The 3rd SCMB Annual Symposium ran from December 7th - 10th, 2020 as a free online event with the goal of elevating the the ongoing dialogue at the interface of Mathematics and Biology. Focused on the theme of Interactional Expertise, the Symposium hosted daily panels that sought to answer important questions about how practitioners of the mathematical and biological sciences can meaningfully collaborate. Invited talks from junior researchers representing all four NSF-Simons MathBioSys Research Centers shared compelling success stories of mathematical theory meeting biosystems data. The final day of the Symposium hosted plenary lecture "Algebraic Systems Biology" by Oxford's Heather Harrington. Following the plenary, the Symposium hosted a virtual poster session on spatial conferencing platform Spatial.Chat.
SCMB Junior researchers discuss their experiences embedding in research groups of another discipline in Tuesday's panel discussion "What can we learn from embedding in each others' space?"
Sam Petti (Harvard) talks about best practices in distinguishing pastries from puppies in her talk "Applications of independent set algorithms to benchmarking with sequence data."
Sam's talk was one of three talks inivted to the Symposium from SCMB's fellow NSF-Simons MathBioSys research centers. Sohyeon Park (UCI) represesented CMCF and Alexandria Volkening (Northwestern) represented CQuB.
Ling Wang (SCMB; GT) draws a crowd during the poster session in Spatial.chat.
Symposium attendees mingle in spatial.chat and get to know panelists Tim Elston (UNC) and Curina Curto (Penn. State) after Monday's panel discussion: "How do we know when a biology question needs a mathematician?"
Mentors and launched mentees reunite to discuss non-traditional career paths for math-bio researchers in Wednesday's panel discussion: "Oh the places you could go! Career opporunities for math-bio trainees."
