Modeling Group Behavior

Our guest in this episode is Sebastien Motsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, working in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science. He works on modeling self-organized biological systems to understand how complex patterns emerge.

Guest

Sebastien Motsch: Sebastien Motsch' research interests focus in the mathematical modeling of biological systems and especially those which exhibit self-organization such as bacterial colonies or flock of birds. His work aims at connecting two levels of description for these systems: a microscopic viewpoint (describing each individual) and a macroscopic description (using partial differential equations). One of the many questions addressed by biological systems is to understand how local interactions among individuals lead to the formation of large structures. The derivation and analysis of macroscopic models give new insights to understand these phenomenons. Motsch’ research can be divided in three themes: 1) derivation of macroscopic models from microscopic dynamics 2) numerical and analytically study of the macroscopic models derived 3) modeling of complex systems based on experimental data