Mathematics Graduate Student Colloquium

MGSC Website: http://math.uci.edu/~mgsc/

Analysis of stochastic stem cell models with control

Jay Yang
Monday, October 20, 2014
3:00 pm - 3:50 pm
RH440R

Talk Abstract:

Understanding the dynamics of stem cell lineages is of central importance both for healthy and cancerous tissues. We study stochastic population dynamics of stem cells and differentiated cells, where cell decisions, such as proliferation vs differentiation decisions, or division and death decisions, are under regulation from surrounding cells. The goal is to understand how different types of control mechanisms affect the means and variances of cell numbers. We use the assumption of weak dependencies of the regulatory functions (the controls) on the cell populations near the equilibrium to formulate moment equations. We derive simple explicit expressions for the means and the variances of stem cell and differentiated cell numbers. We demonstrate that these findings are consistent with numerical results via some novel examples. This methodology is formulated without any specific assumptions on the functional form of the controls, and thus can be used for any biological system.

About the Speaker:

Jay is a 4th-year math Ph.D. student, a graduate of UC Berkeley, with current research interest in math computational biology and applied/computational math.

Refreshments:

Pizza will be served after the talk.