Conveners
Women advancing mathematical biology
- Samantha Erwin (North Carolina State University)
Description
This session will tackle a variety of biological problems from participants in the third Women Advancing Mathematical Biology (WAMB) workshop. The WAMB workshop was held in April 2017 at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at The Ohio State University, and teams of senior and junior scientists and mathematicians were created to foster new research collaborations among women in mathematical biology. In this minisymposium, participants from this workshop will present on their ongoing research and foster continued collaborations with others at the conference. Since the workshop brought together a variety of participants and research areas, this session also includes a broad background of topics. The topics include: comparing continuous and discrete models of Ornithodoros moubata (soft ticks); stochastic models of super spreading events; fluid dynamics of nematocyst prey capture; and characterizing Clostridium difficile colonization through networks and mechanistic models. This session will combine ODE models, stochastic models, fluid dynamic models, and network models together in one session. Moreover, the models will span from in host bacteria models to population epidemiological models.
The first mathematical models for an argasid tick are developed to explore the dynamics and identify knowledge gaps of these poorly studied ticks. These models focus on Ornithodoros moubata, an important tick species throughout Africa and Europe. Ornithodoros moubata is a known vector for African swine fever (ASF), a catastrophically fatal disease for domesticated pigs in Africa and...
The importance of host transmissibility in disease emergence has been demonstrated in historical and recent pandemics that involve infectious individuals, known as superspreaders, that are capable of transmitting the infection to a large number of susceptible individuals. To investigate the impact of superspreaders on epidemic dynamics, we formulate deterministic and stochastic models that...
A nematocyst is a specialized organelle within cells of jellyfish and other Cnidarians that sting. Nematocysts are also present in some single celled protists. They contain a barbed, venomous thread that accelerates faster than almost anything else in the animal kingdom. Here we simulate the fluid-structure interaction of the barbed thread accelerating through water to puncture its prey using...
In recent years, new technology has allowed us to achieve measurements of hundreds of metabolites and the expression of thousands of genes. With this large scale, all-encompassing, ‘omics’ data comes a critical need to reduce these datasets to the most functional elements so that we can discover key components driving disease pathogenesis. Current techniques to analyze omics data are not...