Mercedes Pascual

Pascual has developed systems models for the study of complicated, irregular cycles in ecosystems, using mathematical, statistical and computational approaches. She applies these models to the study of food webs, ecology, and epidemiology, in particular the evolution of infectious diseases.

She has discovered relationships between El Niño climate patterns and the occurrence of cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh. One of the patterns she reports is that El Niño episodes are becoming an increasingly-strong driver of disease outbreaks. Her work may be the first quantitative evidence to show global climate change effecting an infectious disease. Other diseases that she studies include malaria and influenza. Her models can be used predictively in support of public health.

Education

Pascual was born in Uruguay and grew up in Argentina and Brazil. Her father was a chemical engineer. Pascual did undergraduate work in marine biology and mathematics at Universidade Santa Úrsula (USU, 1978–1979) and at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC, 1980). She received her Licentiate degree in biology from the Universidad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1985. She received an M.Sc. in mathematics from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1989.

Pascual earned her Ph.D. in biological oceanography from a joint program of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, attending from 1989 to 1995. She worked with Hal Caswell. Her thesis was on Some Nonlinear Problems in Plankton Ecology. She did postdoctoral work at Princeton University from 1995 to 1997.