Mathematical Biology and Medicine

Current and forthcoming programs, conferences and workshops




- Mathematical Life Sciences Bonn, 17-20 Apr 2023
- Dynamics & Evolution of Human Viruses Heidelberg, 19-22 Apr 2023
- QuanTII closing meeting, 8 May 2023
- BSI mathematical modelling affinity group meeting 15-16 May 2023
- Unifying the epidemiological and evolutionary dynamics of pathogens Stockholm, 29 May - 22 Jun
- Delays and Structures in Dynamical Systems: Modelling, Analysis and Numerical Methods Udine, 20-24 Nov
Seminars
- 21 Sep 2023Mohit Kumar Jolly IISc Bangalore
Design principles of decision-making networks in cancer cell plasticity and T cell differentiation
Decoding the emergent dynamics of cellular differentiation is crucial in understanding how cells make decisions during development and modulate those decisions for cellular reprogramming. Decision-making is often driven by complex interconnected networks, whose design principles remain poorly understood. I will present examples from our work on CD4+ T-cell differentiation into Th1, Th2, Th17 and hybrid states, as well as from cancer cell plasticity during metastasis. These networks exhibit multistability, thus enabling cells to reversibly alter their phenotypes. Moreover, the specific dynamical features seen in these networks are largely unique to them, indicating evolutionary selection of these networks in enabling multicellularity. Analysis of transcriptomic data analysis from relevant datasets validates our model predictions, and highlight how an integration of dynamical modeling with transcriptomic data can quantitatively map the cellular decision-making landscape. - 11 Sep 2023Chang Liu Maynooth
PACESS: Practical AI-based Cell Extraction and Spatial Statistics for large 3D biological images
Efficient methodologies to fully extract and analyse large datasets remain the Achilles heels of 3D tissue imaging. Here we present PACESS a pipeline for large-scale data extraction and spatial statistical analysis from 3D biological images. First, using 3D object detection neural networks trained on annotated 2D data, we identify and classify the location of hundreds of thousands of cells contained in large biological images. Then, we introduce a series of statistical techniques tailored to work with spatial data, resulting in a 3D statistical map of the tissue from which multi-cellular interactions can be clearly understood. As illustration of the power of this new approach, we apply this analysis pipeline to an organ known to have a complex and still poorly understood cellular structure: the bone marrow. The analysis reveals coherent, useful biological information on multiple cell population interactions. This novel and powerful spatial analysis pipeline can be broadly used to unravel complex multi-cellular interaction towards unlocking tissue complexity. - 18 May 2023Chris Overton Liverpool
Modelling the 2022 mpox outbreak
During the 2022 mpox outbreak, modelling has provided support to policy makers and the incident management team. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the key modelling work. Firstly, we consider real-time estimation of epidemiological parameters. Such estimation is challenging due to right-truncation and interval-censoring in the real-time data. Through this, we provided the first evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission of mpox. This will be followed by an overview of novel nowcasting models that were developed during the outbreak. With substantial delays between infections occurring and being reported, the epidemic curve suffered from substantial backfilling. Nowcasting methods attempt to account for this backfilling, allowing the epidemic curve to be evaluated in real-time. This is essential for reliable surveillance and timely decision making. - 17 May Philip Maini University of Oxford
Modelling collective cell movement in development and disease
Collective movement is ubiquitous in nature, occurring across a vast range of scales, from whales to bacteria. This talk will review some of our work on collective movement at the cell level. It will include (i) a novel partial differential equation (PDE) model derived from consideration of the classical snail-trail model for angiogenesis; (ii) a PDE model that views cancer cell invasion as a co-operative phenomenon; (iii) a hybrid agent-based model for cranial neural crest migration which, coupled with experiments, has led to new biological insights on this phenomenon. - 11 May Eva Deinum Wageningen
Zebrastripes for thirsty plants: the same story twice over?
The plant cell wall is a versatile material that can meet a wide range of mechanical requirements. The banded patterns in protoxylem form a striking example, enabling these vessels withstand substantial negative pressure and allow for extension at the same time. The required anisotropic material properties largely derive from the location and orientation of the constituting cellulose microfibrils. These, in turn are deposited along the cortical microtubule cytoskeleton. So, using the case of protoxylem as a model system for complex cell wall patterns, the question becomes how cortical microtubules can self-organize into banded patterns. This happens in interaction with another well-known patterning system, the ROP proteins.
We address this interaction from both sides: how can dynamic microtubules collectively adjust to a predefined ROP pattern and how can an –implicitly microtubule derived– field of diffusion anisotropy orient and change ROP patterns?
The ROPs can be described as a reaction-diffusion system, which we study using PDEs, complemented with an ODE model of slowly interacting peaks/clusters. The microtubule part of the work extends a long tradition of combined analytical and stochastic simulation approaches, with a close link to experimental quantification. Whereas the simulations are more easily adapted to relevant biological detail, the analytical foundation aids in efficient investigation and interpretation.
