CCB Brown Bag Seminar

1st Presenter: Jamie Morton, Ph.D., Associate Research Scientist, Systems Biology Group

Topic: Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that’s characterized by heterogeneous cognitive, behavioral and communication impairments.

Abstract: More recently, dozens of microbiome and other omics studies have identified signatures that distinguish children with autism from neurotypical control children. The statistical analysis of omics data presents challenges including dealing with cohort-specific confounders, batch effects, and the compositional nature of omics datasets. We present a Bayesian age-sex matched differential ranking algorithm that boosts the amount of information extracted from over 20 omics datasets, including 16S amplicon sequencing, whole genome shotgun metagenomics, and human RNA sequencing by reducing batch effects and other cohort-specific confounders.
 

2nd Presenter: Leroy Jia, Ph.D., Flatiron Research Fellow, Biophysical Modeling Group

Topic: Axisymmetric membranes with edges under external force: buckling, minimal surfaces, and tethers

Abstract: A time-honored problem in the calculus of variations is to show that an area-minimizing soap film suspended between two symmetric rings forms a catenoid. We explore the shapes that result if we instead stretch a fixed area fluid membrane with resistance to bending. This simple problem turns out to be surprisingly rich: various iconic shapes such as catenoids, thin tethers, and elastica-like buckled surfaces can appear as different limits of this system depending on the area. We also investigate the effects of including a Gaussian curvature modulus, which causes the axial force and tension to diverge.