The goal of this grant application and the mission of the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) are to provide interdisciplinary training in cell physiology, anticipating future developments that we believe will be important in the next 20 years. We and many others, see a key challenge for the future in quantitative analysis and computational modeling of cell physiology. The MBL Physiology course will provide a unique interdisciplinary training environment and research program to meet this challenge. It is our vision that the course will bring together biological and physical/computational scientists, both in the faculty and student body to study and work together on current exciting problems in cell physiology. The course design consists of three threads: cell motility; cell division and signaling accompanied by computational analysis that will span three 2-week sessions. These sessions will promote learning by practice with a particular emphasis on stimulating experimental creativity and interdisciplinary approaches. The co-directors for the course, Ron Vale and Tim Mitchison are leading cell biologists with strong training records. They have assembled an outstanding faculty which includes teachers with backgrounds in cellular physiology, physics, engineering and computational science. In addition the co-directors have added a group of distinguished visiting scholars and members of the MBL scientific community to provide additional training. In the summer of 2004, the inaugural year of the new Physiology course, Tim Hunt, Martin Raft, Andrew Murray and Tony Hyman will be Visiting Scholars to the course. We will strive to make this course a recognized venue for interdisciplinary training where experimental and physical/computational scientists gather to teach others their philosophies and approaches. In this application we request support for this exciting endeavor.
