Now is the time to start planning for next summer. Our annual meeting will be in Dundee, Scotland from 6-9 August, 2003. This meeting is under the capable organization of Mark Chaplain and colleagues. As well as a strong scientific program (including plenary lectures, minisymposia, contributed talks and posters), it includes a civic reception on board the RRS Discovery (the ship of Captain Robert Scott of the Antarctic)!

If you have been coming to the SMB meetings for several years, you may have noticed growth in meeting size over the last three years, with more parallel sessions. This reflects growth in interest in mathematical biology, as well the hard work of organizers. However, the meetings still remain small (approx 200) compared to meetings of larger societies. This allows for an informal atmosphere which promotes interactions and connections between researchers.

I have recently entered into discussions regarding reciprocity with the European Society for Theoretical and Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Association for Mathematical Biology. The idea here is that members of one society should be able to join another with reduced cost. Advantages include newsletters, society benefits such as travel scholarships, journal subscriptions, and networking with different math biology communities. I hope we will have ironed out the details for reciprocity in time for the next meeting.

In this electronic age many members may want to save trees and have an electronic (versus print) subscription of the Bulletin included as part of their membership. We have brought this up with the publisher and hope to have the option "online" in time for the 2003 membership renewal.

A pioneer in mathematical biology, Art Winfree, passed away recently after a fight with cancer. His death is a great loss, and he will be missed by family, friends and colleagues around the world. There is an obituary for him in this newsletter, written by Michael Tabor.

Wishing you all the best for 2003

Mark Lewis

President

Meeting the Challenges in Emerging Areas

John Jungck

Meeting the Challenges in Emerging Areas: Education Across the Life, Mathematical and Computer Sciences

Feb 27th - March 2nd, 2003

Hyatt Regency Bethesda, One Bethesda Metro Center, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA.

For details, please contact the organizer, Prof John R. Jungck (jungck@beloit.edu).

SMB Annual Meeting in 2003, Dundee, Scotland

International Conference on Mathematical Biology and 2003 Annual Meeting of the Society of Mathematical Biology

University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

6-9 August, 2003

The meeting will consist of:

• Six 1 hour plenary lectures
• Minisymposia talks of 40 minute duration
• Contributed talks of 20 minute duration
• One afternoon devoted solely to a Poster Session

Further announcements (e.g. minisymposia topics and speakers) regarding the meeting will be made via the SMB Digest until December 2002. A web page has been set up at URL: http://www.maths.dundee.ac.uk/smb03 to give the basic details of the meeting at this stage. In January 2003 the above web site will be opened up for conference participation and registration and full details of the meeting will appear then.

Future Annual Meetings - Suggestions and Proposals Requested

Lou Gross

A new Committee of the SMB Board has been organized to set up policies and make plans for future annual meetings of the Society. The Committee consists of Lou Gross (Chair), Rob de Boer and Carl Pannetta. At this time, there are no definite plans for meeting sites after the 2003 Dundee meeting. The Committee would appreciate any comments, suggestions, and proposals from members regarding either particular locations for future meetings, or policies that we should consider in making longer-term meeting plans. The Society has in the past attempted to rotate meeting locations spatially, and to alternate independent SMB meetings with those held jointly with another society. Of course, any particular meeting depends upon the voluntary contribution of time of the local organizers, but given the growth of math biology, there are now numerous research groups around the world that have the capability to organize a meeting.

Members are encouraged to contact Lou Gross (gross@tiem.utk.edu) to provide input on the decisions, or discuss the possibilities of hosting a future meeting. Although there is certainly a lot of planning and effort involved in organizing an SMB meeting, the benefits to your local research and student community can be quite large. It is also a fine way to publicize your institution. The Committee is also setting up a collection of "tips" for future meeting organizers to help ease meeting preparation.

The Bulletin of Mathematical Biology is on the move!!

