News
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense (Re)Scheduled
Posted by Paul Macklin
25 April 2007 at 2:30 PM PDT (UTC +?)
At long last, my dissertation defense has been scheduled. Here are the details:
- Date: Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
- Time: 12:00 noon to 2:00 pm
- Room: MSTB 254
- Title: Nonlinear simulation of centimeter-scale tumor growth into heterogeneous tissue
- Committee:
- Natalia Komarova (Mathematics)
- John Lowengrub (Mathematics, chair)
- Hongkai Zhao (Mathematics)
More details and an abstract / title to follow! -- Paul
ICMS Cancer Workshop was a Success!
Posted by Paul Macklin
31 March 2007 at 6:35 AM PDT (UTC +?)
We just wrapped up the Mathematical Modelling and Analysis of Cancer Invasion of Tissues workshop in Dundee, Scotland. It was a fantastic workshop, with a great mixture of mathematical modelers and biologists. I got to meet many new friends and colleagues from the European and U.S. cancer modeling community, and I look forward to keeping in touch with them.
In spite of initial jitters, my talk (Nonlinear simulation of centimeter-scale tumor growth into realistic tissue) went very well on Tuesday. The audience asked some great questions, and in further discussions, I received a lot of helpful feedback that I will use to improve the model and the numerics. I'm very excited for the future of our work, and the insightful comments from my new friends will help me quite a lot!
John Lowengrub and I had a chance to catch up on work with our collaborators (Sandy Anderson, Mark Chaplain, and Steven McDougall), and we hope to make rapid progress on our first joint paper. To that end, I'm working in Edinburgh this week with Steven McDougall to complete the coupling of our angiogenesis and cancer invasion software packages. It should be a very exciting few days!
Of course, work also continues on our J. Sci. Comput. and J. Math. Biol. papers. I hope to get those drafts done pretty soon, particularly given the fact that they are the next two chapters of my dissertation!!! :-)
Attending ICMS Cancer Workshop in Dundee, U.K.
Posted by Paul Macklin
7 March 2007 at 12:25 PM PST (UTC +?)
I'll be attending the Mathematical Modelling and Analysis of Cancer Invasion of Tissues workshop in Dundee, Scotland from March 26th to March 30th (my birthday). The workshop is organized by Mark Chaplain and hosted by the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Although I have yet to receive email confirmation, it looks like I'll be giving a thirty minute contributed talk on our most recent centimeter-scale glioblastoma simulations. I'm very excited!
In the following week, I'll be working with Steven McDougall in Edinburgh to put the finishing touches on our joint tumor growth-angiogenesis software. After that, we'll be ready to start writing our joint papers.
On the dissertation front, I'm making slow progress on the writing. I spent some time tracking down subtle behavior in my code and improving the accuracy of our ghost fluid method extension. We should be submitting a paper on that to the Journal of Scientific Computing pretty soon. Next up: writing up our tumor growth model for the Journal of Mathematical Biology. After that, I can finally return to my dissertation writing for real.
Lastly, as a goofy web programming aside, I fixed some bugs in my PHP code that inaccurately displayed times in the noon and midnight hours, as well as single-digit minutes. (I accidentally appended a 0, rather than inserting it.)
Update: March 18, 2007: My contributed talk has been confirmed for Tuesday, March 27th at 3:30 pm. I guess I'd better get to work on that PowerPoint!
NSF Math Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Declined
Posted by Paul Macklin
19 February 2007 at 8:53 AM PST (UTC +?)
I just received word that my proposal for the NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship was declined. However, there was a silver lining: most of those who were declined received word earlier than February 12th, and so my application was most likely in the running until the very end. Given that 151 applications were received this year and only about 30 are awarded, this was a very competitive process. So, it was a good experience, and we must not have been very far off.
I'd like to give special thanks to my recommenders (Mark Chaplain, Natalia Komarova, and John Lowengrub), as well as Vittorio Cristini and Robert Gatenby for the generous time and help that they provided in the application process! -- Paul
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense Postponed
Posted by Paul Macklin
18 February 2007 at 4:05 PM PST (UTC +?)
John and I decided to delay my dissertation defense until next quarter. This will allow me to finish up a couple of papers and remain in graduate student housing a little longer. More details to come on the two papers. Essentially, John and I decided that chapter 5 of my dissertation could be separated into two publications: a ghost fluid/level set method paper, and a modeling paper on our latest tumor growth/tissue model. Publishing these results as separate modeling and method papers will greatly assist as we start publishing results with our collaboration with Mark Chaplain, Steven McDougall, and Sandy Anderson.
In an unrelated vein, I'm going to try to keep this website better updated. I may roll out some home-grown XML/PHP software I wrote to make it a bit more "blog" like. :-)
