Seminar Series and Workshop on Biological Control Systems

Organizer:

Christian Cuba Samaniego, Carnegie Mellon University

Sponsoring IFAC Body:

TC 2.1 - Control Design

Description:

This seminar series focuses on the progress in control of biological systems. The scope is broad and accommodates works addressing theoretical, computational, and experimental problems combining Systems and Synthetic Biology, Systems and Control Theory, Physics, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics. Topics of the seminar include, for example, modeling, inference, simulation, analysis, and control of biochemical reaction networks, realization and implementation of synthetic biological systems in vitro and in vivo, and fundamental limits in the control and filtering of noisy biological systems.

We aim at providing a common forum for sharing knowledge and encouraging discussions and collaborations across subfields. In particular, we aim at facilitating interactions among theoreticians, computationalists, and experimentalists. In addition, we strive to connect junior and established researchers to foster career development in academia and industry.

The seminar has been running once per month since Fall 2021, with 31 talks so far organized and/or planned. Each session consists of one 45-minute Zoom talk followed by questions. We have recently increased the periodicity of the seminars to twice a month to better adapt to the pace of research in the field. A dedicated Slack workspace has been set-up to continue discussions after the seminars, share/discuss new research and ideas, pursue collaborations, and post relevant jobs and funding opportunities. The Slack channel now has 226 members, and it has been at the center of our efforts to promote informal conversations and to strengthen the community. The Slack channel is also a way to get feedback from the audience on their preferences regarding scheduling or contents of the seminar series. We plan to expand the seminar series to include more diverse types of talks and activities. These include flash talks, keynote seminars from senior PIs, tutorials, live discussions, career development seminars, and engagements with industry.

In addition to the monthly seminars we would like to organize, for the first time, an online workshop in Fall 2024. The workshop will be run on Gather (www.gather.town), a virtual space commonly used by virtual conferences to facilitate participant interactions, especially in poster sessions. We will use our Slack workspace for communications leading up to, during, and after the workshop. Depending on participation, the duration of the workshop
will be 1-2 days.

This first-of-its-kind event will allow participants to share their latest research and spontaneously initiate collaboration. It will also serve as a relevant forum for students to select their research projects and establish first contacts with PIs and researchers in the field, as well as promoting successful students within the community. We plan to contact potential speakers as soon as possible to establish a preliminary program. As we aim to use this
workshop to further drive communication and collaboration between theoreticians and experimentalists, the program will alternate between theoretical and experimental works.

To attract participation from students and young researchers, poster sessions will be organized, in which the best posters, as voted by participants, will be recognized.