It is now one year since the editorial office for the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology moved to Oxford. Under the previous Managing Editor, Lee Segel, the Bulletin went from strength to strength and became firmly established as one of the top journals in the field. The impact factor of the journal continues to rank very favourably with journals in the same area (outranking most) and this year there has been a marked increase in submissions, reflecting the enormous growth in the area. With a very strong and distinguished editorial board in place, the future looks encouraging.

Elsevier, who acquired Academic Press, are exploiting the electronic revolution in a number of ways. There is now less restriction on the number of papers per issue, allowing us to publish more papers. Of course, we aim to maintain the quality of the journal (the acceptance rate continues to be roughly 50 percent) but we will be less hampered by long lead times to publication. Moreover, once the paper has been processed it immediately goes online and is available to subscribers.

From January 1st, 2003, the journal will be accessed online via the Elsevier journal platform, ScienceDirect. This transfer results from the journal platform IDEAL being integrated with ScienceDirect. Consequently, ScienceDirect now offers over 1700 journals on a single platform. This can be accessed using the following address http://www.sciencedirect.com.

As Society members plan to submit papers to the Bulletin, guidance for manuscript preparation can be found on the new journal home page at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/00928240. Click on "Author Gateway" to get instructions and guidance on submitting papers. In the event of difficulty in accessing ScienceDirect or the new home page, please do not hesitate to contact the publisher at m.macdonald@elsevier.com.

Authors will be able to monitor the progress of their papers in production via the Author Gateway. The Production Department will inform authors of all new submissions on how to benefit from this functionality.

From the journal home page, Society Members can sign up for ContentsDirect, a free email service that delivers table of contents and abstracts of new journal issues and of new books direct to the desktop.

A New Year benefit for a limited period: From January 2003, all Society Members are being offered guest electronic access to full text articles of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology via ScienceDirect. It is anticipated that this will enable members to become familiar with this new journal platform and show members the benefits of having the journal delivered to their desk top. In the event of a Society member have difficulty in accessing ScienceDirect or the new home page; please do not hesitate to contact the publisher at: m.macdonald@elsevier.com

The journal belongs to the Society and the Society benefits directly both financially and in terms of visibility from the success of the journal. The BMB is the main source of revenue for the SMB, so its strength and impact have a direct effect on SMB activities. Therefore, we encourage you to submit your work to the Bulletin and, in these troubled financial times, to ensure that your library continues to take the journal or indeed begins to subscribe to it.

With Season Greetings and best wishes for 2003,
Philip K. Maini (Managing Editor) and Margaret Macdonald (Senior Editor, Elsevier Science)

Art Winfree (1942 - 2002)
Michael Tabor

Art was an uncommon and original man and a brilliant scientist. He was uncommon because he did not accept explanations lightly and certainly never on the basis of the pedigree of the explainer. He had to know and understand things for himself. He was original because this hunger for understanding drove him to ask all sorts of questions the answers to many of which pioneered whole new directions of research. He was most famous perhaps for his discovery and elucidation of three-dimensional scroll waves in excitable media. These are waves which emanate out in spiral-like fashion from an organizing backbone, which itself is like a vortex filament. Such structures have been often observed experimentally, for example, in dog and sheep hearts, and are widely believed to be intimately associated with the phenomenon of cardiac fibrillation and arrhythmia in the human heart.

He was widely respected by his peers. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, the Einthoven Award in 1989-1991 for his influence in cardiology, a Regents Professorship at The University of Arizona in 1989, and the Norbert Wiener Prize of 2000 from the American Mathematical Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics for his work on biological rhythms. While he received much recognition, he also gave much back to the scientific community. He was a natural teacher and a great believer in learning by exploration. He wrote many articles about science for popular consumption. Most recently, he ran a column "Adventures in Discovery" for the Society of Amateur Scientists.

