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Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics Marc Mangel has devoted much of his research career to understanding biological challenges, particularly species conservation and fisheries management, through mathematics.
Now, the prestigious Society for Mathematical Biology has recognized Mangel’s contributions to this field by selecting him as a Fellow.
Read on for a brief Q&A about Mangel’s research.
Emily Cerf, Baskin Engineering Writer: Why has mathematical biology been the lens through which you’ve pursued your research throughout your career? Why is it well suited for the study of conservation and fisheries management?
Marc Mangel: Well, I have worked in other areas of applied mathematics, including operations research (especially search theory), theoretical chemistry, and economics but biology always attracted me (particularly fish and insects). As an undergraduate physics major, I discovered Nicolas Rashevsky’s books called Mathematical Biophysics at the same time that I was taking upper division electricity and magnetism. In that course, we did complicated computations in the morning in lecture and complementary measurements in the afternoon. I decided that this was what I wanted to do in my career, but with applications in biology.
Regardless of the application, mathematical modeling forces you to think precisely about the problem, making clear our assumptions about how the world works. Unlike in many parts of physics or engineering, we do not know the governing equations for biological systems (or more precisely – the systems are so complicated that we cannot figure them out). So often we begin with simple models that help us.
This approach is very well suited to conservation of living resources, agricultural pest control, and management of fisheries exactly because they involve complicated systems that are further complicated by human intervention. But often, we can derive general insights by considering a model that is not specific to any particular system but has much in common with many systems.
EC: What are you currently working on within your research, and how does that intersect with mathematical biology?
MM: All my work now is in mathematical biology and I am doing three things. The first, in collaboration with colleagues at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz and Seattle, involves models for the reproductive biology of the rockfish species on the west coast. We are particularly interested in how to characterize the relationship between the reproductively active adults and the number of offspring that they produce.
The second project is in collaboration with colleagues in the Theoretical Ecology Group at the University of Bergen; I have worked with them for 30 years. We are developing models for the behavior of animals and plants by trying to think with a ‘first person perspective’ about how they solve the problems of avoiding predators and accumulating resources for reproduction.
In the third project, I am completing a book (literally doing the final revisions) called “Fighting the Virus: How Disease Models Can Enhance Cyber Security.”
Many of the words that we use to describe biological disease are often also used to describe cyber systems (e.g. virus, infected). The overall goal of my research in this area is to see how far we can push this metaphor and what we can learn about cyber systems by using models from the population biology of disease. To use the models from the population biology of disease, we need to make specific notions of cyber compromise and attack, and once we do that, it turns out we can push this metaphor pretty far into the cyber domain.
EC: What does the honor of being elected to the Society for Mathematical Biology mean for you and your career?
MM: The Society for Mathematical Biology is the direct descendant of the society that Rashevsky, whom I previously mentioned, created and it is a great honor to be elected fellow.