Conference: SICB 2024: Computational and Physical Models in Research and Teaching to Explore Form-Function Relationships

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This conference award supports participants in a symposium and associated workshop on incorporating computational and physical models in biological research and teaching at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in January 2024. With greater universal access to computational power as well as the rapid expansion and construction of “maker spaces” across college campuses, mathematical, physical, and engineering modeling tools that offer unique opportunities to advance understanding of organismal form and function relationships are readily available to biologists. However, broad adoption of physical models and computational modeling approaches in the biological sciences is often thwarted by the difficulty of forming appropriate transdisciplinary collaborations as well as gaps in technical training of biology students. This award supports a transdisciplinary symposium that will catalyze discussions and ideation among biologists, physicists, and engineers, and will accelerate the formation of new transdisciplinary collaborations. The symposium highlights early-career researchers and members of groups under-represented in the sciences. Outcomes of the symposium include a collaborative workshop and synthetic paper that will identify innovative approaches and priorities for applying physical models and computational modeling to revolutionize biological knowledge, as well as creating a framework for integration into biology curricula. Emergent behaviors of a biological system are the result of the precise coordination of multiple complex and interconnected systems, enabling rapid signal processing followed by appropriate effector output. A mechanistic understanding of these processes can be achieved by integrating traditional biology experiments with physical or computational modeling. The activation barrier for applying these tools can be high especially for those labs new to modeling. Likewise, it is imperative to educate future scientists to perpetuate the use of modeling approaches in their own research and teaching. The award supports a transdisciplinary symposium that will catalyze discussions and ideation among biologists, physicists, and engineers, including early-career scientists, international researchers, and members of groups under-represented in the sciences, and will accelerate the formation of new research and education collaborations. By showcasing the potential of cross-disciplinary research and teaching approaches, the symposium and workshop will inspire scientists to implement models in their own work and identify pathways for doing so. Summaries of the symposium presentations will be published in the SICB journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology. That issue will include a jointly-authored, forward-looking perspective paper reviewing the state of the field and highlighting research priorities that will continue pushing the limits of biological knowledge discovery and transdisciplinary integration of these tools. 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.