Workshop - Warsaw, Poland, 29 May - 2 June 2006
Description
Recently biology attracted many mathematicians and physicists. Apart from the development of new statistical algorithmic procedures to organize a huge collected data, there is a need of analytical methods helping to understand physical and biochemical processes on the molecular level.
The aim of this exploratory workshop on stochastic models in biology is to try to broaden the area of research of mathematical statistical mechanics/stochastic processes community. We would like to learn issues and problems in biology which could be addressed by mathematics and theoretical physics.
Our workshop has also a strong tutorial/school character. We hope to attract about 40 PhD students and postdocs to introduce them to new interdyscyplinary topics and research problems. This may initiate new collaborations and working research groups in European countries.
More specifically, in many biological models we deal with systems of many interacting entities like genes in population genetics, species in evolutionary ecology or proteins in regulatory biochemical networks. The number of interacting objects is finite and often very small and therefore their stochastic fluctuations play the decisive role in the time evolution of a given system.
The leading motif of the workshop is the analysis of stochastic dynamics of finite populations. Stochastic effects can be modelled by Markov chains, stochastic processes or stochastic differential equations. Such stochastic models will be analyzed from mathematical, physical and biological points of view. We identified five research areas which in our opinion are mature enough to allow an application of mathematical methods of stochastic analysis. This should foster discussions and collaborations between researchers with an expertise in different areas.