Kimmel The investigator and his colleagues organize a conference on the mathematical modeling of heterogeneous biological populations. The topics concern populations of genes (including dynamics of genome evolution), populations of cells and tumors, as well as the natural history of cancer, and selected topics from epidemiology such as AIDS. These biological topics are integrated with the mathematical topics of branching processes, stochastic models, random walks, spacial processes, structured populations, semigroups of operators, and dynamical systems. This selection of subjects is motivated by recent advances in the mathematical theory of populations and in new data available from various branches of molecular and cellular biology, and biomedical sciences. The aim of the conference is to provide an interdisciplinary international forum for an exchange of views and experiences between biologists working on real life data and mathematicians developing and analyzing model equations. Special efforts are made to facilitate a mutual understanding between the usually disparate groups of theoreticians and experimentalists, and between established scientists and younger colleagues. The conference fosters exchanges between mathematicians and quantitative biologists in the relevant fields from the the west with colleagues from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
