NIMBioS

You Can’t Be Serious

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

NIMBioS Working Group members are featured in this new documentary on the importance of play.

Interviews on the subject of play behavior by several members of the NIMBioS’ Working Group on Play, Evolution & Sociality are featured in soon-to-be released documentary movie about the importance of play in our everyday lives. A trailer and a kickstarter campaign for the movie was released today.

The filmmaker for the project is Gwen Gordon, a former designer and builder of Muppets for the children’s program Sesame Street, who came to NIMBioS in November 2011 to conduct interviews of Working Group members. Entitled “Seriously!,” the movie is “a creative documentary about the power of play to generate and restore health and sanity to our world,” according to the movie’s website.

The movie features interviews with many Working Group members, including co-organizer Gordon Burghardt, a UT professor in the psychology and ecology & evolutionary biology departments; behavioral neuroscientist Sergio Pellis; biological anthropologist Kerrie Lewis Graham; biopsychologist Barbara Smuts; sociobiologist Elisebetta Palagi; and animal biologists Marc Beckoff and Marek Spinka.

The NIMBioS Working Group on Play, Evolution and Society aims to develop models for the interactions that occur during social play and to determine the factors that predict the dynamics, occurrence and trajectory of play in diverse taxa as well as the ecological, physiological and life history factors that facilitate and maintain it. The next meeting of the Working Group is scheduled for Oct. 29-31, 2012.

Posted in game theory, research | Tagged game theory, research | Comments Off

Microbiology Prof New Associate Director for Graduate Education

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

Dr. Alison Buchan

NIMBioS welcomes Alison Buchan, associate professor of microbiology at UT, as NIMBioS’ associate director for graduate education, effective Sept. 1.

Buchan’s research focuses on the roles of microbes in natural environments. Major objectives in Buchan’s lab include linking microbial taxa to critical ecosystem processes, exploring functional gene diversity and its relation to community structure and biogeochemical processes, and identifying novel enzymes and/or catabolic pathways.

Much of Buchan’s work focuses on the Roseobacter clade, an abundant, broadly distributed and biogeochemically relevant group of heterotrophic marine bacteria. Aspects of Roseobacter biology that are of particular interest include catabolism of plant-derived compounds, attachment and colonization of surfaces, and geographical distributions. In addition, Buchan also examines viruses that infect the Roseobacter clade in order to understand how phage lysis influences Roseobacter populations as well as to understand the chemical nature of dissolved organic matter that is released due to phage activity.

Buchan is also on the faculty of UT’s Genome Science and Technology Graduate Program and UT’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology.

Cynthia Peterson, emeritus associate director for graduate education, has accepted a new role as interim associate dean for academic personnel within UT’s College of Arts & Sciences.

Posted in Leadership | Tagged leadership | Comments Off

NIMBioS Hosts Women in Science Meeting

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

AWIS Tennessee Chapter meets at NIMBioS.

Outreach to middle school girls, better treatment for international graduate students, tenure and promotion for women on UT campus — these are among the top issues for the members of the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) Tennessee chapter, who met at NIMBioS on Thursday. The purpose of the meeting was to plan activities for the new academic year.

Two programs that focus on creating excitement for science among middle school girls are planned again for this fall:

SHADES (Sharing Adventures in Engineering and Science), which was last held November 2011, is for sixth and seventh grade girls interested in STEM careers. This year’s program is scheduled for Oct. 6 and will be held at the Knox County STEM Academy. Click here for more information about last year’s program.

Gadget Girl Adventures in STEM, which was held in April 2011, is a day full of STEM activities for grades 6-8 held on the UT campus. This year’s program is scheduled for Nov. 17. A booklet from last year’s program is available here.

Volunteers are needed to help with both programs. If you are interested in the activities of the Tennessee Chapter of AWIS, contact Chapter President Suzanne Lenhart at lenhart@math.utk.edu or 974-4270. Membership is open to both women and men. The mission of AWIS is to advocate for the interests of women in science and technology.

Posted in Diversity, Education/Outreach, gender diversity, Middle School, STEM | Tagged diversity, Education/Outreach, Girl Scouts, STEM | Comments Off

NIMBioS Initiates Campus Collaborations on Big Data

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

NIMBioS Director Louis Gross kicks off the “Big Data” meeting, a cross-collaborative effort at UT to initiate new projects associated with computational science.

