Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Time: November 20, 2019, 13:30-14:30
Title: Virophysics: applying physical models to virology
Speaker: Catherine Beauchemin (Ryerson University/iTHEMS)
Room: 631A/B

Abstract:

Cell-virus interactions are diverse and the resulting viral infections are
nonlinear, stochastic, complex processes involving many variables. They form
an excitable, dynamical system capable of learning and adapting to a
changing environment. But the mechanisms underlying these dynamics have not been formalized into laws and equations, and generally, lack a quantitative
description. My research is in the field of virophysics, utilizing physical
models to resolve the temporal (and sometimes spatial) dynamics of viral
infection spread within a cell culture (in vitro) or a host (in vivo). Our
models have enabled us to determine the impact of individual mutations in
the influenza virus on its fitness. But the accurate nature of our method
has also allowed us to identify problems with certain experimental
protocols. As the accuracy of our models increases, so does our need for increasingly accurate experimental data which typical assays cannot provide. In this talk, I will review what we have learned from theoretical virology and the challenges we now face.

Short bibliography:

Catherine Beauchemin is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Ryerson University, a Senior Visiting Scientist in the Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) group at RIKEN in Japan, and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Originally from Montreal, she received her undergraduate degree in Computational Physics from the University of Ottawa in 2001. She obtained her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Jack Tuszynski in the Physics Department of the University of Alberta in 2005, working on spatiotemporal modeling of viral infections. During 2005-2007, she was a postdoctoral fellow jointly in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory with Prof. Alan S. Perelson, and at the Adaptive Computation Laboratory in the Computer Science Department of the University of New Mexico with Prof. Stephanie Forrest.