Geannuleerd - OZR opvangmandaat post doc Jan Rombouts

Pattern formation due to self-organization appears in many different physical and biological systems. Mathematical modeling has always played an important role in the study of these patterns. In recent years, the use of nonlocal continuum models has become popular to model biological patterns. These models are successful in explaining many phenomena, but do not require the specification of detailed cellular and molecular mechanisms. Despite their success in qualitatively describing biological patterns, these models remain under-used in applications to concrete biological systems and are seldom compared to experimentally obtained data. The aim of this project is to bring this modeling approach closer to concrete biological applications. The project contains a big theoretical part as well as a collaboration with experimentalists. First, I will theoretically investigate which biological mechanisms for cell-cell interaction lead to which types of nonlocal description. Second, I will determine how different types of interactions affect patterns on finite, two-dimensional domains. In the collaborative part, I will use methods to estimate nonlocal interactions directly from imaging and cell-tracking data. These fitted interactions will then be used in models to gain deeper understanding into the biological mechanisms of pattern formation and the role of domain shape and boundaries.