Despite the very different modelling frameworks and proteins involved, our work on ROP proteins provides critical insights into a problem in the stochastic microtubule simulations: there is a deep link between the stable coexistence of multiple clusters of active ROP and maintaining a sufficiently homogeneous distribution of microtubules across the cell cortex. - 4 May Samuel Relton Leeds
Prediction Modelling in the Healthcare System: From Patient to Production
In this talk we'll go through the full production cycle of building statistical models that are actually used by clinicians within the NHS. Most modelling work takes place using pre-cleaned data and doesn't need to be production-ready, so there are many extra issues to consider when going the extra mile. In particular we'll discuss the modelling for the electronic frailty index+ (eFI+) work which will imminently go live within the SystmOne and EMIS GP systems (totalling over 30M patients). In addition to the usual modelling issues we'll touch on various sources of bias, robust external validation, MHRA registration, and patient/stakeholder engagement that all need to be taken care of to make direct clinical impact on the frontline.
Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Fluctuating Populations
Understanding the origin of species diversity and the evolution of cooperation is a major scientific riddle that resonates with numerous societal concerns, like the rise of antimicrobial resistance or the loss of biodiversity, and is even relevant to epidemiology. Population dynamics traditionally ignores fluctuations and considers static and homogeneous environments. However, fluctuations arising from randomly occurring birth / death events (demographic noise) and the change of environmental conditions (environmental variability), together with the spatial dispersal of species, play a crucial role in understanding how the size and composition of a population jointly evolve in time, i.e. its eco-evolutionary dynamics. Here, we focus on the ubiquitous situation where the eco-evolutionary dynamics of fluctuating populations is shaped by the coupling of demographic noise and environmental variability.
The interdependence of environmental variability and demographic noise is poorly understood but of great importance in microbial communities, which are often subject to sudden and extreme environmental changes. In particular, modelling population of varying size and composition subject to changing external factors is crucial to understand the evolution of microbial antibiotic resistance. In fact, pharmacodynamics largely focuses on the deterministic description of large well-mixed bacterial populations, but fails to account crucial stochastic effects arising in small communities. When antibiotics reduce a large population to a very small one but fail to eradicate it, surviving cells may replicate and restore infections, and these survivors are likely to develop antibiotic resistance. Owing to the small population size, the details of the outcome are subject to large fluctuations.This important example clearly illustrates the need for theoretical advances to shed light on extinction and resistance scenarios in fluctuating environments.
Recent theses
Léa Sta Mathematical models of cell signalling in heterogeneous populations ![]() Mar 2023 |
Daniel Luque Duque Network models of T cell receptor repertoires, cross-reactivity, and viral infection ![]() Mar 2023 |
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Bevelynn Williams Mechanistic intracellular and within-host models of bacterial and viral infections Feb 2023 ![]() |
Giulia Belluccini Stochastic models of cell population dynamics and tick-borne virus transmission Feb 2023 ![]() |
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Polly-Anne Jeffrey Mathematical Modelling of Cellular Receptor-Ligand Dynamics Oct 2021 ![]() |
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Recent programs, conferences and workshops
ECMTB 2022 Immunoctoberfest 2022![]() |
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- Sensing and Signaling in Immune Systems: Mathematics meets Biology BIRS Banff, Feb 2022
- NEPA 2020-21
- PiNEJan2021
- PiNE 10-14 Sep 2020
- Society for mathematical biology 17-20 Aug 2020
- British Early Career Mathematicians' Colloquium (virtual colloquium) 14-15 Jul 2020
- Mathematical and Computational Biomedicine Oaxaca. 3-8 Nov 2019
- Cancer and Inflammation: From Micro to Macro NIH. 17-18 Oct 2019
- Viral dynamics Paris, France. 21-23 Oct 2019.
- The mathematics of biology and medicine Leeds. 30 Sep 2019
- Numerical analysis and applied mathematics Rhodes, Greece. 23-28 Sep 2019.
- Stochastic modelling in Health and Disease Leeds. 11-13 Sep 2019
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50 Years of Stochastic Processes at UCSD: a symposium in honor of Katja Lindenberg
15-16 Aug 2019.
- Immunology of human diseases Santa Fe, NM. 28-31 Jul 2019.
- Society for Mathematical Biology annual conference Montréal. 21-26 Jul 2019
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Fluctuations, tipping points and emergence in eco-evolutionary dynamics
Leeds. 2-5 Jul 2019
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Mathematical and Statistical Explorations in Disease Modelling and Public Health
Bangalore, India. 1-11 Jul 2019
- Mathematical and statistical challenges in viral dynamic models: Ebola virus as a paradigm ICMS Edinburgh. 10-28 Jun 2019
- Systems Biology of Human Disease Berlin, Germany. 27-29 May
- Mathematical modelling in immunology Cambridge, 9-10 May 2019.
