Lisette de Pillis

Lisette G. de Pillis is an American mathematician who works as chair of the department of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and holds the Norman F. Sprague, Jr. Professorship of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd. She is also the co-director of the Harvey Mudd College Center for Quantitative Life Sciences.

De Pillis earned her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Heinz-Otto Kreiss. The Argonne National Laboratory named her their Maria Goeppert-Mayer Argonne Distinguished Scholar for 1999–2000.

Her early research concerned computational fluid dynamics. In around 2000, she became interested in cancer immunology, and began doing research on population models featuring cells of three types: normal cells, cancer cells, and immune cells. By augmenting the model to include cancer treatments and applying control theory, she was able to devise techniques that could lead to more effective personalized treatments for cancer.

In 2015 she was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.