Conference Service Mandl

abstract: Our understanding of infectious-disease epidemiology and control has been greatly increased in recent years through mathematical modelling. Insights from this increasingly-important and exciting field are now informing policymaking at the highest levels, for pandemic influenza, SARS, HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, foot-and-mouth disease and other infections.

This course is the ideal introduction for mathematical modellers who are considering entering this exciting field, and many past participants have been mathematicians. Course teachers have backgrounds in mathematics, physics, statistics, molecular biology, microbiology, and epidemiology, and are highly experienced in multi-disciplinary collaboration. The course emphasises how to express biological and clinical principles mathematically, and how to interpret results from a biological and clinical perspective.

Since 1990, this short course has introduced epidemiological modelling to public-health professionals, policy makers, and medical and veterinary researchers, and kept them up-to-date with what they need to know about this fast-moving field. It is taught by active researchers in the world-leading Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, which advises public health agencies, governments, international organisations, and pharmaceutical companies, and hosts the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis & Modelling, UNAIDS Epidemiology Reference Group secretariat, Partnership for Child Development, and the Gates Foundation-funded Schistosomiasis Control Initiative that has treated over 12 million children to date in six countries in Africa.

abstract: Following 2 previous Noise in Life meetings in Spain (2006) and Germany (2007), "Noise in Life 2009" will focus on cell signaling, regulation of gene expression and neuronal dynamics. There is a nice balance between these three topics to make for an exciting meeting which will improve our understanding of the emergence of mesoscopic dynamics in cell physiology. We will combine communities from the biosciences, nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, applied mathematics and scientific computing, and gather together expertise in realistic modeling, multi-scale simulations and experimental biology.

abstract: The aim of this programme will be to debate and provide contributions from state of the art mathematical techniques for galvanising the wider research community into focused action on the emerging issues of applying mathematics and computational science to develop multi-scale computational models of physiological systems.

abstract: Predicting physiological behaviour from experimental data combined with environmental influences is a compelling, but unfulfilled, goal of post-genomic biology. This undeniably ambitious goal is the aim of the Physiome Project and its subset the Cardiome Project which is an international effort to build a biophysically based multi-scale mathematical model of the heart. To achieve this goal requires further development of the current generation of advanced cardiac models which span an already diverse set of mathematical representations from stochastic sub-cellular regulation models to whole organ based sets of coupled partial differential equations. The focus of this programme will be on the development and application of the mathematical techniques which underpin the ongoing extension of this approach.