NIMBioS News
 Bi-Monthly News from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis
March-April 2014, Vol 6 Issue 2
UPCOMING DEADLINES

Application Deadline: June 6
 
Requests for NIMBioS Support, Sept. 1
Report Your Results

The results produced from NIMBioS research activities are important in measuring our success. Click the button below for an online form to report publications and/or other products that have resulted from your NIMBioS activities. Click here for specific language to use in acknowledging NIMBioS in your work.
 


Connect
See NIMBioS LIVE!
NIMBioS now offers free live streaming of many of its events, specifically Investigative Workshops, Tutorials and Seminars. After you log in by entering your name, organization, and email address, you will be taken to the live stream, which is active only during the event. NIMBioS also offers a live chat of the event via Twitter, which is displayed to the right of the live stream. To post a question or comment, type it into the chat window (use only 140 characters per tweet) and use the designated hashtag in your tweet to enable others to keep up the Twitter conversation and to allow better archiving of the Tutorial discussions. In the event of a "pause" on the live stream, viewers should visit the Twitter feed for updates on when streaming will resume. The next event to be live streamed will be the NIMBioS Tutorial: Computing in the Cloud, which begins Sunday, April 6 and runs until Tuesday, April 8. This tutorial brings together a diverse set of computational biologists and modelers who want to expand their expertise and learn how to harness big data and computation using the R language. Visit the Tutorial's webpage for complete details and the full schedule. The hashtag for the Tutorial will be #cloudTT. For more information about the NIMBioS Live Feed and how to participate, click here.
Featured Science: Altruistic Side of Aggressive Greed

In many group-living species, high-rank individuals bully their group-mates to get what they want, but their contribution is key to success in conflict with other groups, according to a study that sheds new light on the evolutionary roots of cooperation and group conflict. In a series of mathematical models, researchers from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and the University of Oxford uncovered a mechanism for explaining how between-group conflict influences within-group cooperation and how genes for this behavior might be maintained in the population by natural selection.  Read the full story.

Citation: Gavrilets S, Fortunato L. 2014. A solution to the collective action problem in between-group conflict with within-group inequality. Nature Communications. [Open access online]
On Camera: Movement Ecology
NIMBioS postdoctoral fellow Julia Earl studies the resources that animals, particularly pond-breeding amphibians, move from one ecosystem to another. These "spatial subsidies" can be ecosystem services, such as nutrients and energy, but can also be detrimental, such as contaminants. In this video, Dr. Earl explains her research, which focuses on building mathematical models that help make predictions about when spatial subsidies will be harmful or beneficial to ecosystems. You can read more about Dr. Earl's research here, which includes a link to her seminar on the topic.
Education Spotlight: Summer Research Participants Announced
NIMBioS is pleased to announce the 18 undergraduates and two teachers selected for the 2014 Summer Research Experience (SRE) at NIMBioS. The program will run for eight weeks this summer from June 9-August 1. Participants from all over the country will work in teams with NIMBioS postdocs and UT faculty on research at the interface of mathematics and biology. Projects range from modeling Argentine ant super-colonies to tracking facial expressions and conscious experience of emotion. For more information about this year's projects and the complete roster of participants, click here.
Upcoming Research and Training Opportunities at NIMBioS
Applications are now being accepted for the NIMBioS Tutorial: Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics, to be held August 4-9, 2014, at NIMBioS. Quantitative genetic theory has been applied to a wide range of phenomena including the evolution of differences between the sexes, life history traits, evolution of body size and much more. This tutorial is for evolutionary biologists interested in how quantitative genetics theory can be tested with data. Application deadline: May 1, 2014. For more information and how to apply, click here. 
Applications are now being accepted for the NIMBioS/BioQUEST Workshop: Biology by Numbers: Bringing Math to the High School Biology Classroom, to be held July 23-25, 2014, at NIMBioS. Focusing on the quantitative side of biology, the program will feature hands-on experience with inquiry activities that use real data, tools for graphing and modeling. It will be led by the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium. Application deadline: June 6, 2014. For more information and how to apply, click here. 
REQUESTS FOR SUPPORT
September 1 is the next deadline for submitting requests for new scientific and educational activities at NIMBioS, including Working Groups, Investigative Workshops, Postdoctoral Fellowships and Sabbatical Fellowships. Although all areas at the interface of mathematics and biology are acceptable, potential organizers are particularly encouraged to submit requests for Working Groups and Investigative Workshops in areas of molecular biology, cell biology, network biology, and systems biology. Click here for details.
bat

The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) brings together researchers from around the world to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to investigate solutions to basic and applied problems in the life sciences. NIMBioS is funded by the National Science Foundation in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
____________________________________________________

NIMBioS is located at the Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
1122 Volunteer Blvd, Suite 106, Knoxville, TN 37996-3410
Phone: +1 865 974 9334
Fax: +1 865 974 9300
nsf logonimbios

bat