Collaborative Research: RoL: FELS: Workshop - Rules of Life in the Context of Future Mathematical Sciences

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The RoL: FELS: Collaborative Proposal Workshop - Rules of Life in the Context of Future Mathematical Sciences will be hosted jointly by George Mason University, Ohio State University, and University of Michigan. The conference will be held in Alexandria, Virginia on October 4-6, 2018 and will bring together 50 faculty experts and 30 graduate and post-doctoral students from a variety of fields spanning mathematics and biology. One of the main goals of the conference is to help refine emerging research areas in mathematical biology under the Rules of Life, one of the NSF's ten Big Ideas. The conference will help to promote the exchange of new ideas in mathematical biology, specifically to understand the organizational principles and rules of living systems. This exchange will be accomplished through a variety of activities including keynote presentations, brainstorming affinity mapping activities, faculty lightning talks, student poster presentations and expert panel presentations from agencies and leading mathematical biology institutes. Outcomes of the discussions will be aggregated and refined, ultimately resulting in the publication of a white paper. This white paper will be freely available online, and the conference organizers (PIs Dawes, Eisenberg and Seshaiyer) will further disseminate the ideas in the white paper at other workshops and symposia. The conference will also provide graduate students as well as post-doctoral fellows and new doctoral degree holders with an opportunity to present their research in a setting similar to professional disciplinary conferences.Specific conference activities will focus on topics (not limited to): (a) new and predictive understanding of outcomes of biological processes; (b) understanding the basic rules for the emergence of multicellular structures; (c) understanding regulation of circadian and seasonal rhythms; (d) re-engineering sustainable and resilient biological systems at any scale and; (e) understanding role of social interactions and experiences in reshaping the genome through genetic and epigenetic changes. It is expected that the conference will help to frame comprehensive genome/environment-to-phenome theories with predictive capability that can help design phenotypes to respond to environmental challenges or lead to next generation state-of-the-art technologies. The conference format and broad community participation will develop priority areas in mathematical biology addressing one of the NSF Big Ideas, Understanding the Rules of Life, that will (a) enable discoveries that will allow better understanding of complex biological interactions and identify causal, predictive relationships across scales and (b) help to identify connections between genomic and phenotypic diversity to encompass biological and environmental processes across multiple scales of space and time.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.