2023 Collective Behavior Gordon Research Conference

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Project Summary Collective behaviors are social and coordinated processes that arise spontaneously in all kingdoms of life. They can be observed in a variety of contexts: the blinking of fireflies, the marching of an army of locusts, the schooling of fish, the aggregation of social bacteria, and viral attacks. They are even observed in the movement of inanimate objects, such as robot swarms. Collective behaviors occur on all scales of living systems; synchronous behaviors extend from the organism to the tissue, to the cell, to the molecule. Ironically, research on collective behaviors is not coordinated. Disparate scientific groups work on these phenomena in many disciplines, including evolutionary biology, microbiology, mathematics, physics, and engineering. Although the problems being pursued have exciting overlaps, interaction between groups has been sparse. We propose three steps to create a unified and enduring research community committed to the study of collective behavior by providing trans-disciplinary bridges: (1) build a trans-disciplinary community of collective behavior researchers by holding a biannual Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Collective Behavior, (2) build an enduring inclusive trans-disciplinary community of collective behavior researchers based around this GRC by recruiting participants from under-represented groups; and 3) establish a permanent venue for the GRC on Collective Behavior. To begin this community building and to promote this new inter-disciplinary field, we will hold the first GRC on Collective Behavior August 13 - 18, 2023 at Grand Summit Hotel at Sunday River, Newry, ME. The goal of this conference is to establish trans-disciplinary collaborations between scientists to share information, approaches, and technologies in a coordinated effort to transform investigations of collective behavior. Specifically, we expect the conference will promote the discovery of unifying principles across scales and organisms and uncover how the findings, both experimental and theoretical, can be used in future experimentation, computation, robotics, and medical applications. Moreover, the conference will help to further our understanding of how collective behaviors emerge from the behavior of single components, such as individuals, cells or molecules. Sixty-five percent of the invited speakers and discussion leaders (and most likely the attendees) focus their research on areas that are a high priority for NIBIB. This includes using synthetic and computational biology and mathematical modeling and simulations to analyze collective behaviors in both animate and inanimate systems. The researchers in this emerging field of study would be a rich source of new NIBIB investigators. Furthermore, NIBIB funding, which will supplement travel and registrations costs, is expected to increase the participation of women, URM postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, and early career investigators, who otherwise could not afford to attend this conference. We are especially interested in supporting this group of young and diverse researchers, as they will fuel the future of this new research area of collective behavior.