Art taught a completely unique and popular course at the University of Arizona called "The Art of Scientific Discovery." The aim of this course was to develop the student's ability to solve problems like those encountered in scientific investigations. The course was organized around "practice scrimmages" in strategy and tactics of recognizing ignorance, of posing questions, of cultivating multiple alternative solutions, of eliminating rejectable candidate solutions, of spotting and taking advantage of your own mistakes, and especially of learning a positive attitude toward mistakes. Art believed that mistakes are often the most available doors to discovery.

He was also well known for books such as The Geometry of Biological Time that was originally published in 1980, re-published in 1990 and a second edition has just recently appeared. He had a grand gift for bringing, in a simple manner, deep topological, geometrical and dynamical ideas into the realm of the natural. For example, his early work was seminal to understanding how our biological clocks could be synchronized and reset by exposure to coupling with another nonlinear oscillator with a slightly different frequency. Incidentally, he used this idea to great effect in designing a program for travelers to follow in order that they might avoid jet lag. He claimed great success for this method when he applied it to his own experiences, although, consistent with his usual modest self, he was also willing to entertain the notion that other factors, such as auto-suggestion, might explain equally well his irritability and sleeplessness when he didn't follow his own recipe.

He received his Ph.D. in Biology from Princeton University in 1970 and his Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1965. He joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona in 1986. He was also a much-valued member of the UA Applied Mathematics program.

He is survived by his gracious and talented wife Ji-Yun, whose love and generosity made him, by his own admission, "a far better man," and by his daughter Rae of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton, his son Erik who is also a MacArthur Fellow at Caltech (there won't be many father-son combinations holding this award!), by his dad C. Van Winfree, and by sister Phyllis and two brothers, Charlie and Robert.

This lovely and curious man will be greatly missed by family, friends and colleagues around the world.

Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists - the Quantitative Component
Lou Gross (University of Tennessee) and John Jungck (Beloit College)

As members of SMB know, the Education Committee of the Society has long been working to encourage new approaches to enhance the quantitative training of life scientists at all levels. SMB members may be particularly interested in a new report issued by the US National Research Council (the study arm of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine) titled "BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists." This report urges colleges and universities to consider a variety of methods to better prepare students for careers in biology, and includes a focus on interdisciplinary approaches. The report provides several suggested curricula and discusses methods to better incorporate mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering in undergraduate life science programs.

The report places particular emphasis on quantitative components of the undergraduate curriculum, and notes that this involves both formal courses in mathematics, statistics and computer science and the inclusion of quantitative concepts and approaches with life science courses. A distinguished panel of mathematical biology researchers, including SMB members Robert Blystone, Lou Gross, Nancy Kopell, Alan Perelson, and Charles Peskin, provided suggestions for the quantitative aspects of the report. Input was also provided through a special workshop on innovative approaches to biology education, which included a presentation by SMB Education Committee Chair John Jungck on the BioQUEST Consortium approach. Nancy Kopell served as a member of the Committee that prepared the final report. The full report is available on-line through the National Academy Press site at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10497.html.

Nominations for the Akira Okubo Prize
Philip Maini

Nominations are requested for the Akira Okubo Prize, which, for 2002, will be awarded to a living junior scientist for outstanding and innovative theoretical work, for establishing superb conceptual ideas, for solving tough theoretical problems, and/or for uniting theory and data to advance a biological subject. The areas of research are mathematical biology, biomathematics, theoretical biology, and biological oceanography. The prize is jointly awarded by the Japanese Association for Mathematical Biology (JAMB) and the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB). The SMB would like to invite the prize winner to deliver a lecture at the next annual SMB meeting, which will be held in Dundee (Scotland) August 6-9, 2003. The JAMB will invite the winner to deliver a lecture at the next annual JAMB meeting, which will be held in Nara (Japan) September 20-22, 2003.

