Christina Cobbold

Christina Cobbold and her collaborators Richard Reeve, Tom Leinster and Louise Matthews have been awarded a BBSRC Flexible Interchange Programme (FLIP) grant for a 2 year project entitled “Mathematical Theory and Biological Applications of Diversity”, with £124,226 of the total £174,761 funds coming in to our University.

The aim of the project is to exchange knowledge and ideas between mathematics and the life sciences so this will mean Christina will be learning about the measurement of genetic and phylogenetic diversity, its application to measuring viral circulation for foot-and-mouth disease. (FMD) epidemiology, and how antigenic diversity measurement can help in vaccine seed strain selection for FMD control.

Dirk Husmeier

The proposal for a special session on statistical inference in mechanistic models of biosystems, to be held at the 13th International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, has been accepted. This session will be organised by four Glasgow staff (Dirk Husmeier, Simon Rogers, Mu Niu and Benn Macdonald) and will raise the international profile of our School.

Kitty Meeks

Kitty Meeks has been awarded a 5-year Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to purse a project entitled "Exploiting Realistic Graph Structure". The idea is to find new mathematical ways to represent structural properties of real-world network datasets (including Scottish livestock contact networks, the compatibility network between participants in the UK's National Living Donor Kidney Sharing Scheme, and the network formed from applications in various centralised job allocation schemes), and to use these "realistic" graph structures to design more efficient algorithms for the applications. Kitty said:

“The project will involve collaboration with various experts in the applications (specifically from the School of Computing Science, and the University of Stirling) but I also look forward to discussing various aspects of the problem with members of this School in the coming months.”

Marian Scott

Marian Scott has been appointed as a member of the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER), for the 5 year period 2016-2021.

The Scientific Committees, managed by the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, provide the European Commission with advice on scientifically difficult and politically sensitive issues. There are two committees, and the SCHEER provides opinions on questions concerning health, environmental and emerging risks.  Examples of areas of activity include potential risks associated with: antimicrobial resistance; physical hazards such as noise and electromagnetic fields; the interaction, synergic effects and cumulative effects of risk factors and methodologies for assessing new risks.

The first plenary meeting was held in Luxembourg in April, and the work of the committee has already begun.

First published: 26 May 2016

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