Zhilan Feng

Zhilan Julie Feng (born 1959)^[1] is a Chinese-American applied mathematician whose research topics include mathematical biology, population dynamics, and epidemiology. She is a professor of mathematics at Purdue University,^[2] and a program director in the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation.^[3]

Zhilan Julie Feng
Born	1959
Nationality	Chinese-American
Alma mater	Jilin University, Arizona State University
Occupation	Applied mathematician

Education and career

Feng studied mathematics at Jilin University in China, earning a bachelor's degree in 1982 and a master's degree in 1985. She came to Arizona State University for graduate study, completing her Ph.D. in 1994.^[2] Her dissertation, A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics of Childhood Diseases Under the Impact of Isolation, was supervised by Horst R. Thieme.^[4]

After her postdoctoral study at Cornell University, she joined Purdue University as an assistant professor in 1996. She was promoted to full professor in 2005, and became a program director at the National Science Foundation in 2019.^[2]

Recognition

Feng was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for contributions to applied mathematics, particularly in biology, ecology, and epidemiology".^[5]

Books

Feng's books include:

• Disease Evolution: Models, Concepts, and Data Analyses (American Mathematical Society, 2006, edited with Ulf Dieckmann and Simon A. Levin)
• Applications of Epidemiological Models to Public Health Policymaking: The role of heterogeneity in model predictions (World Scientific, 2014)
• Mathematical Models of Plant-Herbivore Interactions (Chapman & Hall / CRC, 2018, with Donald DeAngelis)
• Mathematical Models in Epidemiology (Springer, 2019, with Fred Brauer and Carlos Castillo-Chavez)^[6]