Speaker: Dr. Hugh R. MacMillan
From: School of Computational Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Time: Monday, April 4, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Place: 136 DeBartolo Hall

Title: Toward modeling the influence of DNA damage and repair during cortical neurogenesis

Abstract:
I will present work on a specific biological question in a specific cellular context: Can dna damage history explain intrinsic developmental timing during cortical neurogenesis in a mouse? Recent investigation of the segment polarity network in Drosophila serves as a paradigm modeling framework: i) sample parameter space associated with various related and modularized qualitative dynamic networks of gene products and ii) judge plausibility according to portfolios of cell population scale data (Meir, von Dassow, Odell, et al.).  Of course, comprehensive treatment of known molecular determinants of cell fate control, and subsequent construction of what CompuCell calls "cell type maps", is premature.  Nonetheless, as a humble mathematician, I'm tinkering with models that derive from severely reducing the network complexity of DNA damage and repair signaling, and attempting to judge their plausibility by appealing to observed aspects of cytoarchitectonics.   In this talk, I'll discuss the computational challenges that model discovery and validation present.

I'm from Tallahassee, FL originally and have returned there as a postdoc with Max Gunzburger at Florida State. My mathematical training (PhD, Applied Math, Univ. of Colorado) is in inverse problems, and especially the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, but I spent two years at UCSD on a Sloan postdoctoral fellowship in a transition to computational molecular biology. I've since been coping with learning computational cellular biology instead, and have been heavily influenced by work in Jerold Chun's lab at the Scripps Research Institute, especially that of Mike McConnell.