Mathematical biology centre launched

摘要

A new US institute that will be part funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will aim to become the world centre for collaboration between mathematicians and biologists. The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) will bring mathematical approaches to problems across biology, with a particular focus on modelling the dynamics of animal disease. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will, within a week, announce that the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has beaten 18 other proposals to host the centre. "We want to become the place people think of first in linking mathematics and biology," says the institute's director Louis Gross, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Tennessee. "Mathematical biology has traditionally been one little corner of biology. We want to move it to a central role."