UT faculty, postdocs and scientific staff interested in the computational challenges associated with “big data” gathered for pizza lunch at NIMBioS today to brainstorm ideas for new collaborations. Representatives from NIMBioS, the Computational Geography Group, the Innovative Computing Laboratory, and the Remote Data Analysis and Visualization Center (RDAV) attended the meeting.

The effort was spurred by a new National Science Foundation supplement awarded in July to NIMBioS, in collaboration with RDAV. The supplement, which totals $200,000, will help fund efforts within NIMBioS and RDAV to develop new high performance computing simulation and data analysis for biology.

Today’s meeting was an effort to foster new ideas about how those interested in computational science at UT might collaborate. Examples of computational challenges include issues surrounding the classification of metadata, data storage, and how to describe data workflows. NIMBioS Director Louis Gross and NIMBioS HPC Specialist Eric Carr kicked off the meeting by sharing details about the new NIMBioS-RDAV collaboration, as well as their report from a recent NSF-hosted meeting they attended about cyber-infrastructure challenges facing national biology centers like NIMBioS.

NIMBioS and RDAV collaborated previously when they developed and hosted the 2010 tutorial, “Migration from the Desktop: HPC application of R and other codes for biological research.”

Posted in Computing | Tagged computing | Comments Off

NIMBioS REUs: The work is done! And has only just begun…

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

Members of the evolution of HIV group present their final results.

Arielle Nivens from the Salmonella group.

All eighteen undergraduates in NIMBioS’ 2012 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program ended their eight-week research projects today and presented their results.

Working closely with NIMBioS postdocs and UT faculty as mentors, each REU worked on one of six different research projects at the interface of mathematics and biology. This year’s projects were modeling the evolution of sexual imprinting; modeling protein translation and genome evolution; developing natural pesticides; modeling Salmonella transmission in swine; agent-based modeling of Johne’s disease; and modeling early evolution of HIV.

For a full listing of all REU participants in the 2012 program and their institutional affiliation, click here. On our 2012 REU page, you will also find more detailed profiles of some of the REU participants. More photos from today’s final presentations, as well as team photos, are on the NIMBioS Flickr photostream.

Congratulations to the 2012 NIMBioS REUs! While your REU experience comes to a close, we wish you well in continuing the research that you began here.

Posted in REU/REV | Tagged Education, Education/Outreach, REU/REV | 1 Comment

Malaria Paper Now Published

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

Calistus Ngonghala

NIMBioS postdoctoral fellow Calistus Ngonghala’s paper on periodic oscillations in a model for the dynamics of malaria transmission has been published in Mathematical Biosciences.

The model differs from standard malaria models in that the vector behavioral patterns of feeding, egg laying, resting and swarming, and back to feeding — referred to in the paper as demography and lifestyle — are explicitly integrated and modeled.

“Our model results indicate that there are two threshold parameters, one directly linked to the mosquito vector and the other to the disease transmission dynamics that are important for disease control purposes,” Ngonghala says.

The model also exhibits the phenomenon called backward bifurcation, which indicates that reducing the disease threshold parameter below unity may not be enough for disease eradication as advocated by most epidemiological models.

“The model suggests that to fully understand the dynamics as well as patterns observed in indirectly transmitted diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and others, for which the transmitting vector resides in different habitats from the humans, mathematical models should incorporate the demography and life style of the arthropods that transmit the disease-causing agent and not be developed in isolation,” the authors write in the paper.

The paper’s co-authors are Gideon A. Ngwa and Miranda I. Teboh-Ewungkem.

More information about Ngonghala’s research can be found here including a video interview.

Posted in malaria, postdocs, publication, research, viruses | Tagged malaria, postdocs, publications, research, viruses | Comments Off

Best Student Paper: Plant Virus Transmission Dynamics

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

Carrie Manore (left) accepts the Lee Segel Prize for Best Student Paper.

The 2012 Lee Segel Prize for Best Student Paper was awarded to a paper modeling virus transmission dynamics in grasses. The award was presented on Saturday at the 2012 Society for Mathematical Biology conference.

