Working Groups
Each term we will concentrate on a specific topic, starting in Fall 2021 with Animal Locomotion and moving to Geometric Morphometrics in Spring 2022. Everybody is welcome to participate in the activities of these Working Groups. Date and time of the meetings will be announced soon.
Structure of the meetings
The meetings will be 90 minutes long and will be recorded. Each meeting will be divided in three parts:
(1) Lecture [40 minutes].
(2) Q & A [20 minutes].
(3) Topic Talk [30 minutes].
Participants are encouraged to give a presentation during our meetings in the Topic Talk session on a topic of their interest related to the theme of the lectures. Ideally, participants will present a concrete problem that they want to collaborate on in a team, which will benefit from cross-disciplinary interactions. Interesting problems could come from biomechanics, morphology, and/or ontogeny and need advanced mathematical or computational tools to be addressed.
Fall 2021: Animal Locomotion
Organizers: Prof. Kathleen Lois Foster and Prof. Alessandro Maria Selvitella
Description
This working group aims at learning, understanding, and discussing biological principles and physical and mathematical laws of animal locomotion. In this module, we will concentrate on terrestrial animal locomotion, but possible further topics on swimming and flying will be proposed for future working groups. The main resource we will use is the book Animal Locomotion: Physical Principles and Adaptations 1st Edition by Malcolm S. Gordon, Reinhard Blickhan, John O. Dabiri, and John J. Videler. This working group is intended to further collaborations between the participants on possible concrete questions which are of interest to biologists but need the development of mathematical and computational tools to be answered. Lectures will have a first half as a standard lecture and a second half interactive, where everybody will pose questions to which everybody will contribute answers, propose ideas for collaborations, discuss the progress made, and have fun! See Structure of the Meetings above for more details.
Course Objectives
By the end of this term, we will have:
Covered Chapters 1,2, & 5 of the reference book.
A specific understanding of the mathematical laws describing terrestrial locomotion.
A concrete small-group project on which at least one mathematician and one biologist will collaborate on the topic of animal locomotion.
Schedule (tentative)
Week 1: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2 (2.1 - 2.2 - 2.3) - Tuesday 5th October 2021 @3pm EDT- Kathleen Lois Foster
Week 2: Chapter 2 (2.4 - 2.5) - Tuesday 26th October 2021 @3pm EDT- Kathleen Lois Foster
Week 3: Chapter 5 (5.1) - Tuesday 26th October 2021 @3:30pm EDT- Alessandro Maria Selvitella
Week 4: Chapter 5 (5.2 - Part I) - Tuesday 23rd November 2021 @3pm EST- Alessandro Maria Selvitella & Kate Garland (Monash University) @ 4pm EST
Week 5: Chapter 5 (5.2 - Part II) - Tuesday 1st February 2022 @ 3pm EST - Armita Manafzadeh (Brown University)
Week 6: Chapter 5 (5.3)
Week 7: Chapter 5 (5.4)
Week 8: Chapter 5 (5.5)
Week 9: Chapter 5 (5.6 - Part I)
Week 10: Chapter 5 (5.6 - Part II)
Week 11: Chapter 5 (5.7 - Part I)
Week 12: Chapter 5 (5.7 - Part II)
Week 13: Chapter 5 (5.8)
Week 14: Project Presentations
Working Group Members
Prof. Kathleen Lois Foster (BSU)
Prof. Alessandro Maria Selvitella (PFW)
Kathleen Garland (Monash University) - Tuesday 23rd November 2021 @4pm EST- Project Pitch
Data Science for the Biological Sciences Workshops
LAB 1 - Tuesday 29th November 2022 - Kathleen Lois Foster & Alessandro Maria Selvitella
Background on how to use R, the use of variables to store information, how to call particular elements of a matrix, how to install and use packages.
LAB 2 - Thursday 1st December 2022 - Kathleen Lois Foster & Alessandro Maria Selvitella
Basic statistical methods and visualization. Hypothesis tests, such as t-test, ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, simple linear regression, and multiple linear regression.