Nancy Jane Kopell (born November 8, 1942, New York City) is an American mathematician and professor at Boston University.
She held visiting positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France (1970), MIT (1975, 1976–1977), and the California Institute of Technology (1976).
The focus of her research is the field of applied biomathematics and includes use of mathematical models to analyze the physiological mechanisms of brain dynamics.
[5] During her undergraduate education at Cornell University, she registered for a mathematics honors program, and was the only female participant.
[6] She then decided to attend graduate school in order to "find an alternative to the more traditional life her family expected for her.
[5] Smale suggested a problem which Kopell almost singlehandedly solved, leading to her thesis in the field of dynamical systems which catapulted her career.
[7][8] She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1990 for her work developing methods of dynamical systems to attack problems of applied mathematics.
She was recently selected to be an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society, a distinction given to one or two mathematicians per year worldwide.