When her numbers are up, it's bad news

Tufts' Elena Naumova is drawn to the 'unhappy' numbers in public health issues. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

Imagine a mathematician with a heavy Siberian accent uttering the following statement:

"Behind every number is sickness and death."

Set it to the right music and you've got a trailer for a spy movie. Except that when Elena Naumova says it with her shoulders shrugged, it's kind of funny.

Naumova is a mathematician who studies public health figures; she creates the statistics you don't want to end up as.

"There are good numbers [in public health], happy numbers, like birth rates. I'm just stuck on the unhappy numbers." Shrug. Smile.

Naumova, who will be named a full professor tomorrow at Tufts University School of Medicine, specializes in trying to find mathematical and statistical patterns in the chaos of infectious disease, particularly as they relate to seasons and weather. Or as one colleague put it, "if it's hot today, what does that mean for salmonella in a week?"

At the core of her work, Naumova says, is the need to believe that nothing is random. "There is a reason for every single event," the 47-year-old said recently from her office in Chinatown. "We just don't know the reason, so we call it random." It's been said that diseases do not watch calendars. Naumova thinks they do; it's just that they have their own calendars. Naumova tries to find that calendar by synchronizing events, lining up the exposure - say a flood or a heat wave - with the health outcome.

As the director of the Tufts Center for the Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases, Naumova has found patterns in many of the classic summertime diseases in Massachusetts. Salmonella peaks at the end of July, the hottest time of the year in the state, while the parasite giardia and the bacteria shigella spike one month after that peak. And if you can't wait for those, it's worth noting that Naumova has found that the number of Massachusetts cases of cryptosporidiosis - a nasty intestinal parasite - increases in the 21 days following a temperature spike of 90 degrees or more. In other words, right now.

As she describes herself and her work, Naumova is very playful and self-deprecating. "There's nothing noble about diarrhea," she quipped, and said that much of what she does probably sounds silly.

"We do these big studies, and the results are very benign. They're what your mother always told you: 'Don't leave your tuna fish sandwich in the sun.' "

But, she says, it's not about that sandwich. It's about learning the disease system with the goal of being able to forecast outbreaks in the future. "We hope to get to the point where we can predict these things, and people will start to trust us like the weatherman. They're not always right, but if they say, 'Bring an umbrella,' you probably do."

What separates Naumova from others in her branch of mathematics is that she "speaks so many different fields of science," according to Nina Fefferman, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution, and natural resources at Rutgers University.

"Most people who do this only do the number crunching," Fefferman said. "While her research is on the numbers side, she pulls in an understanding of the biology really well. Her most frequent collaborator is her husband, who is an immunologist, so a lot of the modeling is not just about the mathematics, but also how the biological systems work. She approaches it from both ends."

For Naumova, she says that is the appeal of her work, bringing in data from so many fields and trying to "make links in the unknown." It is not a quest that typically leads to "Aha!" moments, she said - "I never know the proper reason; I can only observe very unusual events" - but she likes puzzles that produce questions instead of answers. "That way I am never bored," she said.

Despite the fact that she spends so much time around numbers of death and disease, Naumova said that she is not the least bit paranoid that she's going to end up a statistic herself when the mercury rises. "My mother told me not to leave the sandwich in the sun, not to swim in muddy water, to wash my hands. It does no good to worry."

And then, with a mischievous smirk on her face, she decides to have a little fun. Naumova, who recently co-authored a paper on the time lag between exposure and infection, slid a mug across a table to a reporter.

"Drink it. It's just water," she said, and then took pleasure in watching an unsure gulp.

"If I'm correct, we should know in about a week if you're going to live."

Fact sheet

Hometown: Novosibirsk, Siberia; lives in Cambridge.

Family: Husband, Yuri Naumov, is a researcher in immunogenetics at UMass-Worcester; daughter, Ekaterina, 25, earned a degree in philosophy at UMass-Boston and is now traveling, according to her mom; son, Mikhail, 18, just graduated from Newton North High School, and is thinking of doing his own traveling.

Education: She studied applied statistics and computer science as an undergraduate at Novosibirsk State Technical University in Siberia, and stayed on to earn a PhD in applied statistics in 1988.

Hobbies: "I am famous for my strawberry jams and fancy desserts," she said. She is also interested in Ikebana, the strict Japanese art of flower arrangement, which she studied while her husband was doing his postdoc fellowship in the country.