Bakers get paid to mix. Bartenders get paid to mix. And the University of Arizona is getting paid to mix — $1million to mix math and biology.
The lottery-sized training grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health, is a new, five-year grant given to only 10 other universities. The funding for the UA Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics will support graduate students who will use computers and math to better understand biological systems.
Among their biggest questions: How do protein molecules in the heart muscle influence its ability to contract and relax? How do protein molecules fold and how has this changed during the process of evolution? And how is information stored and processed in the brain?
"Any student doing this is going to have to be good with computers as well as math," said Timothy Secomb, UA professor of mathematics and physiology and director of the training program.
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"The basic idea is that we have some concept of how a biological system works and we convert it into mathematical equations or some other form that can be represented as a computer program," Secomb said in an e-mail.
As a computer program, the systems will be compared with the behavior of the actual system. If they match, then researchers can suggest that they understand some aspects of the system.
For the coming year, three UA graduate students were selected for the research. The number of slots will increase next year to six, and graduate students nationally will be recruited as well, said Michael Cusanovich, director of Arizona Research Laboratories.
Kentucky native David Lyttle double-majored in math and biology as an undergrad at the University of Louisville.
"I was trying to find somewhere where I could mix the two. I knew I wanted to have some component of both in grad school."
He found himself at the UA and recently received the news he had been accepted into the program.
Ian Borukhovich, also selected for the program, wanted to study biophysics and biochemistry after graduating from Long Island's Stony Brook University in New York and made the move to Tucson.
"It's what I was hoping for," he said. "Those are the questions I want to answer, the biological ones. The tools are all mathematical or computational, but the purpose is biology."
Biology is like an enormous jungle, Secomb said. And what we can describe with math is only a small clearing.
"As we get more understanding of how things work in biology, we can start to describe them in terms of quantities and mathematical equations," he said. In physics, everything is described by equations. In biology it's descriptive, he said. "But gradually, as biology gets more advanced, then we can describe it in terms of quantities and how they relate to each other."
Secomb, who spearheaded the application of mathematics to blood flow, is a mathematician who came to the UA physiology department in 1981 from the University of Cambridge.
"To have a mathematician going into the physiology department was unheard of," he said.
But interdisciplinary applications, like combining math and biology, are nothing new to the UA, Cusanovich said. "We've been working at this interdisciplinary boundary for 37 years."
The interdisciplinary nature of the program also is reflected in the advisers and mentors, who have backgrounds ranging from cellular biology and biochemistry to psychology and mathematics.
"What we're doing, we can't do with just the math. The only way we can do something useful is by combining the math with the biology," Secomb said. "But I always want to emphasize, we need the biology, we can't replace the biology."
The equations are complicated, he said. "But that's what keeps us in business."
His students are like-minded.
"In the end, you want to do good science, answer interesting questions and possibly have some impact on reality, on people," Borukhovich said.
To Learn More
Go to http://www.physiology.arizona.edu/people/secomb for more information on Timothy Secomb's research.
