There is a news piece in Nature about the launch of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). NSF is expected to make an announcement this week that the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has beaten 18 other proposals to host the center. The center will have a similar setup to that of other NSF-funded centers such as the very successful National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara (California) and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham (North Carolina). NIMBioS will bring mathematical approaches to problems across biology, with a particular focus on modeling the dynamics of infectious disease. According to the institute’s director Louis Gross, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Tennessee, the center aims to bring mathematical biology out of its little corner and onto the central stage by, for example, bringing mathematics to new parts of biology, such as development and immunology. Apparently 8-9 work groups are already planned for the first year including projects addressing the links between the mathematics of invasive species and cancer metastasis; the dynamics of social networks in animals; and modeling the spread of pseudorabies among feral pigs in the southern United States.
This is a really big deal, or as Alan Hastings, a UC Davis theoretical ecologist and regular visitor at NCEAS, puts it:
Other institutes like this have had a tremendous global impact… The NCEAS changed the way people do ecology.
This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog ( http://pineda-krch.com ) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of California, Davis.
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