Biology Seminar Series – Madhav Mani “Breaking free of Lotka and Volterra”

After finishing his bachelor and masters in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge Madhav went onto a PhD with Professors Michael Brenner and L. Mahadevan at Harvard. Following this he decided to switch focus to biology and was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Inst. of Theo. Physics at UCSB with Prof. Boris Shraiman. Since then Madhav has been a professor at Northwestern for a decade, initially focused on developmental biology. His interests and collaborations have grown, with his team working across developmental biology, ecology, and cell biology. A unifying theme across the team’s work is to search for the “right variables” for a complex biological phenomena and engage in longstanding dialogues with experimental groups. He is a Simons Investigator and an investigator within CZI’s Theory in Biology program. Madhav also helped grow the quantitative biology initiative at Northwestern, helping found the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology and the National Institute for Mathematics and Theory in Biology.