Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch

Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander is a biomathematician and public health scientist who worked at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, Massachusetts. Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or contribute to disease. She also is believed to be the first female Harvard faculty member to have had a jury trial for a lawsuit filed against Harvard University for sex discrimination.

Tamara Awerbuch was born in Uruguay, lived until the age of 12 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then moved to Israel with her parents, where her grandparents and parents had lived after they had escaped Nazi Germany just before the Holocaust began. She studied and completed two degrees at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She studied chemistry and minored in biochemistry and completed the BSc degree in 1965. In 1967, she completed both the Master of Science (MSc) in Physiology and the Master of Education (MEd) degree from Hebrew University.[4] She was certified to teach grades K–12 in Israel, where she lectures and appears on panels and in workshops, as she does also in the United States and elsewhere. She also served for two years in the Israeli army.

In October 1973, while visiting friends in America, she was offered employment at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study chemical carcinogens in tissue cultures, then a recently developed technique. During this period, she worked in the lab studying carcinogenicity in tissue cultures, studied one course each semester, and lived frugally, sharing a house with MIT junior Faculty and graduate students. As one of her allotted courses per semester, in spring of 1974 she first started to study mathematics, taking mathematics and statistics. In summer 1975, she matriculated as a full-time student at MIT, where in 1979 she completed her doctorate in Nutrition and Food Science. She became a US citizen and had resided in the United States since that time until very recently. She was recruited in 1983 to the Biostatistics Department of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health by Department Chair Marvin Zelen. In 1993, she began a long career in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Her two sons, Danny and Ari, were born in the 1980s and reared in Brookline, Massachusetts. She speaks English, Hebrew, and Spanish fluently and understands and reads German.