Faculty Member Since 2024
Jeremy Harris, Ph.D., is Spelman College's mathematics professor.
He grew up a few miles from Hershey, Pennsylvania, so going to Hershey’s amusement park was a staple of the summer and at times, the aroma of chocolate could be smelled in the air. He attended undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his parents and grandparents are originally from. He initially majored in engineering but then decided that he wanted to better understand the math models underlying the engineering frameworks that he had been learning in coursework. He switched his major to mathematics and finished with a math major and minor in bioengineering (2011).
He decided to stay at Pitt for grad school, where he had plenty of family support. He studied applied math to learn how to use math models (e.g., differential equations) for studying biological systems (e.g., neurons in the brain or viral infections in cells!). He earned his Ph.D. in math (2017) and went on to do postdocs in biology at Emory University (2017-2020) and then at Georgia Tech (2020-2023).
This past year, he taught at Rose-Hulman Institute, a small STEM school in Indiana. He enjoys doing applied math research (“in conversation with the world”) as well as teaching math. He feels privileged to do math in his daily life and hopes to pass on to students those things that excite him -- the language, deep concepts, and proficiencies of mathematics.
The role of individual variation in ecology and evolution of infectious disease dynamics.
(Preprint). Harris JD, Gallmeier E, Dushoff J, Beckett SJ, Weitz JS (2024). Infections are not alike: the effects of covariation between individual susceptibility and transmissibility on epidemic dynamics. MedRxiv (DOI)
Shi, YT, Harris, JD, Martin, MA, & Koelle, K (2024). Transmission bottleneck size estimation from de novo viral genetic variation. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 41(1), msad286. (DOI)
Dominguez-Mirazo M, Harris JD, Demory D, Weitz JS (2024). Accounting for cellular-level variation in lysis: implications for virus–host dynamics. mBio15:e01376-24. (DOI)
Teaching Demo – Calc 1 Concept: “the chain rule” for derivatives