The SURE (Speakers and Undergraduate Research Engagement) program and BEPUR (Broadening Engagement and Participation in Undergraduate Research) class in the math department are pleased to host Dr. Pratima Hebbar (Duke) for a seminar on Monday, Oct. 11, 4:00-4:50pm in McBryde 452 titled "Modeling Cell Growth with Branching Processes."

Following her seminar 4:50-5:20 there will be a student fireside chat in the same room. It will be hosted by SURE and AWM, and all undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to attend! 

Please note that everyone is required to adhere to VT and public health guidelines, including wearing face coverings at all times while indoors. You can visit the VT Ready website for further details.

Dr. Pratima Hebbar is an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2019. Her research work is in the field of Probability, Partial Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems.

For more information about her talk, you can read  her abstract below:

In this talk, I will first introduce Galton-Watson Branching Processes and discuss some well-known results about their long-time behavior. Then, I will consider a stochastic model for the evolution of a cell population, where the number of cells grow according to a supercritical continuous-time Galton-Watson process. In addition, the mass of each cell grows in time according to a deterministic function. At the moment of branching, the total mass of the parent cell is divided among two child cells. Each child receives a random proportion of the mass of its parent cell. In a recent paper, we consider different types of growth functions, which depend on both the mass and time, and derive the long-time asymptotics of the distribution of the mass of a typical cell. I will discuss the proofs of these results as well as present numerical simulations of this model.

Past Speakers in the program include Dr. Rachel Levy, the Deputy Executive Director of the MAA and Dr. Daniela Ferrero fom Texas State University.

Related articles: 

Are you interested in Undegraduate Research? (October 2020)

SURE Speaker Series continues with a visit from Dr. Daniella Ferrero (November 2019)

SURE sponsors Dr. Rachel Levy's visit to Campus (October 2019) 

SURE Grant Supports Undergraduate Women Interested in Research (October 2019)