Dissecting Biological Pathways in COVID-19

In this talk, I will discuss how we have utilized existing bulk and single cell high throughput sequencing data to study various aspects of host-pathogen interactions in the context of COVID-19 including the biology and regulatory mechanism underlying the interaction. Moreover, I will discuss how this knowledge could be utilized for identifying treatment options.

Models and motion: Leveraging biomechanics to understand patterns of diversity

Physical principles and laws determine the set of possible organismal phenotypes. Constraints arising from development, the environment, and evolutionary history then yield workable, integrated phenotypes. Thus, combining mechanics and aspects of an organism’s ecology will yield a greater understanding of diversity. Specifically, the utilization of biomechanical models enables one to combine traditional functional traits to predict how an organism will function in its environment. I will highlight this approach using three examples. First, I will show that an ecomechanical model of drag-induced bending in trees provides a predictive framework for survival in changing environments. Second, I will show how physical models of animals can be used to understand ecological pressures and transitions. Finally, I will outline a model of adhesion and impact forces that enable us to examine the role of ecological variation performance. In order to fully integrate biomechanical models into studies of development, evolution, and ecology, a new data pipeline is needed. Specifically, online databases must be combined, and standard data collection methods need to be adopted.

Infectious Disease Dynamics from the Black Death to COVID-19

Historical records allow us to reconstruct patterns of disease spread in the past, in some cases going back hundreds of years. Mathematical models can help us reveal the mechanisms that shaped these epidemics. I will discuss analyses that identify how demographic and behavioural processes changed the structure of recurrent epidemics of childhood infections, such as measles and whooping cough, in the 20th century. I will also describe recent work that illuminates epidemic patterns as far back as the Black Death in the 14th century, and how COVID-19 presents some of the same, and some very different, challenges.

What can and can't we do with geometric morphometrics today?

Over the past two decades, shape analysis has become central to studies of morphology. Now we can answer many long-standing questions about the impact of various factors on shape, identifying even subtle and complex effects. We can also extend the applications of shape analysis to studies that have relied upon non-metric data, such as the numbers of species within various ecological guilds within a community, to analyze the functional component of diversity biodiversity across regions. Unfortunately, some subjects, including those central to evolutionary biology, are still difficult to study because we still lack generally accepted methods for fitting any but the simplest and least plausible model. This talk will present an examples of each application: (1) an analysis of phenotypic plasticity of jaw shape, testing the hypotheses that dietary consistency affects jaw shape and covariance structure; (2) an analysis of the geographic structure of species richness and shape diversity, testing the hypothesis the range of shape increases and the nearest-neighbor distances decrease with species richness across for a classic model system in studies of community structure, heteromyid rodents, and (3) the difficulties that we have analyzing evolutionary dynamics, including tempo and model of shape evolution.