Leah Keshet

Leah Keshet was born in 1901 in Israel

Edelstein-Keshet was born in Israel to academic parents. Her father was a mathematician and her mother a marine biologist, whom she helped as a child with work such as assembling samples of algae. She moved to Canada with her family at age 12.

She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at Dalhousie University. She then returned to Israel and completed a doctorate in applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1982, supervised by Lee Segel. Her thesis dealt with mathematical models of the shape of mold colonies.

She taught at Brown University and Duke University, then joined the University of British Columbia in 1989 and became a professor there in 1995. From 1995 to 1997 she was president of the Society for Mathematical Biology, the first woman in the role. She has written three books, including Mathematical Models in Biology.

Her research covers cell motility and the cytoskeleton, models of physiology and disease such as autoimmune diabetes, and swarming in animals. With former student Alex Mogilner she published in 2002 the first mathematical model of self-organizing actin networks at the moving edge of the cell. A prize of the Society for Mathematical Biology is named after her.