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Applying The Power Of Math

New Faculty Expand Department's Cross-Disciplinary Efforts

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Making Biology More Precise
Assistant Professor Brandilyn Stigler comes to SMU fresh from a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) at the Ohio State University. MBI is one of only a handful of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematical research institutes in the country and the only one devoted to the mathematical biosciences, which include computational epidemiology and neuroscience, Stigler says. At SMU, she specializes in applying algebraic techniques to the study of biological systems. “I’m interested in taking data from genetics studies and making mathematical models that represent the behavior of the genes within the cells,” she says. Her work involves reverse engineering, which she describes as being similar to the parlor game Twenty Questions, in which players try to discover a secret word by asking yes/no questions. “In molecular biology, a biological network such as the immune system plays the role of the secret word and laboratory experiments take the place of the questions,” she says. “The goal is to discover the network through the experiments with the hope of gaining deeper insight into a particular phenomenon.” Her computational approach uses experimentation, such as recent work testing the reaction of yeast cells to toxins that cause oxidative stress response genes to activate. These genes also are used by the immune system to fight pathogens. Moore points out that biological researchers have an enormous ability “to get very accurate data on the systems they study, but they need mathematicians to help them analyze and interpret that data.”

Computing With The Stars
Assistant Professor Daniel Reynolds held postdoctoral research posts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the University of California at San Diego before joining SMU. He works on large-scale computational problems in astrophysics and fusion energy, the energy created when atomic nuclei fuse as in the sun and other stars. His specialty is using parallel computers, so-called supercomputers, on large team projects to model and simulate experiments that would be prohibitively expensive and take years to solve with conventional computers. Reynolds received an $80,000 grant from the Department of Energy for his part of a $3.1 million collaborative project involving five universities and four national labs to design algorithms to model fusion processes. Those models could aid in fusion reactor design for nuclear energy and perhaps even help explain how stars are born and how they die. In addition to studying supernovae (exploding stars), Reynolds has a $65,000 annual grant from the NSF to model star formation in the early universe. To help solve some of these problems, Reynolds has allocated time on the world’s largest supercomputer for open science research: the Ranger system unveiled at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. At its dedication, Ranger was hailed as the first of the new “Path to Petascale” computer systems that NSF will provide to ensure U.S. leadership in computational science. Ranger’s 15,744 computer processors, which work simultaneously, were described as “up to 50,000 times more powerful than today’s PCs.”

Solving Problems Across Disciplines SMU’s Mathematics Department has long excelled in several areas, including differential equations, Moore says. In fact, Professor Emeritus Lawrence F. Shampine is known internationally for creating much of the computer code for the solution of differential equations in Matlab, a crucial software component of the Math Works website used by major engineering projects around the world such as the Mars Reconnaissance Obiter. The department will continue to help other scientists find clever ways to improve the efficiency and dependability of their projects, Moore says. “A lot of mathematical problems are too large or complicated to be solved by typical analytical techniques these days.”

For more information: smu.edu/math