CWI Lectures in Mathematics and Computer Science (2009)

Starting Life Sciences at CWI
What does city heating have to do with cancer research? How do cells know how to make a blood vessel - can they communicate and organize themselves? In January 2009, a new research group in the life sciences has started at CWI. We celebrate this with this year’s edition of the CWI Lectures in Mathematics and Computer Science. Turing Award winner Richard Karp will give a presentation on his research and his vision of this field. Alexander Anderson, specialist in mathematical oncology, will talk about novel interactions between mathematics, computer science and cancer research. CWI researchers Gunnar Klau and Roeland Merks will present examples from life science research at CWI.

You are all welcome to attend the meeting. Please mark 4 June in your diary!

Speakers:

Richard M. Karp is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the ACM Turing Award, the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Kyoto Prize, and many other prizes, as well as four honorary degrees. He worked at the IBM Watson Research Center for nine years. Karp has made important discoveries in computational complexity, operations research, and, more recently, in computational biology.

 

Alexander R.A. Anderson is Co-Director Integrated Mathematical Oncology of the Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, Florida, USA. He studies different aspects of cancer with individual based modelling approaches. In collaboration with the Vanderbilt University he has established the Vanderbilt Integrative Cancer Biology Center, which studies the forces that drive tumour invasion.

 

 

Gunnar W. Klau is computer scientist and researcher at CWI, heading a group on Algorithmic Computational Biology. He has worked at several universities in Germany and Austria, and at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (USA). Klau’s group develops algorithms and mathematical models for the analysis of biological and biomedical data, among others for cancer research.

 

 

Roeland M.H. Merks is group leader of the Biomodelling and Biosystems Analysis group at the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology (NISB) and CWI. He has worked at universities in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan and the USA. Merks’ group develops new biomodelling concepts and approaches, focusing on multiscale, cell-based modelling of biological form and function.

 

Life Sciences at CWI

CWI’s Life Sciences group is an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists, and theoretical biologists, comprising in total 30 researchers. Within this group algorithms, methods, and models are developed, and simulations for a wide range of biological topics are performed, with a strong focus on systems biology. CWI collaborates with a large network of researchers in biology and biomedicine − both individually and within national and international consortia, including the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology.