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Karen Rios - Soto
Graduate Research Associate
Email: krr22@cornell.edu
Office: PSA 643B
Phone: (480) 727-8535
Karen was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico (P.R.), and is the oldest of three children. In her senior year of high school she received a scholarship from the College of Engineering and Surveillance in P.R. as a winner of a math competition on the island to study at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez campus where she got a B.S. with honors in mathematics in the year 2002. During her years in college, Karen attended four summer REU's in mathematics. In 1999, she went to SIMU and then spent three consecutive summers (2000-2002) to MTBI at Cornell University. From these SummerPrograms she gained experience doing research with four technical reports, two of which have been published. Karen received two poster awards with these works, one at the 2000 SACNAS conference and the other at the 2003 AMS joint meetings. In 2002, she received a four-year graduate fellowship from the Sloan Foundation and SUNY to attend Cornell University. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate in the BSCB department at Cornell, working with Carlos Castillo-Chavez. Her interests are in mathematical epidemiology and ecology, in particular modeling infectious diseases and social dynamics. Currently she is studying spatial dynamics, the role of dispersal on epidemics.