Biomedical Mathematics Online Colloquium

Abstract Our present healthcare system focuses on treating people when they are ill rather than keeping them healthy. We have been using big data and remote monitoring approaches to monitor people while they are healthy to keep them that way and detect disease at its earliest moment presymptomatically. We use advanced multiomics technologies (genomics, immunomics, …

Abstract Individual human cancer cells often show different responses to the same treatment. In this talk I will share the quantitative experimental approaches my lab has developed for studying the fate and behavior of human cells at the single-cell level. I will focus on the tumor suppressor protein p53, a transcription factor controlling genomic integrity …

Abstract The advent of single-cell transcriptomics has brought a greatly improved understanding of the heterogeneity of gene expression across cell types, with important applications in developmental biology and cancer research. Single-cell RNA sequencing datasets, which are based on tags called universal molecular identifiers, typically include a large number of zeroes. For such datasets, genes with …

Abstract Many natural systems exhibit oscillations that show sizeable fluctuations in frequency and amplitude. This variability can arise from a wide variety of physical mechanisms. Phase descriptions that work for deterministic oscillators have a limited applicability for stochastic oscillators. In my talk I review attempts to generalize the phase concept to stochastic oscillations, specifically, the …

Abstract Spontaneous rhythmic oscillations are widely observed in real-world systems. Synchronized rhythmic oscillations often provide important functions for biological or engineered systems. One of the useful theoretical methods for analyzing rhythmic oscillations is the phase reduction theory for weakly perturbed limit-cycle oscillators, which systematically gives a low-dimensional description of the oscillatory dynamics using only the …

Abstract The creation and inference of mathematical models is central to modern scientific discovery in the life sciences. As more realism is demanded of models, however, the conventional framework of biology-guided model proposal, discretization, parameter estimation, and model refinement becomes unwieldy, expensive, and computationally daunting. Recent advances in Weak form-based Scientific Machine Learning (WSciML) allow …

Abstract Sleep is commonly analysed as an independent factor. However, because of the 24-hour constraints on a day, changes in sleep will co-occur with changes in remaining time use. This talk introduces compositional data analysis (CoDA) for sleep research. CoDA is illustrated using 24-hour sleep and activity data from accelerometry, first cross-sectionally showing associations between …

Abstract Many processes in the life sciences are inherently multi-scale and dynamic. Spatial structures and patterns vary across levels of organisation, from molecular to multi-cellular to multi-organism. With more sophisticated mechanistic models and data available, quantitative tools are needed to study their evolution in space and time. Topological data analysis (TDA) provides a multi-scale summary …

Abstract Smartphones and wearable devices provide a major opportunity to transform our understanding of the mechanisms, determinants, and consequences of diseases. For example, around 9 in 10 people own a smartphone in the United Kingdom, while one-fifth of US adults own wearable technologies. This high level of device ownership means that many people could contribute …

Abstract I will present a talk on "Dynamical data science and AI" for quantifying dynamical biological processes, disease progressions and various phenotypes, including dynamic network biomarkers (DNB) for early-warning signals of critical transitions, spatial-temporal information (STI) transformation for short-term time-series prediction, knockoff conditional mutual information (KOCMI) for quantifying interventional causality, partial cross-mapping (PCM) for causal …

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Abstract Many natural systems exhibit complex dynamics and are prone to sudden changes or ‘regime shifts’. At the same time, many of these systems are sparsely observed posing considerable challenges for modeling and control. Here I will describe recent developments in empirical dynamic modeling (EDM) for inference of bifurcations and anticipation of unseen dynamical regimes …