We are offering a fully-funded PhD opportunity for a student to work
on quantifying mass migrations at the University of Glasgow. This is
an integrated project between ecology, medicine and statistics. The
project aims to synthesize our empirical observations of two mass
movement events: the annual migration of wildebeest in the Serengeti
and cancer cells in the blood stream of patients. We aim to
determine if there are commonalities that occur across these scales
of organization that may capture the divergent behaviour of large
congregations of organisms.
The project would suit a numerate biologist or a
physical/mathematical scientist with a keen interest in cellular or
ecological problems.
*****************FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTION********************
PhD Title: Universal laws of mass migration: From cancer cells to wildebeest.
Institution: University of Glasgow
Dept/School/Faculty: Institute of biodiversity, animal health and
comparative medicine & School of mathematics and statistics
PhD Supervisor: Prof Jason Matthiopoulos , Prof Dirk Husmeier, Prof
Robert Insall, Dr Grant Hopcraft
Application Deadline: Applications accepted all year round
Funding availability: Fully funded, international students
Enquiry by email:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Description: Why do things behave differently when they are in
groups? If we imagine that the suitability of an area degrades away
from a specific point, then we should expect the movement of agents
up and down this gradient to match the availability of the resource.
For instance, more humans should migrate towards economic hubs,
wildebeest should congregate in proportion to the available grazing,
and the movement of cancer cells should be a function of the
viscosity of the blood. However, this rarely occurs. In almost all
circumstances, we observe more agents than we expect congregating in
specific patches and these individual agents tend to move
collectively. This aberrant behaviour of groups is consistently
observed across all levels of organization from the movement of
individual cancer cells in the human body to the mass migration of
millions of animals. When individuals congregate and interact (via
chemical, visual or aural communication), there is a fundamental
switch away from our expectations which is suggestive of an
underlying emergent property that has yet to be adequately quantified.
This project will synthesize our empirical observations of the
movement of cancer cells and GPS collared wildebeest and compare them
to models in which movement is directly proportional to the resource.
Our objective is to account for the observed variation in movement
patterns of groups and determine if there are commonalities that
occur across these scales of organization that may account for this
divergent behaviour.
The project would suit a numerate biologist or a
physical/mathematical scientist with a keen interest in cellular or
ecological problems.
