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- Associate Professor
- Alethea Barbaro
- TU Delft
- Mathematical physics
How can mathematical models help fight cancer?
According to the American Cancer Society, one out of eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Luckily, early detection and good modern treatments have limited the mortality. However, there are some patients whose cancer has developed resistance to available treatments. In this talk, I will discuss how mathematicians are helping to develop a new treatment protocol for this disease using game theory and population-based models. I will then discuss my own work on a spatial version of this model, where we develop a particle model on a lattice, formally derive a system of PDEs, and study the equilibria.
About
Alethea Barbaro is an Associate Professor in the Mathematical Physics Group at TU Delft. Her research focuses on mathematical models, generally of social organisms, from the perspective of kinetic theory. At the microscopic level, she designs and implements interacting particle and agent-based models. She has applied these models in the context of fish migration, pedestrian dynamics, gang rivalries, territorial development, and in medicine, and she is now working on models for pedestrian dynamics, particularly in stressful situations. She is also interested in deriving and studying the mesoscopic and macroscopic limits of this type of model, especially if the model undergoes a phase transition as parameters are varied.
Alethea's Homepage