This award provides support for the 30th meeting in the series of Southeastern-Atlantic Regional Conferences on Differential Equations (SEARCDE), held 1-2 October 2010 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The conference encourages and financially supports participation by students and recent Ph.D. recipients.
The meeting includes plenary lectures on topics of current research interest and also especially encourages lectures by students and recent Ph.D. recipients. The conference brings together workers in a variety of different areas of research in differential equations, with emphasis on providing opportunities for new researchers to present their work.
Conference web site: www.icam.vt.edu/SEARCDE 2010/
(SEARCDE) has met annually since 1981. It was initiated by members of the Department of Mathematics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and has since then rotated among the research institutions in the southeast. The thirtieth SEARCDE conference was held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, on October 1-2, 2010. The conference was very well attended with 140 registrants. There were 90 regular 20 minute talks as well as three 50 minute plenary presentations. Due to generous financial support from the National Science Foundation 43 graduate and undergraduate students and young researchers received travel support. A wide range of topics, including ordinary and partial differential equations, dynamical systems, integral and functional equations, numerical methods, inverse problems, differential geometry, control theory, and applications to biology, finance, engineering and the sciences in general were covered. The conference was advertised to departments and interested parties in the wider South Eastern region and we received interest from a large group of young researchers, including undergraduates. We were able to support all the young researchers that requested funding. In awarding support, preference was given to beginning researchers who was presenting their research at the conference and women and minority participants were especially encouraged to apply for support. Plenary speakers Susanne C. Brenner (Louisiana State University) Finite Element Methods for the Monge-Ampere Equation: In this talk we will discuss new finite element methods for the fully nonlinear Monge-Ampere equation. These methods are derived by a novel approach that provides a natural fixed-point analysis for the discrete problems. This is joint work with Thirupathi Gudi, Michael Neilan and Li-yeng Sung. Alun Lloyd (North Carolina State University) Demographic Stochasticity: Quantifying Variability Using Moment Equations: Many biological systems are subject to demographic stochasticity: random effects that arise because a population is made up of a finite number of individuals (people, animals, molecules, etc). Deterministic models describe the average behavior of the system, but individual trajectories fluctuate around the average. In many contexts, these fluctuations have an important impact on dynamics, so we often need to quantify their magnitude. We discuss the derivation of moment equations---extensions of deterministic models that additionally quantify the variances of, and covariances between, state variables---and the use of moment closure approximations. We will present a number of examples from infectious disease settings, comparing the performance of moment equations derived using different moment closure approaches to estimates obtained from numerical simulation and an alternative approximation based on linearization. Tim Sauer (George Mason University), Dynamics on Networks: Inference and Control: Networks have become popular models for physical and biological processes. We will discuss several problems arising from the need to infer network structure and dynamics from observations. In particular, we will address the development of computational methods for extracting link structure of networks, individual node dynamics and ways to do tracking and control of network behavior. Applications to protein networks and neuronal networks will be discussed. Due to generous financial support from the National Science Foundation 43 graduate and undergraduate students and young researchers received travel support. Summary of conference participants receiving travel support: New researchers: 10 (Male 9, Female 1) Graduate Students: 31 (Male 19, Female 12) Undergraduate students: 2 (Female 2) This group included African American: 3 White: 20 Asian: 16 Other: 4 All participants were from the United States except for two participants, one from Germany and one from India. Budget Due to generous support from the Department of Mathematics and the College of Science at Virginia Tech, registration fees were waived for this conference. All expenses were covered by the support from the Department of Mathematics and the College of Science. As a consequence, all funds received from the National Science Foundation was used towards travel support of young researchers except $58.94 which was used towards supplies.
