June 24, 2013 – June 26, 2013

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Location

The Grand, Brighton, England

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Organizers

Robert Endres, Imperial College London
Giovanni Sena, Imperial College London
Joanne Hemstock, Institute of Physics
 

Important Links

Physics of Emergent Behavior Website

Abstract Submission (Deadline: May 2, 2013)
Registration Information (Deadline: June 17, 2013)
Conference Program

 

Overview
The aim of this multidisciplinary meeting is to bring together physicists and biologists to discuss experimental and theoretical approaches for studying behaviour in living systems. Speakers will combine an introduction aimed at a broad audience with results from their latest research. Topics covered will include search strategies and foraging, simplicity underlying complexity, sensing and migration, and decision-making. These topics span multiple scales from single cells and individuals to collectives.Biological systems are often conceptualised as networks of interacting genes and proteins. Nevertheless, a simple analysis of the fundamental genetic programs is often not sufficient to explain higher-level functions such as multi-cellular aggregation, tissue organization, embryonic development, and collective behaviour of groups of individuals. Furthermore, various aspects of these processes are often emergent properties of the underlying complex system, irrespectively to its microscopic details. In the past few years, larger scale experiments allowed the construction of statistical mechanics models of biological systems directly from real data, producing immense progress in our understanding of emergent collective behaviour in biology.

Invited Speakers

• D Chialvo, CONICET (National Research Council), Argentina

• L de Arcangelis, Seconda Universita degli Studi di Napoli, Italy

• B Fabry, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

• N Franks, University of Bristol, UK

• R E Goldstein, University of Cambridge, UK

• T Gregor, Princeton University, USA

• P M Hogan, University of Sheffield, UK

• J Krause, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Germany

• H J Jensen, Imperial College London, UK

• S Mancuso, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy

• A Martinez Arias, University of Cambridge, UK

• P Swain, University of Edinburgh, UK

• M Vergassola, Institut Pasteur, France