Applied Math Seminar

Title: Eigenvector Methods for Community Detection in Hypergraphs Abstract: Hypergraphs are generalizations of graphs in which edges are allowed to contain arbitrary numbers of nodes. Hypergraphs are well-suited for modeling complex data sets with multi-body interactions. Familiar examples include email threads with multiple participants, projects with multiple collaborators, and forum posts with multiple tags. The hypergraph […]

Title: Mixing and Pumping on the Microscale Abstract: Mixing and pumping in microfluidics devices is difficult because the traditional methods of mixing and pumping at large length scales don’t work at small length scales. Experimental work has suggested that rotating helical flagella may be used to effectively mix and pump fluid in microfluidics devices. To […]

Title: Traditional Applied Math, and then, Working with High Dimensional Biological Data Abstract: I will give an overview of my interests in two parts. The first part will be on passive tracer problems – with the goal of finding formulas of descriptive statistics (mean, variance, skewness) for a solute distribution advected by a smooth flow […]

Title: Circadian Rhythms in Multinucleate Cells Abstract: Circadian rhythms are among the most researched cellular processes, but limited work has been done on how these rhythms are coordinated between nuclei in multinucleate cells. I'll analyze a mathematical model for circadian oscillations in a multinucleate cell, motivated by mRNA and protein data from the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa. Stochastic simulations of […]

No applied math talk

Title: A Recommendation Systems Approach for Detecting Epistasis Abstract: There are a variety of methods used to understand and interpret an organism’s phenotype, the physical expression of one or more genes. Epistasis, the phenomenon of one mutation affecting the resulting quantitative or qualitative phenotype, is used to assess gene variation in an attempt to find […]

Title: Exploring Phage Treatment for Bacterial Infections with Mathematical Modeling Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious threat to global health today. A renewed interest in phage therapy – the use of bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections – has emerged given the spread of AMR and lack of new drug classes in the antibiotic […]

Title: Understanding Complex Social Systems using Minimal Mathematical Models Abstract: Minimal mathematical models are used to understand complex phenomena in the physical, biological, and social sciences. This modeling philosophy never claims, nor even attempts, to fully capture the mechanisms underlying the phenomena, and instead offers insights and predictions not otherwise possible. Here, we explore minimal […]

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 […]

No applied math talk

Title: TBA Abstract: TBA

Archetypal analysis is an unsupervised learning method that uses a convex polytope to summarize multivariate data. For fixed k, the method finds a convex polytope with k vertices, called archetype points, such that the polytope is contained in the convex hull of the data and the mean squared distance between the data and the polytope […]