NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology

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The NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University aims to use mathematics and statistics to understand biology well enough for scientists to make accurate predictions of how organisms, from simple bacteria and yeasts to mammals, respond to changes in their genes and their environments. The Center's research will focus on three areas: how cells and organisms make decisions that change their behavior and their fate; how sophisticated structures, from the outer coating of viruses and the machinery that segregates a cell's chromosomes to the structure of embryos and organs, can assemble without explicit instructions; and how organisms change their structures and activities to deal with changes in their environments over timescales that range from minutes to millennia. In each of these areas, the Center will bring together mathematicians and biologists, with the hope that the mathematicians will help to create deeper and more general understanding of biological systems and that the biologists will stimulate the mathematicians to develop new techniques in mathematics, statistics, and computation that can be applied to questions outside as well as inside biology. These close interactions will produce a new generation of scientists who see themselves as both mathematicians and biologists and are thus equipped to tackle a variety of questions that cannot be answered today. The NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biological Systems has three aims -- advancing knowledge of complex biological systems using mathematical and computational tools, developing new mathematics and statistics, and training a new generation of researchers in mathematical and computational biology. The goals of the Center are to ask how molecular networks within individual cells allow them to make developmental decisions, to discover how proteins and cells self-assemble and self-organize to produce intra-cellular structures, tissues, and organs, and to understand how these biological systems adapt within and beyond the lifespan of individual organisms. These questions span a broad range of timescales (from milliseconds to millions of years) and length scales (from microns to meters). To extract general principles, the Center will study a range of experimental systems that span viruses, cells, tissues, organs, and organoids. The Center aims to build predictive and causal mathematical models for decision making, self-organized morphogenesis, and adaptation, linking development and evolution. Just as physics has been intricately allied with mathematics for centuries, biology will be similarly allied with mathematics going forward. The Center aims to strengthen this link by training graduate students and postdocs who are already experts in mathematics and computation to use their skills to provide a layered understanding of biological complexity and by hosting visitors and workshops that will establish broad linkages between mathematicians and biologists who embrace the natural complementarity of these disciplines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.