[CSBi-events] Forum of Interest

[CSBi events]

Hello,

This Thursday, Oct 26, room 68-181, 10:00-11:00, Martin 
Meier-Schellersheim Ph.D., from the NIH, Program in Systems Immunology 
and Infectious Disease Modeling, Laboratory of Immunology, will be 
presenting at the Cell Decision Processes Center's (CDP) weekly forum 
(see title and abstract below). You are invited to attend.

Please feel free to pass this info on to your T cell list serves and 
groups.

If you are interested in meeting with him, check out the times below 
and please let me know what time fits you best...  If you want two time 
slots, that'd be great!

	1:00-1:20
	1:30-1:50
	2:00-2:20
	2:30-2:50
	3:00-3:20
	3:30-4:00

Many Thanks,

-John

Speaker: Martin Meier-Schellersheim, Ph.D.
  Program in Systems Immunology and Infectious Disease Modeling
  Laboratory of Immunology
  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
  National Institutes of Health

Title: Moving from 'computing in biology' to 'computational biology'

Abstract: While the use of computers for data management or statistical 
analysis has become standard in biology, computers are much more rarely 
used by biologists as a tool to develop new hypothesis or models. The 
reason is that the computational models that emerge from most modeling 
efforts are - in contents and representation - too far away from the 
biological model they were based on. Most experimental biologists are 
neither capable (or willing) to recognize their research in abstract 
formalized representations nor do they have the necessary background in 
mathematics or computer science to deal with sets of differential 
equations or scripting languages. As a result, most computational 
modeling in biology is being conducted in a manner that is somewhat 
isolated from the input and scrutiny of 'real' biologists.

In my talk I will present our work that aims at providing a bridge 
between the complexity of biological models and computational 
representations that can be used to perform quantitative analyses of 
the behavior of those models. The modeling and simulation software 
simmune (http://www.simmune.org) we developed offers an interface that 
allows experimental biologists to use graphical representations of 
familiar objects like molecules, interactions between molecular binding 
sites, molecule complexes etc. to define models of cellular behavior 
with great detail. The software automatically translates the user 
inputs into mathematical representations and simulates their dynamics, 
offering various graphical outputs and possibilities of interaction 
with running simulations.


John M Burke, PhD Research Scientist-Biomathematician
Cell Decision Process Center Scientific Coordinator
email:burkey at mit.edu
  Phone: 617.253.8644 Fax: 617.258.0248