SMB DIGEST
ISSN 1086-6566
VOLUME 17 ISSUE 7
FEBRuary 15, 2017

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Issue's Topics:
  MBI National Mathematical Biology Colloquium, noon EST, February 15
  Living on the Precipice: Interdisciplinary Conference on Resilience ...
  Keystone Symposia Metabolism Meetings: Upcoming Abstract Deadlines
  Data Science Bowl 2017
  PhD Position in Computational Systems Biology - Newcastle, UK
  Postdoc Position in the Kreiman lab
  Postdoc: Therapeutic Systems/Synthetic Biology for Fibrosis, U Virginia
  Postdoc: Computational Systems/Developmental Biology, Uppsala Univ
  SMBnet Reminders


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From: Tony Nance <tony@mbi.osu.edu>
Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 9:22 AM
Subject: MBI National Mathematical Biology Colloquium, noon EST, February 15

MBI National Mathematical Biology Colloquium
Wednesday February 15, 2017 at Noon Eastern Time

Joel Cohen (Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller and Columbia Universities)

The Variation is the Theme: Taylor's Law from Chagas Disease Vector Control
to Tornado Outbreaks

Darwin and Mendel discovered key roles of variation in biology. Some
useful tools for quantifying, understanding, and exploiting variation
are not sufficiently widely known among biologists. Taylor's power law of
fluctuation scaling describes a relationship between the variance and the
mean of a positive quantity. Examples of Taylor's law include the population
density of bacteria, rice, wheat, potatoes, trees, triatomine bugs that
transmit Chagas disease, fish, rodents, and humans; the numbers of cells per
mammalian organ, parasites per host, cancer metastases, and single nucleotide
polymorphisms; and non-biological quantities such as the prime numbers,
the number of tornadoes per outbreak, and the volumes of currency exchanges
and stock trades. Taylor's law results from a wide variety of processes,
so inferences based on Taylor's law require care. This talk will be partly
a tutorial addressed to the question: What can Taylor's law do for you?


This online series gives individuals and groups the opportunity to watch talks
and to interact with distinguished speakers. Details of how to connect to the
talks are available on the MBI website at https://mbi.osu.edu/go/n/colloquium

Upcoming talks:

Mar 15  URI ALON (Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute)
Design Principles in Biology

Apr 12  JAMES KEENER (Mathematics, Utah)
Cell Physiology: Making Diffusion Your Friend


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From: Chris Bauch <cbauch@uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 6:45 AM
Subject: Living on the Precipice: Interdisciplinary Conference on Resilience ...

Living on the Precipice: Interdisciplinary Conference on Resilience in
Complex Natural and Human Systems

The University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
May 16-17, 2017

Hosted by the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, with support
from the Field's Institute for Mathematical Sciences

The resilience of complex systems to disturbances is a topic of longstanding and
continuing interest in academic communities including applied mathematics,
ecology, environmental sciences, and the social sciences and humanities. Over
the past few decades, research in this field has led to scientific insights into
real-world systems as well as policy improvements. However, significant
challenges remain, especially for environmental systems where human influence is
pervasive and often destructive. This conference will bring together
participants from diverse academic backgrounds that are interested in addressing
these challenges, using toolkits such as mathematical modelling and other
quantitative methods as well as allied methodologies from the humanities and
social sciences.  The emphasis will be on natural, human, and coupled
natural-and-human systems.  The conference will include a plenary talk (Alan
Hastings, University of California, Davis), invited talks, parallel contributed
talk sessions, a poster session, and a graduate student workshop.

Important Dates:

· April 24: abstract submission deadline for contributed oral and poster
presentations

· May 1: notification of acceptance for contributed oral or poster
presentations

· May 5: deadline for early bird registration

· May 16-17: conference dates

For further information, please visit
http://wici.ca/new/2016/12/wici-resilience-and-complexity-conference-may-16-17-2017/

Organizing Committee: Chris Bauch (Waterloo), Madhur Anand (Guelph), Vanessa
Schweizer (Waterloo), Mark Crowley (Waterloo), Kathryn Fair (Waterloo),
Perin Ruttonsha (Waterloo), Dou Yue (Michigan State), and Andjela Tatarovic
(Waterloo)    


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From: <keystonesymposia@keystonesymposia.org>
Date: Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 7:08 PM
Subject: Keystone Symposia Metabolism Meetings: Upcoming Abstract Deadlines

See
http://www.keystonesymposia.org/views/web/marketing/emails/KS_2017_Metabolic.html#utm_source=2017MetabolicEmail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017MetabolicEmail&utm_content=2017MetabolicEmaillink


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From: Santiago Schnell <schnells@umich.edu>
Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 2:38 PM
Subject: Data Science Bowl 2017

In 2017, the Data Science Bowl will be a critical milestone in support of
the Cancer Moonshot by convening the data science and medical communities
to develop lung cancer detection algorithms.

