Maryann Hohn

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 […]

Title: TBA Abstract: TBA

Title: Modern techniques to approach the invariant subspace problem Abstract:  The invariant subspace problem is by far one of the most important problems in operator theory. It has been open for more than half a century, and there are many significant contributions with a huge variety of techniques, making this challenging problem so interesting; however […]

Title: Pareto optimization of resonances and optimal control methods Abstract: First successes in fabrication of high-Q optical cavities two decades ago led to active applied physics and numerical studies of optimization problems involving resonances. The questions is how to design an open resonator that has an eigenvalue as close as possible to the real line […]

Title: Connections between Iterative Methods for Linear Systems and Consensus Dynamics on Networks Abstract: There is a well-established linear algebraic lens for studying consensus dynamics on networks, which has yielded significant theoretical results in areas like distributed computing, modeling of opinion dynamics, and ranking methods. Recently, strong connections have been made between problems of consensus […]

Title: Viscoelastic Effects of Spontaneous Oscillations of Elastic Filaments in the Follower-Force Problem. Abstract: It is well know that microorganisms, such as bacteria and eukaryotes, often move in intricate environments experiencing mechano-chemical dynamics. These environments consist of rheologically complex substances such as mucus and other biofilms that are more complicated than water.  Spermatozoa (sperm), for […]

During this student-centered Applied Math Seminar, there will be discussion and presentation about upcoming courses in applied mathematics to help students make their enrollment choices for Fall 2022 and beyond.

Title: Data science and applications in dynamic topic modeling Abstract: The shockwaves of the big data boom have thrown into sharp relief the critical need for domain-driven, large-scale data analytic techniques across the fields of, among others, finance, political science, economics, psychology, and medicine. It is not simply the size of data sets that contributes […]

Title: What is the best shape? Geometric problems arising in aggregation models Abstract: How do pair interactions shape the large-scale behaviour of a cloud of particles (animals, social agents ...) ?  In the most basic models, the shape of the cloud is determined by minimizing an attractive-repulsive interaction energy under suitable geometric constraints. When can […]