Biological Function in Space and Time: From Forces and Cues to Emerging Decision-making in Fates, States, and Shapes

Overview

Biological systems are physical systems operating in space and time. Understanding how they leverage dynamics and spatial extension to achieve functions, transforming physical cues into decisions, is a compelling challenge which requires new mathematical frameworks to identify and characterize emerging patterns in modern high-dimensional data, to quantify reproducibility, to describe how the information is encoded and transferred across scales, and to elucidate decision-making mechanisms.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental biologists, specialists in data analysis and theorists to identify current challenges, establish collaborations, and discuss strategies to advance our understanding of how biological systems maintain and organize function across space and time. Researchers across biological subfields have developed formalisms and concepts adapted to their systems of interest. By breaking the traditional barriers of scale, we hope this meeting can be a way of identifying universal hallmarks disseminated across fields.