Contact:
Rob Clewley, 404-413-6420
Neuroscience Institute
ATLANTA — Georgia State’s Department of Biology will host a National Institutes of Health researcher who will discuss the use of mathematical and computer modeling to discover more about obesity on Dec. 2.
Carson Chow will present his work at a seminar entitled “The Dynamics of Obesity” at 9:15 a.m. in Room 200 of the General Classroom Building. The seminar is open to all members of the university.
Chow’s work helps to answer questions such as how does lifestyle affect the body and how much control we have over body weight. His presentation will explain these predictions and will dispel some commonly-held myths about dieting and nutrition.
His work, in collaboration with Kevin Hall of the NIH, falls in line with GSU’s interdisciplinary work to address a health problem that plagues the United States and threatens the health of millions. GSU’s Obesity Research Group includes researchers with diverse backgrounds in biology, public health, economics, criminal justice and exercise science.
A crucial question for an interdisciplinary approach is how detailed biological models about the metabolic processes involved in obesity can be reconciled with behavioral models of people in a specific socio-economic environment.
Mathematical and computer modeling are increasingly recognized as tools to help understand the problem. This is an area that is being pursued in new collaborations at GSU between the Obesity Research Group, the Institute of Public Health, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and IBM.
Learning how to effectively integrate approaches from different disciplines will give ways to ask policy questions about urban planning or public health that can be related to nutritional consequences for individuals, said Rob Clewley, an assistant professor at GSU’s Neuroscience Institute.
Clewley is currently teaching a graduate-level course, “Introduction to Modeling for the Life Sciences,” which brings together students who have strong mathematical skills with biologists, computer scientists and philosophers.
“The students have been challenged to critique fundamental assumptions about models that are used in practical research, such as Dr. Chow’s, and appreciate them in a wider scientific context without requiring them to derive or solve equations directly,” Clewley said. “The students have also learned communication skills for making mathematical analysis accessible to non-specialists. In fact, they wrote most of this news article and a detailed supporting handout for Dr. Chow’s presentation.”
This article was co-authored by Clewley’s students, William Barnett, May Chen, Bryce Chung, Patrick Dougall, Shannon Nolen, David Sinkiewicz, Tessa Solomon-Lane and Jeremy Wojcik.
Chow will also visit this class during his visit to provide further insights into his approach.
Students in the class have learned how to generate specific scientific predictions from mathematical models, such as whether individuals each have a unique “set point” body weight that they will tend towards, or can they maintain a stable weight with a variety of combinations of food intake and energy expenditure.
The Chow-Hall analysis uses ‘dynamical systems theory’ to predict how interactions of biologically-based elements can result in different outcomes, for instance, a set point in body weight or a continuous change.
The choice of assumptions and parameters in the Chow-Hall approach allows data from public health studies and from biological experiments to drive the predictions.
Nov. 28, 2011