like individual cells, it makes sense to treat them as discrete entities. I have a student right now who is building a model of blood vessel formation, and we are using discrete components for cells and continuous components for chemicals and things that govern how they move. This is really my first venture into discrete modeling, and I’m finding it very interesting and very applicable to the work I do.” (https://www.maa.org/…/files/pdf/dist-l…/jacksoninterview.pdf)

ON BEING A WOMAN OF COLOR IN STEM. Jackson participated in an email interview with author Patricia Kenschaft for her book entitled “Change is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics.” The book’s text is included below, and a link to it in Google Books is under “For more information.” “When I [Kenschaft] asked her if she had had experiences a while male would not have in the mathematics community, she exclaimed immediately, ‘Oh, yes!’ She wrote later that the most memorable such experiences were the comments and challenges of other graduate students at the University of Washington....For example, on her “very first day during orientation, a fellow incoming student said to me, ‘I can’t believe that they admitted a nontraditional student this year. From this point on it was clear that I had to prove myself worth of being a graduate student in mathematics.’ In answer to my question of what she sees as the biggest challenges for African Americans in mathematics, she had two responses. ‘Finding a department whose atmosphere is comfortable and conducive to our success at both the graduate and tenure-track stage of the academic career. I also think that our own self-confidence, which is a very fragile thing, can be one of the biggest barriers to success. When I asked her if she had any advice for young African Americans who aspire to be mathematicians, she replied, “If mathematics if your dream...relentlessly pursue it!’” (204).

Her experience as a woman when she came to her position at the University of Michigan was luckily more positive. She said in an interview with Scientific American, “When I first came in in 2000, at least three of the women faculty personally took me under their wings. I had wings all over me! They kind of took me under their wings, and it was really, really wonderful.” (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/…/mathematics-live-a-c…/)

HOW CAN WE BE MORE LIKE TRACHETTE JACKSON? Communication. Jackson’s work straddles two fields that use, in many respects, different languages. In order to keep researchers with different backgrounds on the same page, she encourages her mentees to learn all of the lingo. As she says, “Learning to talk math biology to biologists has been a process... That’s something that I try to do with my students: to make sure that they’re learning to communicate, to understand problems and be able to communicate what they’ve done mathematically to the audience that it’s intended for, which is biologists. (https://www.maa.org/…/files/pdf/dist-l…/jacksoninterview.pdf)

Step outside your field’s comfort zone. Working with both mathematicians and biologists has allowed Jackson to acknowledge and learn from different scientific perspectives. Jackson notes that “[Biologists] work in large labs and in large groups, and that is very different from the way mathematicians tend to work. I think that it’s good for students who are concentrating in math to see how biologists run labs and it’s also good for the biologists to see how mathematicians normally work. They need to find a happy medium if their goal is to be a scientist who works on problems that lie right at the middle of the two.” (https://www.maa.org/…/files/pdf/dist-l…/jacksoninterview.pdf)

More questions? Contact Dr. Jackson at tjacks@umich.edu!

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Her website: http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~tjacks/research.html#First An interesting perspective on her and her work:http://www.ibparticipation.org/…/TrachetteJacksonSIAMnews.p… Mathematical modelling and cancer: https://www.siam.org/pdf/news/203.pdf History of black women in the mathematical sciences:http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/wohist.html http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/wmad0.html Change is Possible: Stories of Women and Minorities in Mathematics:https://books.google.com/books…

WiSF-UL THINKING: Thanks for checking out the first Women in Science Friday (WiSF) post! Questions? Feedback? Suggestions for future posts? Let me know by messaging the Facebook page or contacting me at mbehn@haverford.edu smile emoticon Happy Friday! "

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