- Systems Immunology Cold Spring Harbour, 13-16 Mar 2019.
- T-cell memory: thinking outside the blood Trippenhuis KNAW, Amsterdam. 28-30 Nov2018
- Stochasticity and Control in the Dynamics and Diversity of Immune Repertoires Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris. 28-31 Oct 2018
- Advanced asymptotics of PDEs, modeling and extreme statistics and their applications to data analysis in cell biology Pisa, 15 September - 31 Oct 2018
- Frontiers in Basic Immunology NIH, Bethesda, MD 27-28 Sep 2018
- Systems Biology London, 3-4 Sep 2018
- PiNE Durham, 12 Sep 2018
- Synthetic immunity Santa Fe, NM. 10-14 Jul 2018
- Quantitative Analysis of Immune Cell Migration and Spatial Processes in Health and Disease BIRS Oaxaca, 24-29 Jun 2018
- British Society for Immunology: Mathematical Modelling affinity group meeting Cambridge, 7-8 Jun 2018.
- Systems immunology Surrey, 27-28 Mar 2018.
- Host-pathogen dynamics Ohio, 19-23 Feb 2018
- PiNE Leeds, 16 Feb 2018
- Modelling infectious diseases in the cell and host Singapore, 22-24 Jan 2018.
- Quantitative Principles in Biology at EBML Heidelberg, 2-4 Nov 2017
- Systems out of equilibrium Warwick. 27 Nov 2017
- Synthetic Immunity Santa Fe, NM. 10-14 Jul 2017.
- Network Dynamics and Structure Leeds, 25 Jul 2017.
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Climate Fluctuations and Non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue
10 Jul to 4 Aug at the MPIPKS in Dresden, Germany. -
Biostatistics and machine learning methods in omics research
The 34th Leeds Annual Statistical Research Workshop, joint with the EU MIMOmics network.
Leeds, Monday 26 - Wednesday 28 Jun 2017. - CoSyDy 26 Jun 2017 at Imperial College London.
- Theoretical and Experimental Immunology hosted by Microsoft Research Cambridge, 8-9 Jun 2017.
- Viral Dynamics: Past, Present and Future 5-7 May 2017 in Santa Fe, NM
- Modeling Viral Infections and Immunity 1-4 May 2017
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QuanTI closing meeting 19-21 Apr 2017
- Probability in the North-East
University of Leeds, Thursday 27th Apr 2017
Programme- 10.00 - 10.30 Welcome and Coffee
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10.30 - 11.20 Corina Constantinescu (University of Liverpool)
Ruin probabilities in insurance models -
11.20 - 12.10 Ronnie Loeffen (University of Manchester)
Spectral representations for affine processes - 12.10 - 13.10 Lunch
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13.10 - 14.00 Vicky Henderson (University of Warwick)
Probability weighting, stop-loss and the disposition effect -
14.00 - 14.50 Adrian Pratt (Public Health England)
Back-calculation techniques and other models to inform mitigation strategies of non-transmissible acute infections - 14.50 - 15.20 Coffee Break
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15.20 - 16.10 Theodore Kypraios (University of Nottingham)
Recent developments in Bayesian non-parametric inference for epidemic models -
16.10 - 17.00 Antonio Gómez-Corral (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)
On perturbation analysis of quasi-birth-death processes with applications to multi-type epidemic models
- Quantitative T cell Immunology Symposium
Hosted by AstraZeneca, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, 21-22 Sep 2016
Wednesday 21st September- 14:35 Ton Schumacher, Netherlands Cancer Institute
T cell recognition and tumor resistance in human cancer - 15:35 Simon Dovedi Medimmune
Modelling the immunobiology of radiotherapy in cancer - 16:00
Ken Duffy, Hamilton Institute NUI Maynooth
T cell signal integration and an algebra of tree concatenation
- 09:30 Melania Barile, German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg
Quantifying the flux through haematopoiesis - 10:00 Sarah Teichmann, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Understanding cellular heterogeneity - 11:10 Cathal Seoighe, NUI Galway
Promiscuous mRNA splicing under the control of AIRE in medullary thymic epithelial cells - 12:00 Mariona Baliu Piqué, UMC Utrecht
Is long-lasting memory provided by short-lived cells? A closer look at CD8+ memory T cell dynamics
- Lessons to be learnt from mathematical models of T cells University of Glasgow, 17 Nov, 2016.
- Robustness, Adaptability and Critical Transitions in Living Systems
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 19-22 Sep 2016- Systems Immunology Santa Fe. 27-28 Sep 2016.
