This proposal is for partial funding for the Fourth Conference on Computational and Mathematical Population Dynamics (CMPD4), to be held in Taiyuan, China, May 29 - June 2, 2013. The conference will highlight significant recent developments in these areas and provide a forum for the participants to meet and communicate their recent work. One of the aims of the conference is to broaden the education and stimulate the research of young and under-represented researchers, the funds will principally support young unsupported researchers (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty), NSF funding will be vital in achieving this goal.
The Conference on Computational and Mathematical Population Dynamics (CMPD4), Taiyuan, China, May 29 - June 2, 2013, is the fourth joint meeting of the Conference on Mathematical Population Dynamics and the Conference on Deterministic and Stochastic Models for Biological Interactions, with over a 25-year history of international meetings. The goal of this international conference is to bring together leading researchers from different fields (applied mathematics, biology, computer science, ecology, epidemiology, medicine, etc.) to communicate with each other about their current work on computational and mathematical population dynamics. The conference will provide a unique opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to interact with leading researchers in these areas. The funding requested from NSF will be used completely to support U.S. participants, including graduate students, minorities, women and recent doctoral students in an effort to provide young researchers and under-represented groups exposure to current research topics and techniques in the interdisciplinary area of computational and mathematical population dynamics. Also, the work that will be presented at the conference will help us to study challenging environmental and health problems, such as pollution, invasion of species, emerging of new diseases, and surging of existing diseases.
" (CMPD4) was held at the North University of China, Taiyuan, China, May 29 – June 2, 2013. Population dynamics cover a broad ranges of topics in biology, ecology, environmental science, epidemiology, immunology, medical sciences, etc. In the last three decades, population dynamics have become much more approachable due to the rapid development and advances in scientific computing and mathematical theory, and great progress has been made in the interdisciplinary study combining scientific computation, mathematics, biology, and medicine. More than 350 participants from 23 countries and regions participated in this international conference; among them were more than 150 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. The conference highlighted significant recent developments in these areas and provide a forum for the participants to meet and communicate their recent work. One of the aims of the conference was to broaden the education and stimulate the research of young, female, and under-represented researchers. Eight plenary speakers were Odo Diekmann (Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Infectious disease transmission on dynamic sexual networks); Hanna Kokko (The Australian National University, Australia, Is mother nature shortsighted? Evolutionary processes do not maximize population performance); Pierre Magal (University of Bordeaux, France, Bifurcation in structured population dynamics); Sebastian Schreiber (University of California at Davis, USA, Population persistence in the face of uncertainty); Zhilan Feng (Purdue University, USA, Bifurcation analysis of a model for plant-herbivore-predator interactions and its applications); Hisashi Inaba (University of Tokyo, Japan, On recent developments in the theory of basic reproduction number); Frithjof Lutscher (University of Ottawa, Canada, Population spread in patchy landscapes); and Zhen Jin (North University of China, China, Epidemic models on complex networks). There were also 200 talks in 20 different sessions. Sessions topics included gene regulation and molecular biology, Effects of Wolbachia on insect population dynamics, stochastic models of gene expression, population game dynamics, climate change and vector borne diseases, modeling of infectious diseases, influence of heterogeneity in disease dynamics and control, adaptive dynamics, spatial dynamics in population biology, immune modeling, modeling antibiotic-resistance bacteria, within-host models as building blocks for epidemic models, control problems in population biology, modeling of cancer growth and treatment, viral dynamics and drug treatment, bifurcation theory and applications in biology, structured population dynamics, and some other related subjects in population dynamics. The NSF grant was used to support a number of US-based young researchers to participate in the conference and to present their new findings. The conference provided a unique opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to interact with leading researchers in these areas.
