Past Events

Centre of Mathematics Applied to Life Sciences Poster Competition

CMALS held a poster competition in the School on Thursday 6th December. PhD students and Research Assistants from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, from Mathematics and Engineering, gathered to share their research and form possible collaborations.

1st prize was awarded to Karol Lewandowski, for his poster titled ‘Spare the horses: Adaptation, exercise & horse-racing in numerical simulations’.

2nd prize was awarded to the School's own Mihaela Paun, for her poster titled ‘Parameter inference in a mathematical model of the pulmonary circulation’.

Congratulations to the prize winners and all involved for a brilliant event.

Cside 2018

Biometrika Fellow, Dr Benn Macdonald organised a statistical inference challenge, where participants were asked to infer the parameters of a differential equations model from simulated data with known ground truth. The competition had four subchallenges:

Model 1) An ordinary differential equation (ODE) model of cardiac excitation.
Model 2) A partial differential equation (PDE) model of the pulmonary blood circulation system.
Model 3) A stochastic differential equation (SDE) model of cell migration in response to chemotaxis, with complete observations.
Model 4) Like model 3, but parameter estimation is more challenging due to partial, incomplete observations.

Details, including a list of the competition winners, can be found here:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mathematicsstatistics/events/conferences/cside2018/

The inference challenge was co-funded by Biometrika Trust and EPSRC (via SofTMech) to the tune of £10,000. It was widely advertised as a national training event for early career scientists in both Statistics and Mathematical Biology, and has raised the profile of our School, and SoftMech in particular, in the both research communities.

The data were published on 22nd October, and participants were given 10 days to work on the challenge, with a submission deadline of 1st November. The results were announced on 6th November. A workshop was held on 26th November where the winners, as well as the second and third-placed participants for each sub-challenge, were invited to present their results and methodological approaches.

Our School was particularly successful in this competition.

SofTMech Postdoc Agnieszka Borowska and Glasgow PhD student Diana Giurghita jointly won (working as a team) challenges 3 and 4.

Former Glasgow Biometrika PhD student Umberto Noè (now a postdoc at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases) won challenge 2, with SofTMech PhD students Mihaela Paun and Alan Lazarus (working as a team) coming second.

Congratulations to them all on an excellent performance, and thank you to Benn for organising this highly successful event.


First published: 18 December 2018