MBI’s Fall 2018 Emphasis Program will look at problems in modeling micro- and macro- populations in biological studies. From DNA molecules and viruses to humans, the collective behavior of individual components gives rise to the overall dynamics of the biological system. The program will explore mathematical, statistical and biological perspectives on analyzing data from such systems and on construction of predictive models of behavior.

Researchers in the Mathematical and Biological sciences will come together for a series of four workshops:

Current Topics Workshop: Collective Behavior and Emergent Phenomena in Biology (September 10-12, 2018)
This CTW is a collaborative workshop for researchers and students with research interests in collective behavior and emergent phenomena in biology and its applications. The participants will be organized into interdisciplinary teams according to their interests and complementary skills. Each team will be tasked with exploring, analyzing and modeling original data sets provided by biologist attendees.

Modeling for Family Trees in Disease Studies (September 17-19, 2018)
This 3 day workshop will focus on the use of family studies in search for disease associated genes, include the development of novel methodologies and statistics for assessing variant disease relationships as well as the important role of the family study design in a clinical sequencing setting.

Math and Microbiome (October 10-12, 2018)
This 3 day workshop, will take a genome-to-phoneme approach to microbiome with insights provided by mathematicians, biologists, and statisticians. During the workshop the interdisciplinary working subgroups will consider the questions, challenges, tools, and needs of data integration and modeling in microbiome studies. Each participant will present a short talk (5 minutes, 3 slides) highlighting his or her research, perspectives, and challenges. The goal is to help develop a broadly collaborative community of math-enabled microbiome scientists with common research goals.

Modeling and analysis of dynamic social networks (November 5-9, 2018)
This 5 day workshop will consider emerging problems in dynamic social networks with an interdisciplinary approach incorporating modeling and empirical work from the social sciences, behavioral biology, mathematics, and statistics. In addition, because many of the challenges inherent to the study of social network dynamics are not unique to such networks, this workshop aims to include perspectives from other areas of network research.

For more information, visit: https://mbi.osu.edu/programs/emphasis-programs/2018-fall-analyzing-macro-and-micro-population-models/

This program is being organized by:
Ian Hamilton, EEOB / Mathematics, Ohio State University
Shili Lin, Department of Statistics, Ohio State University
Lara Sucheston-Campbell, Pharmacy Practice and Science, Ohio State University