An Integrated Course in Mathematical Biology

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An Integrated Course in Mathematical Biology
Raina Robeva Sweet Briar
College Robin Davies Sweet Briar College
Mathematical Biosciences Institute Ohio State
University, June 1, 2007
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Course Offered

• At SBC
• Spring 2002 as an honors course
• Spring 2004, 2006 as BIOL/MATH
• At UVA
• Fall 2004-2006 as BIMS 341/541

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Course Participants and Structure

• Students
• Teams constructed by matching those with strength
  in biology with those with strength in mathematics

• Faculty team taught
• 1 biologist
• 1 mathematician

• Visiting Faculty

• 3 hours lecture/seminar and 3 hours lab per
  week

• Based (except for the introductory material) on
  topics from current biomedical research

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Course Components
Biology content
Mathematics content
Model Development, Validation, and Refinement
Computer assisted
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Changes in the last decade

• Technological advances

• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• undergoing fundamental changes

• Health related breakthroughs

• Enormous need to develop new structures
  
• describing living nature

• Funding

• Gradual acceptance of mathematical biology
  
• as a field of applied mathematics

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Connections between biology and the other
scientific disciplines need to be developed and
reinforced so that interdisciplinary thinking and
work become second nature.
A Changing Landscape
Executive Summary, BIO 2010
These new kinds of science will be driven by a
deep synthesis and convergence of the sciences
and computing, enabling highly
complex and hitherto impossible model generation,
experimentation, data acquisition, treatment,
manipulation and analysis, and hypothesis
generation and testing
Towards Science 2020 Microsoft Research
Cambridge
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and yet

• A course intended for introductory students to
  pursue case studies when those case studies don't
  tie into anything else in the curriculum can only
  be a special-purpose "mathematical biology"
  optional course.
• Such courses are inevitably under-enrolled
• biologists don't want to take them because
  there's too much math
• mathematically inclined students don't want to
  take them because there's too much biology and
  because they don't have the logical structure
  that math students like.
• It's the rare faculty member who wants to teach
  them. So they can never be mainstream courses
  and they don't accomplish the goal of unifying
  math and biology.
• Anonymous Reviewer, 2005

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and
Despite the hype around Bio 2010, it's clear
that biology faculty are not sufficiently
interested in math that they are willing to make
substantial changes that would create a new kind
of course Anonymous Reviewer, 2005
Percent of Bachelors Degrees in Mathematics and
Statistics 1971 2.95 2004 0.95 US
Department of Education Statistics 2005,
Postsecondary Education Report.
http//nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/d
t05_249.asp
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Significant Problems
Overwhelming level of detail
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Significant problems
Different Species different behavior
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Significant problems
Experimentation and Data
I also met Stan Ulam, a brilliant Polish
topologist with a charming French wife, who
immediately told me that he had sunk so low that
his latest paper actually contained numbers with
decimal points

• Otto Frisch describing his arrival in Los Alamos
  in late 1943

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Significant Problems
Students are experiencing terminology problems
Nature, Volume 7, November 2006
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We knew that the course should be
What content to include?

• Team-taught by a mathematician and a biologist
• Accessible to sophomores but open also to juniors
  and seniors
• Integrated with a data analysis/computer lab
  component (visualization, statistical analysis,
  simulations, validation)
• Based on applied projects, students work in teams
  of 2 or 4 with 50/50 split between math and
  biology students
• Integrated with a lecture series

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Blood Glucose Fluctuation Characteristics
Quantified from Self-Monitoring Data
expenditures- more than any other single chronic
disease. Diabetes spares no group, affecting
young and old, all races and ethnic groups, the
rich and the poor.
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Using Heartbeat Characteristics to Predict
Sepsis in Prematurely Born Infants

• 4 million births
• 40,000 very low birth weight (lt1500 grams)
  infants
• 15,000 NICU beds
• 400,000 NICU admissions

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Pulsatile Secretion of Hormones
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Growth Hormone Consensus Network
Understanding Endocrine Oscillations
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Results Faculty Viewpoint

• Superior level of student engagement
• Superior student performance on analytical
  projects
• Improved writing and oral communication skills
• High marks on student evaluations

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Students Response to the Course

• This was one of the most intellectual courses
  offered
• In real life everything is contained and
  collaborated into one. Classes that focus on
  using tools from a variety of disciplines can
  only increase ones knowledge for both
• I really enjoyed meeting with the UVA-SBC
  professors so closely
• I would like to see more courses like this one
  

• Greatest weakness not enough work. Give us
  more projects!

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Project Leaders
Raina Robeva (Math) Robin Davies
(Biology) Michael Johnson (Biophysics) James
Kirkwood (Math) Marty Straume (Biochemistry) Boris
Kovatchev (Math, Statistics)
Acknowledgements Support for this work was
provided by the NSF CCLI awards 0126740 and
0340930 and NIH NIDDK awards R25DK064122-02,
RODK151562