The Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics is sad to announce the passing of Professor Mary Ann Horn on February 7th, 2024. She was 58 years old.

Professor Mary Ann Horn joined CWRU in 2017 as Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics. Mary Ann was an international leader in Applied Mathematics, through her research accomplishments, her service to the community, and her leadership at the National Science Foundation.  Prior to coming to CWRU, she was a program officer in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences for over a dozen years, and a professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University.  Mary Ann’s expertise lay in control theory, functional analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical biology.  While at NSF, Mary Ann served as the lead program officer in the newly established mathematical biology program. In this role she played a major role in establishing mathematical biology as a thriving subdiscipline of applied mathematics in the United States. She was a driving force behind many collaborative programs at NSF such as the Initiative to Support Research at the Interface of the Biological and Mathematical Sciences joint with NIH.  These programs emphasize the collaborative nature of mathematical biology that brings together clinicians and experimentalists with mathematicians and computational scientists.  Mary Ann’s most impactful work lay in mathematical modeling of the development and spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant enterococci.  During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mary Ann applied her expertise to modeling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection in populations of hospital and health care workers. During her chair tenure at CWRU, she recruited a couple of lecturers and successfully helped some faculty to go through tenure process. Mary Ann was also an active research mentor with the Association of Women in Mathematics. She will be sorely missed.

Mary Ann’s obituary can be found here. A memorial service is planned to be held at a later date, probably in Bloomsburg.