Rules for the prize can be found at: http://www.smb.org/akprize.shtml and at: http://www.smb.org/akguidelines.shtml. To nominate a person for the Akira Okubo Prize, the following information should be submitted to Philip K. Maini VIA EMAIL (maini@maths.ox.ac.uk)

1. Name, address, phone number, affiliation, and email address and/or fax number of the nominator.
2. Name, address, phone number, affiliation, and email address and/or fax number of the nominee.
3. A detailed statement describing why the nominee should be considered for the award.

Closing date for nominations is January 31st, 2003.

Nomination Committee: Alan Hastings (U.C. Davis), Tsuyoshi Kajiwara (Okayama University), Jim Keener (University of Utah), Philip Maini (chair, University of Oxford), Takenori Takada (Hokkaido Tokai University) and Yasuhiro Takeuchi (Shizuoka University).

Scales in Mathematical and Theoretical Ecology Summer School

From Individuals to Ecosystems

A Summer School

Sigüenza, Spain

25 August - 3 September, 2003

A Summer school on Mathematical Ecology will be held in Sigüenza, Spain, August 2003. The school will feature aspects of models and methods in ecology where the scale is an issue: energy budgets, evolutionary aspects of aggregation, particle coagulation and flocculation in the sea, fish schooling and animal aggregation. It will also provide training on subjects of general interest: dynamical systems, fractals, aggregation of variables and a tutorial on computer simulations and software platforms for IBM's.

Further information can be found at: http://euromedbiomath.s2003.free.fr/

Calendar:
October 2002: First announcement
January 2003: Second announcement (with program and details on fees and possible financial support)
June 1, 2003: Deadline for submission of lecture notes and presentation notes
June 15, 2003: Deadline for pre-registration

Fifth International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues
Christof Teuscher

IPCAT2003 - Fifth International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

September 8 - 11, 2003

http://lslwww.epfl.ch/ipcat2003

Important Dates:
Paper submission: February 28, 2003,
Notification of acceptance: May 28, 2003

AICME II, September 5-9, 2003
Rafael Bravo

Alcalá 2nd International Conference on Mathematical Ecology

September 5-9, 2003.

Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain

First Announcement. Call for Papers.

The conference will feature recent advances in mathematical ecology, using new but also classical approaches, in a variety of topics including (but not limited to) the following: population ecology, behavioral ecology, ecotoxicology, evolutionary dynamics, management of living resources, population grouping, spatial aspects of ecology, stochastic models in ecology, individual based models, multiple scaling, etc. Proposals for organizing sessions on these topics or other related ones are encouraged.

Deadline for Session Proposals: December 1, 2002. Deadline for Abstracts: May 1, 2003. All information can be found at: http://www2.uah.es/matema/Aicme/aicme.htm.

Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems
Cynthia Bradford

Seventh International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems

Boston University

May 28 - 31, 2003

Sponsored by the Center for Adaptive Systems and the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University with financial support from the Office of Naval Research. There will be invited and contributed talks as well as posters. Abstract deadline: January 31, 2003. See http://www.cns.bu.edu/meetings/ or contact: Cynthia Bradford, Boston University, CNS Department, 677 Beacon Street, Boston MA 02215 USA, fax: 617-353-7755, cindy@bu.edu

Summer School: The Mathematics Behind Biological Invasions
Mark Lewis

VIGRE MINICOURSE

The Mathematics Behind Biological Invasions

June 2-13, 2003

Department of Mathematics, The University of Utah, USA

With support from a National Science Foundation VIGRE grant, the Mathematics department at the University of Utah will host a two-week minicourse on the Mathematics of Biological Invasions. Biological invasions are one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and ecosystem function, and are also among the largest perturbation experiments our species has tried. This minicourse will examine the many ways that mathematical models have been used to make sense of this important and interesting problem. Speakers: Fred Adler, University of Utah, Mark Lewis, University of Alberta, and Mike Neubert, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Applications should be submitted to Sarah Strong (strong@math.utah.edu, 801-581-8341, fax 801-581-4148) by March 1, 2003. Financial support is available for US citizens and permanent residents.

