BII-Design: Integrating Biological Resilience Across Scales

Tufts University, Medford MA

Investigators

Abstract

The concept of resilience - the ability of any system to return to a previous state after a perturbation – provides an ideal opportunity to unite different scales of biological research. The ever-increasing specialization of scientific research has made it challenging for researchers in different fields of biology to exchange ideas. The study of system resilience, however, is common to all biological fields of study. The overarching objective of this project is to use the theme of resilience to bridge cellular, organismal, and community-level scales of biology by synthesizing the tools, concepts, and approaches used by the different research fields. They will be integrated through 1) collaborative research that includes undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, 2) curricular enrichment, and 3) outreach to other institutions, non-profits, and industry. Conserved mechanisms of resilience identified through these activities will be applicable to engineer and manage biological systems in medical, agricultural, industrial, and natural contexts. This project will challenge scientists to span disciplinary, taxonomic, methodological, and other divides in biology to build and apply a unified framework for biological resilience. Many fields of biology have described resilience in their systems of study, but rarely are there integrative efforts to search for common patterns and processes of resilience across temporal and spatial scales. The first step of the project is to examine how existing models and metrics of resilience are implemented across biological scales. The second step is to determine if there are common mechanisms across scales that allow biological systems to maintain resilience. The final step will be to identify how the basic science of biological resilience can be used to design and manage cellular, organismal, and ecological systems. These areas of resilience will be examined through interdepartmental seminars in biological resilience, a regional symposium on biological resilience, a new graduate module on biological resilience, and graduate research fellowships in biological resilience. The investigators will carefully examine and refine the existing lexicon for biological resilience that can be widely adopted by other biologists and integrative biology research institutions. 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.