This seminar is for the Chancellors Faculty Excellence Program: Quantitative and Computational Developmental Biology Cluster Hire.
Many applications in the life sciences involve unknown system parameters that must be estimated using little to no prior information. In addition, these parameters may be time-varying and possibly subject to structural characteristics such as periodicity. We show how nonlinear Bayesian filtering techniques can be employed in this setting to estimate unknown, time-varying parameters, while…
Dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area play a key role in signalling motivational information. Modulation of this signalling by drugs is also key to the development of addiction. These neurons have several firing modes ranging from periodic low frequency activity to higher frequency bursts. In vitro, intrinsically generated bursts are seen, while in vivo…
Part 1: A theoretical approachChaotic dynamics have been directly detected in ocean dwelling species, and asymmetrical advective dispersal is the dominant dispersal mechanism in the ocean. Therefore, we must better our understanding of chaotic population dynamics under the influence of a unidirectional current. Here, we examine a spatially explicit, density-dependent population in a unidirectional current,…
Aspects of the cardiovascular system:(i) coupling between the left ventricle and systemic arteries, and (ii) arterial dissection. Two topics in mathematical and computational modelling of the systemic arterial circulation will be discussed. First, an immersed boundary model of the left ventricle (LV) is coupled to a structured tree model of the systemic arteries. There is…
New infectious disease outbreaks have great impact on communities over the world, as recently manifested by the Ebola outbreak. An important statistical task is then to predict the future scenario with and with out preventive measures. In the current talk we will investigate such analyses and see how it can be improved. The main catch…
Noise can play a critical role in a wide array of physical and biological dynamical systems. The noise may be internal or external to the system. Internal noise is intrinsic to the system itself, and in stochastic population models, arises due to the random interactions of discrete agents in the system. On the other hand,…
Why do atherosclerotic plaques only occur at specific sites in the arteries? Does the surface geometry of the brain affect the way waves move through the cortex? These questions and many others in the physiological sphere contain implicitly a real difficulty for modellers. How do we contend with the multiple scale lengths. Plaques are quite large compared to cells making…
Circadian (~24-hour) rhythms offer one of the clearest examples of the interplay between different levels of nervous system organization, with dynamic changes in gene expression leading to daily rhythms in neural activity, physiology, and behavior. The main output signal of the master circadian clock in mammals has long been believed to be a simple day/night…