Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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Reconstructing Cell Dynamics from Observational Data

Speaker: Alex Mogilner, Courant Institute, New York University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Monday, January 26, 2026, 10:10 a.m.

Synopsis:

Traditionally, interactions between proteins in live cells are intuited from perturbative experiments (kind of like: to understand how a car engine works, rip out this wire and see what happens). There are obvious caveats to this approach: complex and redundant and partially unknown interaction networks make interpretation of such experiments very difficult. Recent multiplex microscopy imaging data promise to drastically change this paradigm by providing measurements of naturally fluctuating densities of key proteins at the leading edge of unperturbed cells. I will present a simple regression/phase portrait analysis that allows to reconstruct linearized stochastic dynamical system describing mechanochemical machine at the leading edge of a migrating cell. I will then show how heuristic ideas and parsimony helps to build a full nonlinear integro-PDE model of this machine.