Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics(AIM) Seminar

This talk is jointly hosted with faculty from the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and the Department of Bioengineering.

Talk Title:  Propagating waves of immune-virus coevolution

Speaker: Thierry Mora (École Normale Supérieure in Paris)

Date and time:  November 28 at 3 pm

Location: ISEC Room 432 (Northeastern University Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex)

Abstract: Fast-evolving viruses and immune systems play an evolutionary game of cat and mouse. Viruses thrive upon escaping the hosts' immunity, while the hosts' immune systems collectively track the virus. I will show how a theory of this process predicts the emergence of solitary propagating waves in antigenic space, and suggests new insights into the evolution of mutability and virulence. I will also discuss some data analysis of virus and antibody repertoires of HIV patients supporting in-host immune-viral co-evolution.

Biography of Speaker: Thierry Mora got his PhD from the University of Paris-Saclay on the statistical physics of random optimization problems. During his postdoc in Princeton, he got closer to questions related to biology. Since 2010 he has been a permanent researcher at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where he works on a variety of topics from biophysics to neuroscience, collective behaviour, and immunology, applying tools from physics and statistical inference to biological data, and where he teaches as an attached Professor. He is presently a visiting scientist at the University of Chicago.