It wasn’t just a favorite childhood pet, or the fact that she cares deeply for animals, that led Nicole Kleinstreuer to help launch the National Institutes of Health’s initiative to scale back reliance on animals in research. It was also her love of numbers.

As a student, Kleinstreuer was a self-described math nerd, intrigued by the ability of mathematical models to represent the physical world. After earning degrees in applied mathematics and biomedical engineering, she went to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 for a post-doctoral fellowship in the then-nascent field of computational toxicology. Researchers in this area use data and models to predict whether, and at what doses, chemicals might affect human health.

It was during this time, Kleinstreuer recently told STAT, that

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