Bringing Mathematicians into Biology

The Human Frontier Science Program is an international funding agency, supported by the G7 governments, the European Union and Switzerland. The HFSP supports interdisciplinary, international collaborations in the life sciences, with an increasing focus on bringing scientists from various fields such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, computer science and engineering together with biologists to open up new approaches to understanding complex biological systems. The HFSP promotes international collaboration through collaborative research grants and post-doctoral fellowships.

The next deadline for applications for letters of intent to submit research grants is April 2nd 2003 and for fellowships September 1st 2003.

Further information can be obtained from the HFSP web site at http://www.hfsp.org

COM & COM
Amadeu Delsham

The 1st Meeting of Complex Systems and Sport will be jointly held with the 4th International Conference of Computer Science in Sport in Barcelona, 14-17th May, 2003. For more information: http://www-ma1.upc.es/comcom/

Workshop on Modelling Morphogenesis and Pattern Formation
Jaap Kaandorp

Workshop during the International Conference on Computational Science 2003

June 2-4, 2003

Melbourne, Australia

http://www.science.uva.nl/events/ICCS2003/

Contributions are invited for a multi-disciplinary workshop on modeling morphogenesis and pattern formation in biology. The deadline for paper submission is January 25, 2003. Details regarding the submission of papers can found on http://www.science.uva.nl/research/scs/GF2003/

Summer School in Data Mining
Raffaele Giancarlo

15th Edition of the International School for Computer Science Researchers

"Algorithmics for Data Mining and Pattern Discovery"

July 13 to July 26, 2003

Lipari, Italy

Co-directors: Alfredo Ferro (Univ. of Catania) and Raffaele Giancarlo (Univ. of Palermo)

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Systems Biology

We seek a mathematically trained Ph.D. to assist with the development of predictive models that link species traits, environmental conditions, and food web structure to community productivity and its biogeochemical consequences. The successful applicant will work with an NSF Biocomplexity team of geomicrobiologists, genomics experts, microbial ecologists, and ecologists to investigate factors that determine the productivity and resilience of microbial communities in acid mine drainage (http://www.seismo.berkeley.edu/ \%7Ejill/amd/AMDhome.html). Background in microbial ecology, trophic ecology, or ecosystems analysis is desirable. Applications will be considered from December 1st, 2002, onwards until the position is filled. Please send statements of interest, curriculum vita, representative publications, and contact information of three references to Mary Power (mepower@socrates.berkeley.edu, Dept. of Integrative Biology, U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140 USA) and Wayne Getz (getz@nature.berkeley.edu, Environmental Science, Policy and Management, U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3112 USA).

Postdoctoral/PhD Positions, Maddocks Group, EPFL

Continuum mechanics in the modelling of DNA, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. Applications are invited for positions within the Maddocks group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). A postdoctoral position is available in September 2003; a PhD position could start as early as April 2003. See http://lcvmwww.epfl.ch/Positions.html.

Postdoc, Bioinformatics, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

A post-doctoral position is available in our lab for the 2003-2005 period, to develop an ontology of animal expression patterns allowing comparative studies. The person will also develop an efficient extraction of expression patterns from such data as ESTs, SAGE, chips, etc. The work will be done in the framework of our database of nuclear receptors. Applications must be received before December the 20th 2002. See http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~mrobinso/postdoc.html.

2003 National Academies Science & Technology Policy Internship Program

This Internship Program of the National Academies--consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council--is designed to engage graduate and postdoctoral students in science and technology policy and to familiarize them with the interactions among science, technology, and government. As a result, students in the fields of science, engineering, medicine, veterinary medicine, business, and law develop essential skills different from those attained in academia, which will help them make the transition from being a graduate student to a professional.

We are pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for our 2003 program. This year, the internship program will comprise three sessions:

• Winter: January 13 through April 4 (12 weeks with a possible 4 week extension).
• Summer: June 2 through August 8 (10 weeks).
• Fall: September 8 through November 26 (12 weeks).

