NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology

Living organisms exhibit myriad capabilities that allow them to flourish and to adjust and adapt to their variable conditions of existence. These capabilities have emerged under a set of constraints that are physical, chemical, environmental, and evolutionary in nature. For this reason, fields of mathematics that are adept at incorporating constraints are particularly well-suited to illuminating the roles of constraints in biology.

An understanding of constraints from both mathematical and biological perspectives provides a unique bridge for interdisciplinary research, with mathematical research that will advance knowledge of biology, and biology research that will catalyze new mathematics. This project funds the establishment of a National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB) in Chicago led by Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The mission of this project is the creation of a nationwide collaborative research community that will generate new mathematical results and will uncover the fundamental principles governing life through theories, data-informed mathematical models, and computational and statistical tools. The research done by the NITMB will support advances in areas as diverse as the environment, biomedicine, and technology development.

The NITMB will use an interlocking set of strategies and initiatives that will help develop a diverse workforce while ensuring broad impacts on the research community. Geographically co-located NITMB members will share space in downtown Chicago that is readily accessible to collaborators across the US and the world.

The NITMB will realize this vision via an innovative research program organized around five interrelated themes, selected because they reflect key capabilities of biological systems and interconnect with open mathematical problems. These themes - Fidelity and Variation, Fitness and Optimization, Information Processing, Learning and Adaptation, and Prediction and Anticipation - establish bridges across subdisciplines of biological and mathematical sciences, ensuring that research in one domain will support advances in the others.

The themes also reflect the cross-disciplinary organizational structure of the NITMB, ensuring that training and community-building activities foster deep interactions across disciplines. The NITMB will achieve numerous foundational advances, including: a new mathematical understanding of dynamical systems in biologically relevant non-autonomous settings; new tools for extracting global mathematical models from local behavior; new theory for defining variables governing fitness and function; rigorous definitions of cell states and state transitions in development; and quantitative models of the emergence of behavior from collective neural activities.

NITMB programs will create a vibrant international community that will endure for decades and generate foundational advances in biology and mathematics that will inform further developments in public health, the environment, and other applications. Targeted research projects will bring together mathematicians and biologists to collaborate and train students and post-doctoral fellows to become future leaders at the disciplinary interface.

The NITMB will engage in a broad array of education, workforce development, and broadening participation activities that will include diverse communities. Its education initiatives will reach students from the K-12 level, using a proven strategy to pair middle-schoolers with graduate student mentors in lasting partnerships. The NITMB will also develop training for undergraduates, graduates, and post-baccalaureate students and teachers with community partners in a highly diverse city.

Inclusion is a core value integrated into all NITMB education and training activities. A wide variety of scientific long programs, workshops, and conferences will enhance collaboration between mathematics and biology and ensure that the scientific outcomes of the NITMB’s research impact wide-ranging sectors of basic and applied research.

In addition to funding from the National Science Foundation this project is generously supported by the Simons Foundation.

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.