Features
The Numbers Behind Nature
Canada Research Chair brings math smarts to biology
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Prof. Hermann Eberl studies the mathematics of biofilms. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
What do numbers have to do with bacterial biofilms? Asked to trace the connections between math and the growth of slime layers on surfaces, Prof. Hermann Eberl, Mathematics and Statistics, smiles as if he'd expected the question. Indeed, his answer appears in the short description of his research on the website of the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program.
“This goes back to Galileo,” says Eberl, who was named a CRC in Applied Mathematics in Life Science and Engineering this summer. “Math is the language in which we formulate scientific theory.”
The thicket of equations scrawled on his office blackboard is his way of describing something of the natural world outside the MacNaughton Building. Eberl uses those equations to model, analyse and simulate processes in biology and engineering, from the growth of “good” and “bad” biofilms to solid waste digestion to stormwater treatment.
His primary interest passed a milestone this spring when he published - along with researchers from the United States and Europe — a new book called Mathematical Modelling of Biofilms.
He explains that more than 90 per cent of bacteria live in biofilms, layers of microbes growing on surfaces. The good ones remove pollutants from water, aiding in nutrient cycling and in purifying water. The bad guys may foul engineering systems or food and also cause infection in people, including anything from dental plaque to cystic fibrosis.
Eberl has worked with Robin McKellar, a microbiologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and adjunct professor in the Department of Food Science, on models of microbial food safety. He also brings math modelling smarts to the Advanced Foods and Materials Network, one of Canada's Networks of Centres of Excellence based at Guelph.
He works with Prof. Bahram Gharabaghi, Engineering, on improving ways to handle pollutants in the treatment of stormwater. And Eberl has applied math modelling to explain the uneven nature of processes occurring in anaerobic digestion of solid waste.
Referring to the applications of his models, he says: “Here's the system — what's the math we can use to describe it?”
An avid student of the history of science, he explains his varied interests by drawing on the words of anyone from Galileo to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a Scottish zoologist and mathematician whose 1917 book, On Growth and Form, laid the foundation for studying nature through mathematics. Experiment and observation are one thing, says Eberl, but it's mathematical modelling that allows the scientist to begin making predictions about the natural world, from weather forecasts to flood predictions.
He studied math and environmental engineering at the Munich University of Technology in his native Germany. Following a post-doc in the Netherlands, he pursued his interests in mathematical modelling at a national research lab back in Munich before coming to Guelph in 2003 as a SHARCNET Research Chair in Biocomputing.
Besides running the Computational Biomathematics Lab along with his graduate students and a post-doctoral researcher, Eberl belongs to the Biomathematics and Biostatistics Working Group and to Ecology@Guelph.
“We have here a unique emphasis on biomathematics in the department and in the University's life sciences history,” he says.
Eberl lives in Hamilton, where he and his wife, Laura, have recently renovated a house to accommodate not just their son but also a stream of foster children. “It's a tangible contribution, something that matters,” he says.