Elsa Schaefer

Academic Credentials

B.S., Agnes Scott College
Ph.D., Emory University
Dr. Elsa Schaefer’s Faculty Webpage

Biography

Other Information

Teaching Area

Research Interests

For the past few years, Dr. Elsa Schaefer has run a campus research group that includes Marymount students in the fun and intuitive process of epidemiological modeling. She has been able to financially support student research with funding from the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, the National Science Foundation, and Marymount’s own DISCOVER program. Her students are presenting at multiple undergraduate research conferences locally and nationally, and study more globally with a larger research group in mathematics and science here at Marymount.

Dr. Schaefer’s doctoral work was in Partial Differential Equations and Differential Geometry with applications to optical system design. She subsequently studied computational fluid dynamics, focusing on jet flows near the speed of sound. Her present interests are in computational epidemiology, and in particular disease models for cholera and tick-borne diseases. She has published research in multiple journals and books, including the Journal of the Optical Society of America, the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, and Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering. Her past work in transonic aerodynamics and her current work in cholera modeling has enjoyed support from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Schaefer has also been a part of several successful National Science Foundation grant proposals that have helped to bring technology and scholarships into Marymount’s Mathematics program.

She was a 2009 Honors Fellow with the University’s Honors Program.

Publications