Colloquium by Mehran Kardar

Colloquium

Competitive growth on a rugged front

Speaker: Mehran Kardar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA)

तिथि और समय

अमूर्त

When competing species expand into new territory, the population is dominated by descendants of a few successful ancestors at the expansion front. Successful ancestry is stochastic, but biased by fitness of the individual, as well as favorable geographic location. I will describe a simple model of range expansion of competing bacteria, in which reproduction and competition only take place at the growing front. Based on symmetry considerations a pair of nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations are constructed that describe the coevolution of the profile of the growing surface and the composition of the bacterial species on the front. Macroscopic manifestations (phenomenology) of these equations on growth morphologies (patterns) and genealogical tracks of range expansion will be presented. 

Mehran Kardar

Short Biography
Mehran Kardar, Francis Friedman Professor of Physics at MIT, obtained his BA degree from Cambridge University in 1979, and a PhD in Physics (MIT) in 1983. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows for three years, before joining the MIT faculty in 1986. His specialty is Statistical Physics, having authored two textbooks in this area, and conducted research on a variety of topics spanning soft-matter, biophysics, and fluctuation-induced phenomena. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.