We propose to provide support for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to attend a conference on Engineering Principles for Biological Systems, to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on 10--13 December 2008. The conference is intended to foster cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas and expertise between engineers, mathematicians and biologists interested in the analysis of diverse biological systems through the application of engineering principles. Support from this grant would be used to help offset the cost of the conference for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who wish to attend.
Intellectual Merit: Through the process of evolution, living systems retain solutions arisen by chance to problems they must solve in order to survive. In the past, theoretical biology has largely focused on explanations of the physico-chemical mechanisms behind such solutions, while explanation in the form of function-solution pairs has been studied in a relatively ad hoc manner and has not been approached from a disciplinary perspective. This conference will promote the development of an emerging approach to theoretical biology with more formal emphasis on design or engineering principles. Here, the premise is that although solutions or designs in biological systems are not engineered but instead arise incrementally through natural selection, they may nevertheless be studied in their existing forms in the framework of engineering theories developed alongside human-engineered systems. This conference is part of a series of workshops and conferences organized by Partha Mitra (CSHL), Richard Murray (Caltech) and others to help foster a community of researchers working on theoretical frameworks for understanding biological systems across a variety of scales. A starting point for these theories can be drawn from courses taught in engineering departments. The idea is therefore to start with major existing engineering theories (controls, communication, computation) and to examine whether these apply to biological systems, and if not, what modifications are in order. The conference series and this CSHL conference in particular, will provide an educational opportunity for biological researchers to learn about engineering theories which may be relevant to their work, and for engineering theorists and computer scientists to learn about biological problems they might help to be understood. Each session at the conference will have a two invited talks, one each by a biologist and a theoretician/engineer, integrated with a set of contributed talks, chosen from submitted abstracts.
Dissemination and Broader Impact: The proposed conference will foster this new approach to understanding biological systems and the collaborative culture across disciplines that its success will require. The conference venue and format are ideal for encouraging open discussion and initiating collaborative efforts, and it is hoped that a continuing series of such meetings will also encourage the development of an enduring and progressive theoretical framework. To complement the direct training opportunity for conference participants, talks presented at the conference will be put on a website for the benefit of the wider scientific community. Options will be provided to individual presenters to make their talks publicly available through the Leading Strand web site.
