Excellence Unveiled: Greg Forest
The mathematics professor and 2024 Jefferson Award winner talks about tackling some of the world’s most complex problems through collaborative research and training for nearly three decades at Carolina.
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Each month, WCHL will feature stories highlighting Carolina excellence from outstanding Tar Heels to share why they’re passionate about their work and shine a light on their important contributions to the community, state and beyond.
Tune in to Excellence Unveiled during morning, noon and evening drive times to hear their stories and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Excellence Unveiled is an exclusive program on WCHL, sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill. You can listen to WCHL at 97.9 FM or 1360 AM.
Read a transcript of the segment below:
Chancellor Lee H. Roberts: Welcome to Excellence Unveiled, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Chancellor Lee Roberts, and it’s my pleasure to shine a light on our talented Carolina community and its outstanding work. This month, we feature Greg Forest, Grant Dahlstrom Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, to talk about his work to mathematize some of the world’s most complex challenges through collaborative research and training.
Greg Forest: I would say the first University-scale project that we started working on was in material science led by Ed Samulski in chemistry. We worked on a big question to understand biological materials — so to take the principles from physical and chemical understanding of materials and to translate that into biological materials. And that was a collaboration that Ed led with a bunch of us in physics, chemistry, computer science at UNC and applied math. It was coupled and teamed with the National Institute for Aerospace, where the aerospace engineering world would like to understand how they could capture properties of biological materials that did not exist in synthetic materials, like self-healing. You have tissues and the like that will self-heal. How could we incorporate the principles of biology into man-made materials?
The thing I found out very quickly — it was one of the attractors when I was interviewing — was that Chapel Hill has two ideal qualities for what I was brought here to do, for the vision I was brought here to do. One of them is it’s extremely collaborative. There are no walls to collaboration, and people were very open to considering possibilities of interactions. And the other virtue of Carolina that continues until today is that there are pockets of phenomenal excellence around. And so the combination of people that understood that there was a possibility that teaming with the applied math program and the faculty I recruited and hired was going to be beneficial to both of us. And it’s been a phenomenal experience. And I guess, as they say, the record stands for itself for what we’ve been able to accomplish.
I would say [a] big problem was brought to me by Sam Lai, who was hired by the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and he was a virology and antibody expert coming from Johns Hopkins. And Sam’s niche was understanding how antibodies really protect you from infectious diseases. And so we built a group to literally “mathematize,” with scare quotes on it, how antibodies really function in the mucosal barriers in your body on different organs. And then to think about whether we could not only replicate what was observed clinically or in experiments, but to figure out how to optimize the design of synthetic antibodies. I’m proud of the impacts we’ve made throughout UNC and externally. I’m proud of the many careers that have been produced through our program and the activities of our program inspiring people to go into research and apply to computational mathematics.
I would probably go through the examples of the impacts that we’ve had in understanding virus-borne diseases, understanding the pathology of a disease like cystic fibrosis, understanding how your genes really function to perform activities that are required for cellular function and to do all the things that cells need to do individually and collectively. People would never imagine that mathematicians would be centrally involved in these applications when. in fact, we cannot interpret even what we clinically see or experimentally see without someone building mathematical descriptions that allow us to interpret the data and why things happen.
Roberts: This has been Excellence Unveiled, proudly presented by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
