Antibodies: friend or foe? A mathematical investigation Antibodies that bind viral surface proteins can limit the spread of an infection through neutralizing and non-neutralizing functions. During both acute and chronic virus infections, antibody–virion immune complexes are formed, but do not always ensure protection. Moreover, cross-reactive antibody responses may contribute to increased disease severity in a phenomenon …
Intracellular transport: Inferring properties of molecular motors through rigor motor experiments and Bayesian inference. Part 2. Bayes’s Theorem yields the conditional probability of an event A given event B based on prior knowledge about related events. When considering distributions, Bayes’s Theorem can be used to describe the distribution of model parameters given observed data. In …
Examining the probability of silent circulation of polio using the endemic potential statistic Polio is a fecal-oral disease that can cause fever and flu-like symptoms, and, in more rare instances, acute flaccid paralysis (AFP). One characteristic of poliovirus is asymptomatic transmission amongst individuals who have already had a poliovirus infection. This allows the virus to …
Linking Resilience and Robustness and Uncovering their Trade-offs in Coupled Natural-Human Systems Robustness and resilience are concepts in systems thinking that have grown in importance and popularity. Â For many complex social-ecological systems, however, robustness and resilience are difficult to quantify and the connections and trade-offs between them difficult to study. Â Most studies have either focused …
Impact of biased movement on the spread of infectious diseases Many recent outbreaks and spatial spread of infectious diseases have been influenced by human movement over air, sea and land transport networks, and/or anthropogenic-induced pathogen/vector movement. These spatial movements in heterogeneous environments and networks are often asymmetric (biased). The effects of asymmetric movement versus symmetric …
Intracelluar Transport: Understanding Force Dependent Stepping Within cells, small molecules such as glucose rely on diffusion to reach needed destinations. Larger structures, like vesicles and organelles, need directed transport to navigate the crowded cytoplasm. Molecular motor proteins provide the means for such transport, binding to intracellular cargo and stepping along in a hand-over-hand fashion on …
Models of crowding effect on phytoplankton competition for nitrogen In the previous study, we consider a chemostat model of phytoplankton competing for nitrogen taking into account effects of both intra- and interspecific crowding. Crowding can be modeled as an additive density-dependent mortality rate. Crowding effects maybe classified into intra- and interspecific crowding depending on whether …
Reflections on the use of models to study global environmental change The work of my lab revolves around the mathematical modeling to understand interactions between major elements that cycle between atmosphere, land and ocean, between life and environment. The cycle of the major elements carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus touches our existence, in terms of feeding …
Empirical Nonlinear Dynamics: Reconstructing the Dynamics of Real-World Systems from Available Data This seminar presents an empirical dynamics approach that permits available data to ‘speak first’ regarding the nature of real-world processes generating them, and thus provides valuable guidance for subsequent modeling. This data-driven approach is compatible with the classic scientific method in which “ …
