MCS Department Seminar 12/2 – William Felder

On Wednesday, December 2nd, at 3:30pm, we are excited to welcome Dr. William Felder (of the Gustavus MCS department!) to give a (virtual) seminar talk about an approach to modeling biological populations, and how climate change can be incorporated into these models.

Zoom info has been sent through email. If you did not receive this email, you can email mklynn@gustavus.edu for the link.

Title: Branching Brownian motion and population biology in a changing climate.

Abstract: In this talk we’ll explore the basics of the concept of Brownian motion, with an emphasis on intuition over technical detail. We’ll then construct a branching Brownian process, discuss how such processes can model the movement and reproduction of biological populations, and then see how the effects of a changing climate can be incorporated into such models. The fundamental question for these models (and the biological populations they represent) is the question of extinction vs persistence, and we’ll consider how I’ve answered that question for one such model. We’ll conclude by discussing how this result fits into the context of previously existing results, and what further research in this area is needed.