The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is a partially NSF funded institute with a mission to discover and exploit emerging opportunities for mathematics research on problems in the other sciences, engineering and industry. We are proposing to the NIGMS that it partially funds three workshops that the IMA intends to hold during the IMA,s facilities located on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. The first two workshops take place during adjacent weeks, September 8-12 and September 14-18 of 1998 and are on the topics of """"""""Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis: The Basic Process"""""""" for the first week and """"""""Pattern Formation and Morphogenesis: Model Systems"""""""" for the second week. The lead organizer for these two workshops if Professor Hans Othmer of the University of Utah with Professor James Murray of the University of Washington and Professor Phillip Maini of the University of Oxford as co-organizers. The third workshop is """"""""Mathematical Approaches for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases,"""""""" scheduled for May 17-21 1999. The lead organizer is Professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez of Cornell University and the co-organizers are Sally Blower of the University of California, San Francisco, Kenneth Cooke of Pomona College, Denise Kirschner of The University of Michigan and Pauline van den Driessche, University of Victoria, British Columbia. The workshop visitors will join a core group of 10 math biology post-docs and about 40 long-term participants who will be in residence for the full program. In all three workshops, participants are to be chosen in such a way as to bring together communities of mathematicians and biologists who can benefit from interacting with each other but might not otherwise do so. We also encourage the selection of participants from industry as well as academe and at a range of researchers at early in their careers, including those who have only recently achieved their doctorates. As such, we propose to use funds granted to expand numbers of participants from those groups further than our current core funding would allow.