“Spatiotemporal Model of Barley and Cereal Yellow Dwarf Virus Transmission Dynamics with Seasonality and Plant Competition” was published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology in November 2011. Co-author Carrie Manore gave the talk in a plenary session on Saturday, July 28.

The Lee Segel Prize is awarded by Springer, in partnership with the Society for Mathematical Biology, to honor the best paper and best student paper published in the Bulletin over the previous two years.

Posted in awards | Tagged awards | Comments Off

From Computations to Contra, SMB2012 Deemed Success

Posted on July 30, 2012 by admin

More than 400 researchers attended last week’s annual meeting of The Society for Mathematical Biology held July 25-28 at the Knoxville Convention Center. The theme for the conference was Mathematics and Biology: Interdisciplinary Connections and the Living Systems, and was co-hosted by NIMBioS and UT.

Approximately 430 scientists and mathematicians, including undergraduate students, from 23 countries and 35 U.S. states participated in 31 minisymposia and presented 58 posters at the conference. Topics included stem cell research, modeling infectious disease like ‘Bieber Fever,’ understanding ecosystem dynamics, educating future biologists and mathematicians, and developing natural pesticides, to name just a few.

Participants interviewed at the conference were generally positive about the conference and the opportunity to meet the faces behind the names in mathematical biology. The schedule afforded plenty of time for social interaction, including a barbeque dinner and contra dance at the World’s Fair Park Amphitheater.

“The quality of the work presented here was scientifically nice. A lot of theoretical meetings like this have more math, but here there was more application to real examples and experimental data. There seems to be a slow movement toward more application of math to biology,” said UT assistant professor of microbiology and conference participant Vitaly Ganusov.

A lively stream of “tweets” took place on Twitter with the hashtag #smb2012. The total number of tweets with the hashtag was 1,085, and the top tweeters were @dbasanta and @sciencestream. The tweets, as well as media coverage and photos, are all captured on storify here. A full set of photos from the conference and barbeque can be viewed here.

Posted in conference | Tagged conferences | Comments Off

NIMBioS Board Member Receives Nation’s Top Early-Career Award

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

Mariel Vazquez

NIMBioS board member Mariel Vazquez, a math professor at San Francisco State University, has been named one of the nation’s most promising young scientists for her work at the interface of mathematics and biology.

President Barack Obama named Vazquez as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the U.S. government’s highest honor for researchers in the early stages of their careers.

Vazquez is a pioneer in an emerging field called DNA topology, which applies pure math to the biological mysteries of DNA.

Vazquez is among 96 researchers selected for the award this year. PECASE recipients are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service. Federal departments and agencies nominate researchers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for keeping America at the cutting edge of science and engineering.

The PECASE award citation states that Vazquez is being honored for her “excellent interdisciplinary and international research at the interface of mathematics and biology, and for creativity and dedication to recruiting, training, and mentoring, and helping students from underrepresented groups achieve their goals.”

The National Science Foundation nominated her for the PECASE award.

For full details, visit the announcement from San Francisco State University press office and the White House press release on this year’s award.

Posted in awards, Board | Tagged awards, board | Comments Off

All Things MathBio Begins Tomorrow: Babies, Bees & Bieber

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Catherine Crawley

NIMBioS postdocs help prepare materials for SMB2012 conference attendees.

Breast milk, bumble bees, and even “Bieber Fever” will undergo mathematical analyses at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology, which begins tomorrow and runs through Saturday, at the Knoxville Convention Center.

About 400 scientists and undergraduate students from 23 countries and 35 US states are expected to attend the annual meeting and associated research and educational conference, co-hosted by UT and NIMBioS.

Some of the scheduled talks include the following:

The conference includes talks from six plenary speakers, including Michio Kondoh from Ryukoku University in Japan. Kondoh won the society’s prestigious Akira Okubo Prize last year.

“SMB 2012 provides an excellent opportunity for researchers and educators at all levels of experience to share their enthusiasm for addressing important biological problems through the use of mathematics,” said NIMBioS Director Louis Gross.

For more information and abstracts of speakers’ topics, visit the SMB 2012 website.