Kathleen Sprouffske
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
I'm Kathleen Sprouffske, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Genomics and Computational Biology program. I am studying the dynamics of cancer progression.
Here's my brand new webpage
Answers to Dan's Questions follow:
- What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!
- I am interested in using the tools of evolution and ecology to study the dynamics of cancer development and progression. I've recently been thinking lots about how cooperation and cheating play a part in tumorigenesis.
- What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?
- I have a decent knowledge of the cancer literature and the relevant ideas from evolution. More practically, I can program in a number of languages, including perl, python, R, Objective C, and java. I definitely prefer object-oriented approaches. Also, I have created agent-based models using NetLogo and Swarm.
- What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?
- I am very excited to meet and learn from everyone at the program. In particular, I have limited exposure to nonlinear dynamics and am really looking forward to learning that.
- Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS? (Recall that you will all be working in groups on at least one project with the goal of presenting your progress on the last day and finishing up a paper by summer's end.)
- I'm interested in is the possibility that there is non-random separation of DNA strands during mitosis [1], which presumably is protective in terms the acquisition of new mutation. This has been modeled as a Moran process for stem cells here and I'd like to explore other modeling strategies.
- I'm also interested in thinking about how to integrate experimental biology with model-building in a lovely synthesis. I've been thinking about cooperation and cheating recently, and would love to model it, but under potentially testable conditions. Ideas???!
- Wouldn't it be cool to build both agent-based and ODE models of a system, using the same sorts of assumptions and compare the predictions?
- There are also a zillion other things I'd love to learn about and explore!