Thursday, June 26, 2014

Impact of vascular patterning on radiation response - contributed talk from ECMTB 2014

So - I meant to try to use +Camtasia Studio to record my voice during this talk, which would have made following along much easier, but somehow, the meeting was so chock-a-block with content and excellent social outings, that I failed to download and sort it out.  Next time...



For now, here is a short presentation that I gave as a contributed talk at #ECMTB2014 in Goteborg.  It represents the meat of the second chapter of my growing (fingers crossed) DPhil thesis. My hope is that by finding a metric (Ripley's K) that predicts radiation response in our CA model (based on a simplification of a CA I worked on previously with +David Basanta which we published here), that we (or someone!) could translate this into histopathologic sections from patient samples.

This is essentially an extension to a poster I presented at the #PSOC meeting in DC in early April which I blogged about previously.  Please feel free to ask questions or make comments. I'll let everyone know once there is a proper #preprint available, and in the mean time I'll try to learn to use camtasia.

'Till then, here's the presentation:



Monday, June 23, 2014

ECMTB 2014 in Goteborg, Sweden

I've just returned from nearly two weeks in the UK and Sweden, visiting friends and colleagues in both countries. The impetus for the trip was the once-every-three-years meeting of the European Society of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology called the European Conference of Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ECMTB).  I first attended this meeting in Krakow, Poland (thanks to the futuristic vision of +Alexander Anderson ), before I even began my DPhil, and found a true intellectual home. This is an unbelievable group of people - intelligent, kind, fun loving and open minded.

The scientific content for this meeting was excellent (and can be found here) and included many parallel sessions of contributed talks, a poster session as well as member organized minisymposia (I hosted two, which I will blog about separately). There was a lot of activity in the +Twitter sphere recording both the scientific content as well as much of the social activity of the meeting - which are both, I firmly believe, are equally important to the success of a meeting.

I have storified the tweetcast of the meeting and social events, and will embed it below, but I also wanted to take a moment to thank +Torbjörn Lundh and +Philip Gerlee and the rest of the organizers for a throughful and beautifully organized meeting. Everyone to whom I spoke had only nice things to say - the only complaint being that there wasn't enough time to see all the amazing content! Thank you so much for your hard work.

Take a moment to scan what's below - there is lots of linked content and interesting people. Also, keep your eyes out for a group (pro-con) post on tweetcasting on the WCMBlog in the coming days.