Using a data set of thousands of high-resolution lung scans provided by
the National Cancer Institute, participants will develop algorithms that
accurately determine when lesions in the lungs are cancerous. This will
dramatically reduce the false positive rate that plagues the current detection
technology, get patients earlier access to life-saving interventions,
and give radiologists more time to spend with their patients.

Prizes:
. 1st place - $500,000
. 2nd place - $200,000
. 3rd place - $100,000
. 4th place to 10th place - $25,000 for each prize

The funds for the prize purse will be provided by the Laura and John Arnold
Foundation.

Timeline:
March 31, 2017 - Entry and team merger deadline.
April 7, 2017 - Stage one deadline and stage two data release. Your model must
be finalized and uploaded to Kaggle by this deadline. After this deadline,
the test set is released, the answers to the validation set are released,
and participants make predictions on the test set.
April 12, 2017 - Final submission deadline.

For more information visit
https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-bowl-2017#description


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From: Paolo Zuliani <paolo.zuliani@newcastle.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 12:10 PM
Subject: PhD Position in Computational Systems Biology - Newcastle, UK

PhD position 'A Computational Systems Biology Approach to Psoriasis Treatment'
at Newcastle University, UK.

The ICOS group (http://ico2s.org/) in the School of Computing Science at
Newcastle University has a PhD studentship available on 'A Computational Systems
Biology Approach to Psoriasis Treatment'. The work will supervised by Dr Paolo
Zuliani and will involve close collaboration with researchers in the Faculty of
Medicine to validate the developed techniques in the clinic.

Application deadline: 17 March 2017.

For more information and to apply visit:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/sources/allstudents/cs057.html


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From: Gabriel Kreiman <gkreiman@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 10:37 AM
Subject: Postdoc Position in the Kreiman lab

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral scholar position in the Kreiman
lab.  We are looking for an innovative and enthusiastic researcher with
a strong quantitative background (e.g. Math, Physics, Computer Science)
and experience in Neuroscience research and/or Computer Vision and/or
Machine Learning.

The research efforts will involve studying high-level vision and learning
using a combination of computational models, neurophysiology and behavioral
experiments. For information about the Kreiman lab and recent publications,
see: http://klab.tch.harvard.edu/.

The postdoc will be part of an energetic and intellectually vibrant community
of researchers including the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. The
position is funded for 2 years, with an initial one-year appointment and
expectation of extension contingent on satisfactory progress.

To be considered for this position please submit your application to
gabriel.kreiman@tch.harvard.edu, including

 *  CV
 *  Names of three people that are familiar with your work


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From: Jeff Saucerman <jjs3g@virginia.edu>
Date: Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 10:16 PM
Subject: Postdoc: Therapeutic Systems/Synthetic Biology for Fibrosis, U Virginia

Dear Colleagues,

We have a postdoctoral position available to develop regulatory
network models of fibroblasts/fibrosis and therapeutic control by
synthetic gene circuits. The postdoc will be co-mentored by Tom Barker
(http://bme.virginia.edu/people/barker.html) and Jeff Saucerman
(http://bme.virginia.edu/people/saucerman.html).

Details:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jjs3g/lab_webpage/barker-saucerman%20postdoc%20ad%202016.pdf
twitter post: https://twitter.com/sauce_lab/status/827583072027734016

Thanks for distributing to your trainees.


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From: Andreas Hellander <andreas.hellander@it.uu.se>
Date: Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 6:43 AM
Subject: Postdoc: Computational Systems/Developmental Biology, Uppsala Univ

Position type: Postdoctoral researcher
Department: Information Technology, Division of Scientific Computing

The position: 

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join an interdisciplinary
collaboration between the Hellander lab at Uppsala University and the Adameyko
lab at Karolinska Institute, Sweden. The project seeks to develop eScience
simulation methods and software to be used together with cell-lineage data
from genetic labelling experiments. In particular, we aim to develop new
multiscale methods that capture both mechanical and molecular interactions
between individual cells and to use those methods to study how reliable
scaling of structures in the facial region of embryonic mice is achieved. More
information can be found here: 
http://essenceofescience.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/eSSENCE_Postdoc_Hellander_Adameyko.pdf

The candidate: 

The successful candidate will have a PhD in computational/mathematical
biology, applied mathematics, scientific computing (or for the project
relevant field) with high-quality publications as principal author in
international peer-reviewed journals or conferences. Previous experience
with one or more modeling frameworks for multicellular dynamics (such as
cellular automata, center-based model, vertex-based models or cellular
Potts) is required as is strong programming skills and excellent oral and
written communication in English. Previous experience of cloud computing
is considered a merit, but not a prerequisite.

Apply no later than Mach 1 by following the instructions here: 
http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/join-us/details/?positionId=133965


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