Weekly Seminars
The AMSC program is excited to introduce a weekly seminar series starting this Spring. The seminars aim to foster collaboration between faculty and students, showcase research, and encourage student recruitment. Held every Monday at 4:00 PM in MATH 3206 (or virtually via Zoom), the series offers both synchronous and asynchronous presentation options. Join us for the first seminar on February 24 and stay tuned for ongoing weekly sessions. Recordings of the seminars can be accessed by the UMD community here.
This Week
Date: Monday, March 10, 2025
Time: 4:15 PM
Place: MATH 3206 (Colloquium Room)
Speaker: Elana Fertig (School of Medicine)
Title: Forecasting carcinogenesis
Abstract: This talk presents a hybrid mathematical modeling and bioinformatics strategy to uncover interactions between neoplastic cells and the microenvironment during carcinogenesis and therapeutic response. As pancreatic cancer develops, it forms a complex microenvironment of multiple interacting cells. The microenvironment of advanced cancer includes a dense composition of cells, such as macrophages and fibroblasts, that are associated with immunosuppression. New single-cell and spatial molecular profiling technologies enable unprecedented characterization of the cellular and molecular composition of the microenvironment. These technologies provide the potential to identify candidate therapeutics to intercept immunosuppression. Inventing new mathematical approaches in computational biology are essential to uncover mechanistic insights from high-throughput data for these precision interception strategies. Here, we demonstrate how converging technology development, machine learning, and mathematical modeling can relate the tumor microenvironment to carcinogenesis and therapeutic response. Combining genomics with mathematical modeling provides a forecast system that can yield computational predictions to anticipate when and how the cancer is progressing for therapeutic selection. This mathematical forecast system will empower a new predictive oncology paradigm, which selects therapeutics to intercept the pathways that would otherwise cause future cancer progression.
Spring Semester Schedule
- February 24: Maria Cameron (Mathematics)
- March 3: Steven Gabriel (Mechanical Engineering)
- March 10: Elana Fertig (School of Medicine)
- March 17: Spring break - No Seminar
- March 24: AMSC Open House - No Seminar
- March 31: Haizhao Yang (Mathematics)
- April 7: Bill Fagan (Biology)
- April 14: Antony Jose (Cell Biology & Molecular Genetics)
- April 21: Harry Dankowicz (Mechanical Engineering)
- April 28: Ricardo Nochetto (Mathematics)
- May 5: Alexander Estes (School of Business)
Past Seminar Details
Maria Cameron (Math)
Date: Monday, February 24, 2025
Time: 4:15 PM
Place: MATH 3206 (Colloquium Room)
Speaker: Maria Cameron (MATH)
Title: Complex Dynamics of Nonlinear Oscillators and Their Applications
Abstract: Nonlinear oscillators have a broad range of applications in engineering, including rotors, energy harvesters, sensors, and precision timing devices. The dynamics of a single oscillator with cubic nonlinearity and external periodic forcing is surprisingly rich. Depending on parameters, it may admit multiple attractors that may be periodic or chaotic. Their basin boundaries may be fractal. Linking oscillators into arrays and adding noise further complicates their dynamics. I will discuss a method for finding the most probable escape paths from the basins of attractors of noisy oscillators, sensor design, and a few open mathematical problems related to nonlinear oscillators.
Steven Gabriel (Mechanical Engineering)
Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
Time: 4:15 PM
Place: MATH 3206 (Colloquium Room)
Speaker: Steven Gabriel (Mechanical Engineering)
Title: Optimization/Equilibrium Modeling & Algorithm Development for Infrastructure Planning: Focus on Energy, Water and Transport Summary of Research and Teaching
Abstract: Professor Gabriel’s research group develops models, theory, and algorithms for solving problems that arise in infrastructure planning such as: energy, water, transport. These models are typified by a set of autonomous agents (i.e., energy market participants, vehicles) that share a common network. The equilibrium aspects arise since each of the players or subsets of the players compete non-cooperatively with each other for the infrastructure network’s resources. The concatenation of all these optimization problems as well as any system-level constraints results in what is known as an equilibrium problem; typically called a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) or a variation inequality (VI). Such problems generalize the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of nonlinear programs, Nash-Cournot games, as well as many other problems in operations research, engineering and economic systems. These equilibrium problems can also be single-level, wherein all the agents are at the same level or such problems can be multi-level. In the latter case, some famous paradigms include: bilevel optimization (e.g., Stackelberg leader-follower games), attacker-defender interdiction problems and trilevel optimization. Please see Professor Gabriel’s website for further details: http://www.stevenagabriel.umd.edu/ or email him directly at with any questions you might have.