Event to look at biology through numbers
BY ANDREW VOWLES
U of G will play host to a one-day symposium on “Mathematical and Statistical Methods in the Life Sciences” Nov. 12 at 9:30 a.m. in the OMAF Building at 1 Stone Rd. Participants will discuss applications of math, statistics and scientific computing to life and environmental sciences.
The event is being hosted by Guelph's Biomathematics and Biostatistics Working Group, a consortium of researchers in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics who apply math and statistics to biological problems.
Highlighting those connections and U of G's strengths in this field is a key goal of this event, says organizer Prof. Anna Lawniczak, Mathematics and Statistics, who has modelled the spread of infectious diseases.
“With avian flu very much in the news, my research in epidemics is not ivory-tower work but is one of many attempts to provide tools that may help in preventing or softening the impact of the next major flu epidemic.”
Referring to large data sets produced in various fields of biology, her colleague and co-organizer, Prof. Hermann Eberl, says: “Biologists and life scientists and engineers are getting more interested in these techniques as they produce so many data.”
Invited speakers include Prof. Gerarda Darlington, Mathematics and Statistics, and researchers from the Ontario Cancer Institute and several Ontario universities — McMaster, York, Wilfrid Laurier, Waterloo and Western.
Darlington will use results of a school-based smoking-prevention trial to talk about statistical modelling of data from groups of people rather than individuals. McMaster mathematician David Earn will discuss how modern cities may resist infectious disease invasions. Igor Jurisica of the Ontario Cancer Institute will explore data analysis intended to help improve our understanding of cancer.
The symposium will also include the Ashton Lecture in Biometrics, being sponsored by the Faculty of Environmental Sciences (FES).
This year's lecturer is Abdel El-Shaarawi, an acclaimed research scientist at the National Water Research Institute in Burlington. He has used environmental statistics and environmetrics to study the effects of contaminants in the Great Lakes and the habitat of migratory birds in Labrador. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Environmetrics, and founder and past president of the International Environmetrics Society.
The symposium is sponsored by U of G, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, FES, the Office of Research, the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences and the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network.
