2022 Sue Geller Undergraduate Lecture

April 12, 6pm, BLOC 117

Reception starts at 5:30pm

Reinhard Laubenbacher

Dean’s Professor of Systems Medicine
Director, Laboratory for Systems Medicine
Department of Medicine, University of Florida

will present

Medical Digital Twins: Mathematics for 21st Century Medicine

Abstract:   A digital twin in industry is a computational model customized to a particular piece of machinery, such as a wind turbine or an organizational structure, such an entire factory. Continually fed with streaming operational data, it is used for all manner of forecasting, optimization, and control. Even though humans are infinitely more complex than industrial machinery, one can make a clear analogy in medicine. This talk will present examples of what might be considered medical digital twins and will explore the many challenges and opportunities that this paradigm of personalized computational models presents, ranging from the mathematical and computational to the biological, medical, ethical, and political.

Bio of Reinhard Laubenbacher:    Dr. Laubenbacher joined the University of Florida in May 2020 as a professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. He is the director of the Laboratory for Systems Medicine. Prior to joining UF, he served as director of the Center for Quantitative Medicine and Professor in the Department of Cell Biology in the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Concurrently, he held an appointment as Professor of Computational Biology at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. He is a fellow of AAAS, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and the American Mathematical Society. From 2016 to 2022, he served as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the flagship journal of the Society for Mathematical Biology. Dr. Laubenbacher is a mathematician by training, and his broad research interests lie in computational and mathematical systems medicine. Most of his research is done in collaboration with a broad spectrum of scientists and clinicians.

The Sue Geller Undergraduate Lecture Series is intended as a venue for undergraduate students to interact with a leading researcher from outside Texas A&M University who has also demonstrated a deep interest in mentoring students. Before 2018 it was known as the Mathematics Undergraduate Research Lecture Series.

Sue Geller, known to students as Dr. Sue, was Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M. She was the founder and long-time Director of Honors in Mathematics, the first department-level honors program at TAMU. She has supervised more than 100 Masters students and has mentored an uncountable (although finite) number of undergraduates. Her honors include the Ron Barnes Distinguished Service to Students Award from the Texas section of the Mathematical Association of America, and the Texas A&M University Distinguished Service Award in Individual Student Relationships.