Professor Natalia L. Komarova
Department of Mathematics

Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research
2006-2007

I was born in Moscow, and almost for as long as I remember myself, I wanted to be a scientist. My father was a physicist, and I guess I was brought up thinking of physics as the queen of sciences. At school I found myself interested in almost all subjects. I studied physics and math with great excitement, but also read about biology, history, and linguistics. My least favorite subject was geography; this resulted in my only "B" in my high-school diploma. As it turned out, I made up for this later by traveling the world.

I went to study physics in Moscow State University. By the time I was finishing my master's degree in Theoretical Physics, two things had happened which are important for my story. One was that I had started studying the theory of pattern formation and believed that this theory can explain the Universe. The second thing was that Russian Academia had entered difficult times. Many professors had left; I wanted to continue with my graduate studies, but was not sure I could find a supervisor.

A friend of mine told me that one could go the US to study in a graduate school. To do this one needed to pass a horrible exam (in English!) called the GRE. My English was nearly non-existent at that time. I started studying for the exam. Never before or after have I worked harder. I studied so much that I literally turned green. The Mother of a friend of mine, accidentally bumping into me in the street, could not help exclaiming: "Natasha, is that you? You used to be a pretty girl!" In any case, I took the exam and was admitted to the graduate program of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The "god" of pattern formation, Alan Newell, was there, and I felt like I had made a huge leap toward explaining the Universe.

The three years of graduate school in Tuscon were filled with excitement. I learned many things. I learned to smile to strangers; how to analyze nonlinear partial differential equations; and that there are cuisines other than Russian. I was ready to conquer the world. A few subsequent years spent in Europe have expanded my knowledge of geography and my sense of what is possible. I came back to the US in 1999 to become a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the place where Einstein worked for many years and where von Neumann toyed with the idea of a first computer.

By that time my interests grew beyond Pattern formation. This theory could explain why clouds sometimes look like feathers or stripes, and how sand ripples form on a beach, but I felt that this was not quite enough to explain the Universe. I was looking for new applications of things I learned in Grad school. And I found them. Martin Nowak had arrived at the Institute shortly before I got there. He introduced me to his work on problems of language evolution. I said to myself: "Why not?" I have always been interested in linguistics, and I viewed this as an opportunity to learn a new subject. One thing led to another; while working on language I started getting involved in other projects at the interface between mathematics and life sciences. I started reading on biological and medical problems, and soon found myself working on mathematical modeling of cancer. New questions required new techniques to resolve them. Pregnant with my first baby, I was learning about stochastic processes, painfully combining the challenges of a new mathematical discipline with worrying about things, as new mothers do.

My first faculty job was Assistant Professor at the Math Department, Rutgers University. I was proud to associate myself with the Math Physics group. Participating in the weekly seminar and daily lunch with Joel Lebowitz and others have let me feel part of the beautiful tradition, where important things (like origins of matter and the nature of time) came before mundane and commonplace topics.

Having come from a Theoretical Physics background, with a PhD in Applied Mathematics, a publication record in Linguistics and a strong interest in Biology, I was finally starting to see a Pattern. The Universe has many favorite motives; there is nothing more exciting than attempting to recognize them. A population of individuals learning a vocabulary is in some sense similar to soap bubbles; another bubble appears when the DNA is transcribed inside living cells to create proteins... The development of cancer can be described as Darwinian micro-evolution inside an organ; a similar description will also work for language families... English nouns live in a multi-dimensional space and can be clustered together, much like genes are clustered in biomedical applications of bioinformatics... Are these coincidental, superficial similarities among unrelated things in the world, or do they suggest a deep and fundamental connection?

I came to UC Irvine in 2004, and I immediately felt that I was among friends. The interdisciplinary environment and strong support of my colleagues are extremely important for me. Here I have the resources and encouragement necessary to fulfill the most ambitious research program. I am pursuing topics in both mathematical linguistics and modeling of cancer, branching into other applications of life sciences. Looking for patterns, trying to explain how things work, attempting to apply mathematics to areas where it can be used for the good of the society - these are some of the things I am trying to do.

At the moment my main focus is cancer modeling; I work on developing mathematical tools that can be used to describe, understand and suggest possible ways to fight the disease. My other accomplishments are a book on cancer modeling, and two children, Sophia and Paulina.