- Series
- School of Mathematics Colloquium
- Time
- Thursday, November 5, 2015 - 11:05am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Caroline Uhler – MIT – cuhler@MIT.EDU – http://idss.mit.edu/staff/caroline-uhler/
- Organizer
- Josephine Yu
Although the genetic information in each cell within an organism is
identical, gene expression varies widely between different cell types. The
quest to understand this phenomenon has led to many interesting mathematics
problems. First, I will present a new method for learning gene regulatory
networks. It overcomes the limitations of existing algorithms for learning
directed graphs and is based on algebraic, geometric and combinatorial
arguments. Second, I will analyze the hypothesis that the differential gene
expression is related to the spatial organization of chromosomes. I will
describe a bi-level optimization formulation to find minimal overlap
configurations of ellipsoids and model chromosome arrangements. Analyzing
the resulting ellipsoid configurations has important implications for the
reprogramming of cells during development. Any knowledge of biology which
is needed for the talk will be introduced during the lecture.