To apply, candidates should submit an application and request their mentor fill out a reference form. Both are available on the Web at http://national-academies.org/internship. The deadline for applications is November 1 for the Winter program, March 1 for the Summer program, and June 1 for the Fall program. Candidates may apply to all three programs simultaneously.

Additional details about the program and how to join our mailing list are also available on the Web site. Questions should be directed to: internship@nas.edu.

Two Postdoc Positions, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA

We are accepting applications for 2 postdoc positions to join our group to work on modelling the evolution of drug-resistant HIV. These are 3 year positions. This work is funded by an NIH grant (PI Dr. Sally Blower) that will run to 2007. We are looking for mathematicians, mathematical/computational biologists, physicists or engineers. Our work is focused on using mathematical models as health policy tools to predict the impact of vaccines and treatment, and also to design epidemic control strategies. We use a variety of mathematical and computational techniques, and our research group collaborates with many infectious disease experts. For an overview of our research and recent publications please visit our web site at www.biomath.ucla.edu/faculty/sblower.

Please email Professor Sally Blower ( sblower@mednet.ucla.edu), Department of Biomathematics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA if you are interested in applying.

Postdoc, and Graduate Student Positions, MUSC

Postdoctoral and graduate student positions are available in Biomedical Informatics, Proteomics, and Systems Biology. For further information, please visit our website at http://www.bioinformatics.musc.edu/ or contact Eberhard O. Voit, Professor and Director of Biomedical Informatics Program, Department of Biometry and Epidemiology, P.O. Box 250835, Medical University of South Carolina, 135 Cannon Street, Charleston, South Carolina, 29425 USA; E-mail: VoitEO@MUSC.edu. MUSC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer; women/minorities are encouraged to apply.

Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Positions, CBD, Boston U

Predoctoral and postdoctoral positions are available in the Center for BioDynamics (CBD). Interested PhD candidates should apply to one of the associated departments and mention interest in the CBD (see our website at http://cbd.bu.edu. Please refer to the BU Graduate School Admissions Office (http://www.bu.edu/apply/#graduate) for all application materials.

To apply for a Postdoctoral Fellowship, please send a statement that includes your background, career goals, how this position satisfies those goals, and your suitability for this position, your C.V. and three letters of recommendation to: Ms. Geri Duffy, Center for BioDynamics, Department of Mathematics, 111 Cummington Street, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215 USA. Applications will be reviewed starting from January 10, 2003.

Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Positions, PMCN, Boston U

Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships available at Burroughs Wellcome Training Program in Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience (PMCN), Boston University. For further information and instructions about applications, see our website at http://pmcn.bu.edu or email: pmcn@bu.edu. Our mailing address is PMCN, c/o G. Duffy, Department of Mathematics, Boston University, 111 Cummington St., Boston MA 02215 USA. Applications will be reviewed starting from January 10, 2003.

Postdoctoral Position in Computational Ecology, Alberta & Yellowstone

A postdoctoral research position is available in the area of computational ecology. The project involves using stochastic dynamical programming and related algorithms to model the movement of elk in and around Yellowstone National Park. The candidate will be jointly supervised by Bob Crabtree (Yellowstone Ecological Research Center) and Mark Lewis (Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology, University of Alberta, Canada), and will interact with a larger group of researchers as part of a National Science Foundation Biocomplexity grant. Duties include modeling and computational work at Alberta and field work/collaboration in Yellowstone. Applicants should have strong computational and quantitative skills, be highly motivated, be willing to conduct some field work, and should work well in a collaborative environment. Salary is US $30-36,000 per annum commensurate with qualifications. Start date is January through March 2003, and duration is up to two years. To apply, please send a CV, cover letter and up to two selected articles or preprints to Biocomplexity Post-Doc, c/o YERC, 7500 Jarmen Circle, Suite 2, Bozeman, MT 59715 USA OR email materials to both mlewis@math.ualberta.ca and crabtree@yellowstoneresearch.org and also have two letters of recommendation sent directly by mail. Please contact either email address if you have questions regarding the position. For further information on the research environments see http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mathbio and http://www.yellowstoneresearch.org

