Biomedical Mathematics Online Colloquium

Abstract: Circadian clocks control the timing and 24-hour periodicity of virtually all physiological rhythms including sleep, cognition, and metabolism. There are optimal times for most behaviours; e.g., the best sleep is achieved during low circadian activity (night), while meals and physical exercise are best placed during high circadian activity (day) when metabolic rates, stress hormone …

Abstract: The ability to reliably engineer the mammalian cell will impact a variety of applications in a disruptive way, including cell fate control and reprogramming, targeted drug delivery, and regenerative medicine. However, our current ability to engineer mammalian genetic circuits that behave as predicted remains limited. These circuits depend on the intra and extra cellular …

Abstract: Since before the time of Aristotle and the natural philosophers, reductionism has played a foundational role in western scientific thought. The premise of reductionism is that systems can be broken down into constituent pieces and studied independently, then reassembled to understand the behavior of the system as a whole. It embodies the classical linear …

Abstract: Cooperation means that one individual pays a cost for another to receive a benefit. Cooperation can be at variance with natural selection. Why should you help competitors? Yet cooperation is abundant in nature and is important component of evolutionary innovation. Cooperation can be seen as the master architect of evolution and as the third …

Abstract: Multi-omics technologies, and in particular those with single-cell and spatial resolution, provide unique opportunities to study the deregulation of intra- and inter-cellular signaling processes in disease. I will present recent methods and applications from our group toward this aim, focusing on computational approaches that combine data with biological knowledge within statistical and machine learning …

Abstract: Many questions in everyday life as well as in research are causal in nature: How would the climate change if we lower train prices or will my headache go away if I take an aspirin? Inherently, such questions need to specify the causal variables relevant to the question and their interactions. However, existing algorithms …

Abstract: We will present a new approach to develop a data-driven, learning-based framework for predicting outcomes of biophysical systems and for discovering hidden mechanisms and pathways from noisy data. We will introduce a deep learning approach based on neural networks (NNs) and on generative adversarial networks (GANs). Unlike other approaches that rely on big data, …

Abstract: The well-known two-process model of sleep regulation makes accurate predictions of sleep timing and duration, as well as neurobehavioral performance, for a variety of acute sleep deprivation and nap sleep scenarios, but it fails to predict the effects of chronic sleep restriction on neurobehavioral performance. The two-process model belongs to a broader class of …

Abstract: TBD

Abstract: Stochasticity in gene expression is an important source of cell-to-cell variability (or noise) in clonal cell populations. So far, this phenomenon has been studied using the Gillespie Algorithm, or the Chemical Master Equation, which implicitly assumes that cells are independent and do neither grow nor divide. This talk will discuss recent developments in modelling …

Abstract: Cell fate specification is a dynamic process during which gene regulatory networks (GRNs) transition between different states and define cell type-specific patterns of gene expression. Identifying such cell type-specific gene regulatory networks is important for understanding how cells differentiate to diverse lineages from a progenitor state, how differentiated cells can be reprogrammed, and how …