ÌÇÐÄTV

The ÌÇÐÄTV Postgraduate Teaching Community (WPTC) warmly invites you to its first conference, ‘Evolving Experiences in Postgraduate Teaching: Navigating Changing Landscapes, Practices, and Technologies’.

Abstract: Rene Thom's book on Structural stability and morphogenesis ends with the line "at a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not desirable that some, who can, dream?" What was this dream? Shockingly, Conrad Waddington around the same time was pursuing analogous dreams while performing experiments in flies and grappling intuitively with the ideas of how robustness to environmental (and genetic) perturbations might arise during the process of development. Waddington provided us with an enduring image that has come to represent his and Thom's dream — to classify and understand the enormously complex and robust dynamics of organismal development in a simple manner relying on core topological concepts. While dynamical systems theory has no doubt been useful in modelling portions of the biological dynamics at play during development we are still some ways from developing a global mathematical theory, and, crucially, there remains a paucity of clear model systems where theory and experiment can confront each other in a serious manner. In this talk, I will present our attempts at such a theory-experiment dialogue where we try and develop a theory for how we get from an egg to an embryo. Biological jargon will be kept to a minimum, allowing us to focus on the dynamical mysteries.