Collaborative Research: NSF Workshop on Models for Uncovering Rules and Unexpected Phenomena in Biological Systems (MODULUS)

This award supports participation in the NSF workshop on Models for Uncovering Rules and Unexpected Phenomena in Biological Systems (MODULUS), held August 11-12, 2022, at the George Mason University. The NSF MODULUS program aims to catalyze progress in developing new research tools to understand biological systems at the molecular scale, in measuring multiscale response to changing environments, in discovering emergent phenomena and novel biological principles, and in integrating across mathematical, theoretical, and computational disciplines.

This in-person workshop will focus on topics showcasing the progress and achievements of the current MODULUS funded projects, identifying challenging biological questions that require new mathematical and computational methods or new synergies between current approaches, exploring emerging mathematical, theoretical, and computational approaches needed to connect molecular and cellular scales for complex biological systems, and exploring opportunities for collaborations among biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. The conference will bring together 60 faculty experts including senior faculty members, junior faculty members, and post-doctoral students as well as experts from government labs, funding agencies, and industry who work in areas that bridge mathematics, computer science, physics, and biology.

This meeting will be jointly organized by George Mason University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

A major challenge in advancing biological understanding is integrating theory with experiment in an iterative process that leads to the discovery of emergent phenomena, novel biological principles, and the governing equations and rules of living systems. This manner of integration is required for a predictive understanding of biological systems. Furthermore, addressing important biological problems at a systems level and across spatial and temporal scales will require including and integrating knowledge from diverse fields, including applied mathematics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, computer science, physics, and biology.

This in-person workshop will bring together researchers from various disciplines to collaboratively brainstorm and develop novel ideas at the interface of mathematics and molecular and cellular biology, emphasizing systems-scale integration. It will identify opportunities and grand challenges, focusing on advances that have been and can be made through NSF MODULUS projects.

By interspersing panels from experts from government labs, agencies, and industry with academic talks, it will facilitate a highly interactive environment and exchange of cross-cutting ideas. The workshop will broaden participation by including researchers from groups underrepresented in STEM as well as from wide-ranging types of institutions and help to create a diverse interdisciplinary workforce to address challenging questions in biological systems.

More details about the conference can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/nsfmodulusconference2022/home

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.