Center Seminars & Workshops

WORKSHOPS

The Center will hold one or two focused workshops each year, including 15 to 25 participants from outside of the university. The workshops may have a mathematical/methodological focus, or a biological focus.The small size of the workshop is meant to foster new research directions and specific collaborations between Penn faculty, Simons Postdoctoral Fellows, and external faculty.

SEMINARS

The Center runs a roughly biweekly seminar series in which we invite researchers in mathematical biology to give a lecture, from around the country and beyond. Many of these seminar speakers are also long-term visitors to Penn, who will interact with a broad range of researchers across campus.

Events

Next Event
11
Nov

Punit Gandhi
(Virginia Commonwealth University)

The impact of rainfall variability on pattern formation in a flow-kick model for dryland vegetation bands
Show/Hide Abstract
Desert ecosystems have been characterized by Noy-Meir (1973) as "water-controlled ecosystems with infrequent, discrete and largely unpredictable water inputs," with the limiting resource of water arriving in short-lived pulses. These dry climates are known to support regular, large-scale patterns of vegetation growth organized into evenly spaced bands that are separated by swaths of bare soil, and studies suggest that this may provide improved resilience to drought. I will present a modeling framework for vegetation pattern formation in drylands that treats storms as instantaneous kicks to the soil water, which then interacts with vegetation during the long dry periods between the storms. The spatial profiles of the soil water kicks capture positive feedbacks in the storm-level hydrology that act to concentrate water within the vegetation bands. This flow-kick model predicts that variance in rainfall introduced through randomness in the timing and magnitude of water input from storms decreases the parameter range over which patterns appear and may therefore negatively impact ecosystem resilience.
04:00 PM - DRL 2C8
Next Event
18
Nov

Asher Leeks
(Yale University)

The Social Life of Viruses
04:00 PM - DRL 2C8

Past Events

Events

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