Alan Lindsay (Notre Dame)

Title: Mathematics of randomness, heterogeneity in cellular decision making and signaling

Abstract: A variably of biological and engineered systems must reliably coordinate responses to noisy external stimuli for proper functionality whether deciding where to move or initiate a response to threats. In this talk I will present mathematics formulations of these decision making problems which focus of the statistics of Brownian motions in heterogeneous two and three dimensional geometries. In this talk we will discuss how variations in geometry influences the statistics of arrivals of diffusive motions, in particular how receptor organization interacts with geometry to sharpen signaling processes. The work focusses on a combination of PDE modeling, asymptotic analysis and numerical analysis for both stochastic and deterministic differential equations.