Tamara Awerbuch-Friedlander

Tamara Awerbuch-Friedlander was born in 1940 in Montevideo

She was born in Uruguay and lived in Buenos Aires until age 12. She then moved to Israel with her parents. Her family had escaped Nazi Germany just before the Holocaust.

She served 2 years in the Israeli army. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem she earned a BSc in chemistry in 1965, and an MSc in physiology and an MEd in 1967. She was certified to teach in Israeli schools.

In 1973 she took a job at MIT studying chemical carcinogens in tissue cultures. She began studying mathematics in 1974 and earned a doctorate in nutrition and food science at MIT in 1979. She then did postdoctoral work there in somatic cell genetics.

She joined Harvard's biostatistics department in 1983 and the Department of Global Health and Population in 1993. She built mathematical models of epidemics, including HIV, Lyme disease, dengue, Zika and rabies. In 1997 she filed a sex discrimination suit against Harvard over the denial of tenure.

She retired to Tel Aviv, where she died in 2021. She was buried in the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery.