Calendar
- 11May 11, 2023
CMSA Active Matter Seminar: Insights from single cell lineage tree
In this talk, I will discuss two recent projects from my lab that involve lineage trees of cells (the branching diagram that represents the ancestry and division history of individual cells). In the first project, we reconstructed the lineage trees of individual cancer cells from the patterns of randomly occurring mutations in these cells. We then inferred the age at which the cancer mutation first occurred and the rate of expansion of the population of cancer cells within each patient. To our surprise, we discovered that the cancer mutation occurs decades before diagnosis. For the second project, we developed microfluidic ‘mother machines’ that allow us to observe mammalian cells dividing across tens of generations. Using our observations, we calculated the correlation between the duration of cell cycle phases in pairs of cells, as a function of their lineage distance. These correlations revealed many surprises that we are trying to understand using hidden Markov models on trees. For both projects, I will discuss the mathematical challenges that we have faced and open problems related to inference from lineage trees.
This seminar will be held in person and on Zoom. For more information on how to join, please see: https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event_category/active-matter-seminar/
CMSA Active Matter Seminar: Insights from single cell lineage tree
In this talk, I will discuss two recent projects from my lab that involve lineage trees of cells (the branching diagram that represents the ancestry and division history of individual cells). In the first project, we reconstructed the lineage trees of individual cancer cells from the patterns of randomly occurring mutations in these cells. We then inferred the age at which the cancer mutation first occurred and the rate of expansion of the population of cancer cells within each patient. To our surprise, we discovered that the cancer mutation occurs decades before diagnosis. For the second project, we developed microfluidic ‘mother machines’ that allow us to observe mammalian cells dividing across tens of generations. Using our observations, we calculated the correlation between the duration of cell cycle phases in pairs of cells, as a function of their lineage distance. These correlations revealed many surprises that we are trying to understand using hidden Markov models on trees. For both projects, I will discuss the mathematical challenges that we have faced and open problems related to inference from lineage trees.
This seminar will be held in person and on Zoom. For more information on how to join, please see: https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event_category/active-matter-seminar/
CMSA General Relativity Seminar: Positivity of Static quasi-local Mass in general relativity
In this talk, we review results on the PMT of quasi-local masses and prove the positivity of static quasi-local masses with respect to the AdS and AdS Schwarzschild spacetimes.CMSA Probability Seminar: How do the eigenvalues of a large non-Hermitian random matrix behave?
**note unusual day, time and location**We prove that the fluctuations of the eigenvalues converge to the Gaussian Free Field (GFF) on the unit disk. These fluctuations appear on a non-natural scale, due to strong correlations between the eigenvalues. Then, motivated by the long time behaviour of the ODE \dot{u}=Xu, we give a precise estimate on the eigenvalue with the largest real part and on the spectral radius of X.