A Case Study of the Cross-disciplinary Use of Mathematical Constructs in Computational Biology as Tool Migration

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This award supports a postdoctoral researcher in a project that studies the mechanism of tool migration in science; that is, the novel use by one discipline of established mathematical constructs that were first developed and used by a different discipline. Specifically, the project will focus on computational biology, a subfield of biology that applies mathematical models from neuroscience to study information processing in non-neural systems. The overarching goal of the project is to gain a better understanding of a mechanism that promotes smooth and productive interdisciplinary exchange, an important goal of science policy. The researcher plans to disseminate the results of her project to philosophers of science and to biological and cognitive scientists. She also plans to disseminate her results to undergraduates and the interested pubic by developing and delivering a public lecture on the concept of tool migration. The overarching goal of her project is to inspire students and to encourage working scientists to think both creatively and more critically about the tools that have been (or could be) used in their respective disciplines.This is a research project to study how interdisciplinary science came about in the context of computational biology. The project will address three specific research questions: What is the role of analogical reasoning in scientific practice? Does the same theory applied in multiple disciplines (such as the theory of computation in neuroscience and in biology) produce the same type of explanation in those disciplines? Finally, how do scientists transfer or integrate disciplinary knowledge by adopting research tools across disciplines? To address these questions, the postdoc will be embedded in a computational lab in order to gain insights that will facilitate her analysis of the research tools described in computational biology publications (using the framework of tool migration that she developed in her doctoral dissertation work on migrations of tools developed in game theory). Results of this research project will be disseminated in multiple ways: by organizing an interdisciplinary conference symposium on the topic of unification of explanation, presenting at two philosophy conferences on the topics of analogical reasoning and the cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer, publishing one scientific paper and two philosophical papers in peer-reviewed journals, and delivering public lectures to undergraduate students, practicing scientists, and interested individuals.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.