Champion of Math
The often-heard lament of a high school math student; "when am I ever going to use this?" was not voiced in Annalee Salcedo’s calculus classroom on this particular day. A visitor to class, Dr. Helen Moore, had been invited to take aim squarely at the question. Moore, the associate director of quantitative clinical pharmacology at Bristol-Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical company based in Princeton, New Jersey, was there to offer living proof of math’s usefulness. She also laced her lesson with some enticing career prospects. "We need math modelers who know biology and immunology -- just don’t have enough of those people," she told students.
Moore says that when she was in high school she liked math and was good at it, “Solving problems and puzzles made my brain happy, but I didn't know what I could do with that." She majored in the discipline as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and went on to earn her Ph.D., also in math, at Stony Brook University in New York. After teaching at both Bowdoin and Stanford, Moore migrated to the drug development process, where she is gratified that her work aids people who are sick.
In the classroom, Moore invited students to use math modeling to help solve a common hospital operating-room challenge: how to give the proper dosage of anesthesia high enough to keep a patient sedated but low enough to limit side effects (in her world, it’s referred to as a “minimally efficacious concentration”). That’s what the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) asks of us, she told students, noting the partnership between the government agency that regulates the drug industry and the developers of pharmaceuticals in finding safe and effective medicines. She pulled up a graph describing the concentration of the anesthetic propofol in a patient’s body over time and asked students to describe what they were seeing. “Exponential decay?” offered one hopefully. “Right,” answered Moore. Developing a model to describe the physiological impact of the drug inspired a number of creative explanations, which Moore greeted enthusiastically.
After the class, students expressed their appreciation and respect. “I once again realized that math can be used in many different ways and fields to make this world a better place,” said Sarah Park, a senior from South Korea. “As a student who wants to explore more math and biology in college, I found this class very interesting - it gave me a sense of what mathematicians’ and scientists’ lives look like.”
Fittingly, Moore sees her role not just as a champion of the practical applications of math but as a model for women. The following day, she and Dr. Susannah Porter, an assistant professor of geology at UCSB and wife of Cate faculty member Jamie Kellogg, met with a group of students and teachers to encourage participation in the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and math. Frank Griffin, who chairs the Cate math department, said that he and his colleagues were thrilled to have Moore spending time with students both in the classroom and beyond. “In addition to her value to the medical community,” he said, “Helen is a teacher at heart. You can see in her a genuine love of being able to explain complicated ideas to all levels of students.” He hopes that Moore’s visit, the first in a new series that brings mathematicians to Cate classrooms, will inspire students’ current and future mathematical endeavors.
Moore’s connection to the Cate community is long and deep. She lived at Cate for nearly two years with her husband, Colin Day, a gifted member of the math department. His death from cancer in 2012 at the age of 50 greatly saddened students and faculty. In 2014, she addressed the graduating class in the annual Cum Laude ceremony. While acknowledging her own grief over the premature death of her husband, she focused on the optimization of joy. “That’s the mathematician in me,” she told the audience. “My specialty is optimization and what that means is making the most of something. If one’s goals include attaining depth and meaning in our lives, I would consider openness and joy paths to that achieving depth and meaning."
