Department of Mathematics Special Colloquium
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This special colloquium will host a faculty candidate for math biology.
Speaker: Erica Rutter, Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Research in Scientific Computation, North Carolina State University
Title: Modeling and Estimating Biological Heterogeneity in Spatiotemporal Data
Abstract: Heterogeneity in biological populations, from cancer to ecological systems, is ubiquitous. Despite this knowledge, current mathematical models in population biology often do not account for inter-individual heterogeneity. In systems such as cancer, this means assuming cellular homogeneity and deterministic phenotypes, despite the fact that heterogeneity is thought to play a role in therapy resistance. Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) is an aggressive and fatal form of brain cancer notoriously difficult to predict and treat due to its heterogeneous nature. In this talk, I will discuss several approaches I have developed towards incorporating and estimating cellular heterogeneity into partial differential equation (PDE) models of GBM growth. In particular, I will discuss the use of random differential equations for modeling purposes and the Prohorov metric framework for estimating parameter distributions from data.