The PI is organizing a workshop ?Mathematical Methods in Systems Biology,? which will take place January 4-7, 2010, at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. The workshop goals are to bring together applied mathematicians and researchers working in various fields of systems biology in order to exchange ideas and initiate and promote collaborations motivated by problems arising in fields such as cancer modeling, detection and treatment, epidemiology and infectious diseases, computer-assisted diagnosis, and medical imaging. Systems biology is an actively growing field at the interface of biology and medicine and part of its recent progress attests to the application of mathematical methods. The motivation behind organizing this workshop is to increase the awareness of mathematical tools that have proven useful in analyzing and understanding biological phenomena. Pioneering work in this direction has been performed in the United States and Israel and continues to evolve in these two countries. The planned workshop will provide an opportunity for contacts between US and Israeli mathematicians and biologists and thus facilitate the establishment of more prolonged relationships between research groups. This workshop also provides a much needed platform for close interactions between applied mathematicians, biological and medical researchers.
The organizing committee feels strongly that mathematics has much to offer to the medical and biological communities and that methods and techniques from mathematics can deepen the understanding of many problems in systems biology. This workshop will introduce applied mathematicians to challenging and open problems from systems biology that can benefit from an application of mathematical tools and, at the same time, show system biologists new options that mathematical methods can bring to the solution of their problems. The workshop is expected to initiate new collaborations and strengthen existing collaborations while at the same time bringing new mathematicians and scientists into this exciting interdisciplinary field. The results of the workshop will be disseminated by publishing proceedings as a special issue in the journal ?Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering? and further research contacts and collaborations will be fostered through the workshop web site. This project was co-funded by the Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Biology program in the Mathematical Sciences division.