Ph.D. Position, Institute of Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University

Applications are invited for a Ph.D. position available at the Institute of Theoretical Biology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Interested applicants should contact Dr. Michal Or-Guil, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Invalidenstr. 43, 10115 Berlin, Germany. Email: m.orguil@biologie.hu-berlin.de, Phone: +49 - 30 - 2093 9105, Internet: http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/index.html

UCSF Postdoctoral/Graduate Fellowships in Theoretical Neurobiology

The Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at UCSF solicits applications for pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, with the goal of bringing theoretical approaches to bear on neuroscience. To apply for a postdoctoral position, please send a curriculum vitae, a statement of previous research and research goals, up to three relevant publications, and have two letters of recommendation sent to us. The application deadline is January 31, 2003. Send applications to: Sloan-Swartz Center 2003 Admissions, Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at UCSF, Department of Physiology, University of California, 513 Parnassus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94143-0444 USA, http://www.sloan.ucsf.edu/sloan/sloan-info.html

Postdoctoral Positions, University of Utah

The Focussed Research Group (FRG) for the study of "The Dynamics of Growing Biogels" seeks individuals to work with the Principal Investigators, Aaron Fogelson and James Keener. Problems of particular interest include the formation of fibrin polymer gels during blood clotting, biofilm formation, and the role of mucin gels in human physiology. The initial appointment is for one year and may be renewed for up to two additional years. Salary is $40,000/year. Please use the on-line form at http://www.mathjobs.org to apply for these positions. Other application materials, including a CV and a statement of research interests and accomplishments, and three letters of recommendations should be sent to Eleen Collins, Department of Mathematics, 155 South 1400 East, 233 JWB, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 USA. The positions are open until filled.

Postdoctoral Positions, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute

The Cell Biology Modeling group at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech has two open positions for Postdoctoral Associates in the field of mitochondrial modeling. The first position (reference WSD200CB) will involve the development of computational models relating mitochondrial genetics to organelle function and dynamics. The second position (reference WSD200MM) will involve the development of computational models of the effect of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI) on mitochondria. Experience in mitochondria research, metabolic control analysis, computational biology and/or medical simulations are desired. Salary is based on relevant experience and education. Qualified candidates should send a CV and contact details including telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of three references to: Debi Darnell, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, 1880 Pratt Dr., Bldg. XV, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, E-mail: ddarnell@vbi.vt.edu Email applications are encouraged! Please give the position reference that you are applying for (WSD200CB, WSD200MM, or both). Informal enquiries may be sent to Dr. David Samuels at Dsamuels@vbi.vt.edu. For more information about the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute please see our website at https://www.vbi.vt.edu/.

Postdoctoral Position, Mathematical Biology, U of Western Ontario}

The Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Western Ontario has a postdoctoral position available in mathematical biology. The appointment is for one or two years, beginning July 1, 2003. The position carries a reduced teaching load of two half-courses per year, in addition to research. The salary will be $38,000 CDN per year, plus a tax-free research fund of $1,500. Successful candidates will have completed a Ph.D. degree, and will have active research programs in mathematical biology. Applicants should send a curriculum vitae and a research statement, and have two or three letters of reference sent to: L.M. Wahl, Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5B7 Canada. E-mail inquiries and applications are welcome, sent to lwahl@uwo.ca. Applications and letters of reference should be received by January 31, 2002. Information about the department can be found at: http://www.apmaths.uwo.ca/about/department.html and about the mathematical biology group at: http://www.apmaths.uwo.ca/~lwahl.

Please send comments and corrections for this edition of the SMB Newsletter to: editor@smb.org