Gaining a full understanding of complex living systems is essential to tackling some of the most pressing research questions of the 21st Century, from the processes of early development of an organism to the effects of ageing. This system-level behaviour arises from complex interactions between component processes at many levels of biological organisation. For example, the development of a complex functional multicellular organism from a single cell involves tightly regulated and coordinated cell behaviours coupled through short- and long-range biochemical and mechanical signals. To truly comprehend this complexity, alongside experimental approaches we need computational models, which can link observations to mechanisms in a quantitative, predictive, and experimentally verifiable way. To this end we are developing Chaste, an open-source C++ library for multiscale modelling of biological tissues and cell populations. In this talk Mr. Fletcher will discuss how Chaste has been used to gain insight into a variety of biological processes. And he will highlight some of the ongoing and future work to improve the reproducibility and re-use of such models.

Dr Alexander Fletcher is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, and a group leader at the Bateson Centre, at the University of Sheffield. He previously pursued doctoral and postdoctoral research at the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. His group develops and applies a range of mathematical and computational modelling approaches to understand the formation, dynamics, and evolution of multicellular tissues. Recent applications include the patterning and morphogenesis of epithelial tissues. To support this work, he is a founding developer of Chaste, the first open-source simulation package for off-lattice and multiscale models of cell populations.

The colloquium is free of charge. Language: English
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