- International Congress of Immunology Melbourne 21-26 Aug 2016
- Mathematical and Systems Immunology session at ECMTB Nottingham, 11-15 Jul 2016.
- Stochastic Dynamical Systems in Biology: Numerical Methods and Applications
Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge. Jan-Jun 2016- Theoretical and experimental immunology Cambridge. 16-17 June 2016
- Big Data Analytics at Leeds
Wednesday 11 May 2016.- Be curious 19 Mar 2016
- Spring school on lymphocyte dynamics Unilever. 17-18 Mar 2016
- Single-cell biology EBI Hinxton. 8-10 Mar 2016
- Quantitative Immunology KITP Santa Barbara. 1-19 Feb 2016
- PiNE Probability in the North-East
Friday 6 November 2015
Complex stochastic systems arising in applications and interdisciplinary research
School of Mathematics, University of Leeds. Room: MALL 1
Programme 2015 - 13.30 -- 14.20 Carmen Molina-París (University of Leeds)
Stochastic modelling of T cell receptor clonotype competition - 14.20 -- 15.10 Malwina Luczak (Queen Mary, University of London)
SIR epidemics on random graphs with a given degree sequence - 15.30 -- 16.20 Anton Camacho (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
The impact of dynamical modelling on public-health decisions made during the 2013-2015 Ebola outbreak - 16.20 -- 17.10 Alexandre Veretennikov (University of Leeds)
On convergence in Erlang-Sevastyanov queueing systems and in reliability theory
- Numerical Modeling in Evolutionary Problems: perspectives and applications Salerno, 26-27 Nov 2015
- Workshop on Physics of Living Systems San Servolo island, Venice, Italy. 16-19 September, 2015
- Stochastic Single-Cell Dynamics in Immunology Amsterdam, 17-19 June 2015
- British Society for Immunology: Mathematical Modelling Microsoft Research Cambridge. 4-5 Jun 2015
- Mathematics for health and disease ICMS Edinburgh. 13-17 Apr 2015
- LIVING -- Robustness, adaptability and critical transition in living systems
Satellite conference at the annual European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS14)- Stochastic modelling and immunology Ecology, Evolution and Dynamics of Dengue and other Related Diseases Arizona, 4-5 Aug 2014
- BSI Mathematical Modelling, Microsoft Research Cambridge, 19-20 May 2014.
- Novel Applications of Statistical Mechanics Boston, 10-11 may 2014
- Dynamics of Active Matter Imperial College London, Wednesday 7th May .
- Quantitative immunology Les Houches, France. 9-14 Mar 2014
- Systems Approaches in Immunology Santa Fe, USA. 10-11 Jan 2014
- Mathematical modelling affinity group session at the BSI congress 2013
- Modelling the Complexity of the Immune System Barcelona, 16-20 September 2013.
- Stochastic, statistical and computational approaches to Immunology
International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Edinburgh. 22-26 Jul 2013- Complexity Systems Dynamics Leeds, 5 June 2013.
- Mathematical and computational modelling in immunology
Cambridge, 8-9 May 2013.- Simulation Models of Infectious Disease Transmission and Control Processes
Antwerp, 17-18 Apr- BAMC 2013
- Systems biology of T cells Baeza, Spain. 21-24 Oct 2012
- Multiscale physics of lymphocyte development
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems,
Dresden, Germany. 5-31 Aug 2012- New Statistics and Modern Natural Sciences Leeds, 3-5 Jul 2012
- Theoretical and experimental immunology 25-26 Jun 2012 poster
- Synchronisation in Complex Systems 11 May, London.
- Computational Immunology
WEHI Melbourne, 11-13 Apr 2012- Evolution and diversity in complex systems Leeds, 2 Mar 2012.
- Theoretical and Experimental Immunology IISc Bangalore, 16 Aug 2011 Abstracts
- Theoretical immunology network meeting on 16 May 2011 at the University of Leeds
- Imaging, Interpretation and Modeling in Modern Immunology Banff, 10-15 Apr 2011
- Physics of Immunity: Complexity Approach 4-8 Apr 2011, Max-Planck-Institut Dresden
- Experimental and theoretical immunology on 18 Mar 2011 at the University of Leeds
- Experimental and theoretical immunology in the real world at the University of Leeds 10 Jan 2011.
- Yorkshire Immunology Group "Pattern recognition receptors in the immune system" 24 Nov 2010, Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds
- Movement in Models of Mathematical Biology 15 November 2010, University of Warwick
- Stochastic dynamics and applications Monday 18 October 2010, University of Leeds
- Immunology, Imaging and Modelling Network Summer School at the University of Leeds 13-17 September 2010.
- High-throughput Sequencing, Proteins and Statistics (29th Leeds Annual Statistical Research Workshop) 6th-8th Jul 2010
- Probability in the North-East