Associate Professor Mortveit Makes Publication Debut in Biomathematics Field
This past January, Associate Professor and Research Scientist Henning Mortveit and former student Ryan D. Pederson, now a physics PhD student at the University of California, Irvine, celebrated a University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative first with the publication of their article, “Attractor Stability Asynchronous Biological System Models” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. The article, which is Mortveit’s first published piece as a member of the UVA faculty, marks the first time the research team has been published in the biomathematics field.
This is the first time our group has had results from our basic research program published in one of the prominent journals from mathematical biology, so it’s a real breakthrough for our theory work, said Mortveit. For a few decades, mathematical biology has been a thriving area for publication of research related to graph dynamical systems (GDS) and their applications to biological systems. We are excited about having our work exposed to this large and important audience. Not only should this help advance research in this domain, it should also help position us for development of research programs.
The article presents mathematical techniques for exhaustive but efficient analysis of long-term dynamics of asynchronous biological system models. Specifically, Mortveit and Pederson extend the notion of 𝜅-equivalence developed for graph dynamical systems to support systematic analysis of all possible attractor configurations that can be generated by varying the asynchronous update order. This work provides direct support to model exploration and validation.
We are pleased that the paper written by Henning and his colleagues on GDS has been published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Madhav Marathe, Division Director, Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing. With more than two decades of research experience in the GDS field, it’s a well-deserved acknowledgement of the important work he has done and will continue to do. We are hopeful this is the start of more visibility for the Institute itself and our team’s work in this space.
The Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the official journal of the Society for Mathematical Biology, publishes original researching findings at the interface of biology and the mathematical sciences with the goal of keeping researchers cognizant of a plethora of new developments and changes that affect their work. The articles range from biologically motivated investigations in the mathematical sciences to results that combine concepts and tools from the mathematical sciences with experiment or observation.
The full article is available for purchase and download at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11538-018-00565-x.