NIMBioS is supporting several new Working Groups and Investigative Workshops in the coming months. Organizers (and potential organizers) of Working Groups and Workshops will want to know what it takes to have a successful and productive meeting. We have created two helpful web pages: Best Practices for Working Groups and Best Practices for Investigative Workshops. Each page describes what Working Group organizers and Workshop organizers can do before, during, and after meetings to make them successful. Working Groups at NIMBioS focus on well-defined scientific questions at the interface between biology and mathematics that require insights from diverse researchers. Investigative Workshops focus on a broad topic or set of related topics at the interface of biology and mathematics and have between 30-40 participants.

Influenza pandemics can mean that schools close and travelers stay home. But is severing social and business interactions really better than taking a chance on getting sick? "Infectious disease can mean making trade-offs between the risks and rewards of meeting others," says Eli Fenichel, Arizona State University assistant professor and co-organizer of a transdisciplinary working group at NIMBioS that has developed a better model for understanding the role human decisons play in the spread of disease. A study describing the group's work appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Click here for the rest of the story.