Applied Math Seminar — Christopher Miles (UC Irvine)

Title:  Collective motion in the mitotic spindle

Abstract:  Math models of interacting individuals moving as a collective have been profoundly successful in describing physical and social phenomena ranging from swarming insects to human crowds. Especially in molecular biology, recent advances in machine-learning-based automated tracking have led to droves of new data of collective motion. I’ll discuss two related projects, both studying chromosomes (DNA) moving during mitosis (cell division). The first project will hopefully convince you that modeling this system as a collective is interesting, exploring how collective motion models might describe how cancer cells avoid death. The second project will try to address how to actually incorporate data into the modeling process now that we have it.