“This talk will trace years of work in my Montréal group in the mathematical modeling of periodic hematological diseases. The ‘understand’ part talks about our use of modeling to figure out what causes cyclical neutropenia, the ‘treat’ part refers to our work on treating cyclical neutropenia using recombinant cytokines, while the ‘avoid’ part deals with our current ongoing work in trying to obviate the deleterious effects of chemotherapy on blood cell production—one of the major negative side effects of chemo.”