Multi-Scale Modelling and Explanation in the Life Sciences

Multi-scale modelling and explanation in life sciences

The workshop explores the epistemic functions of multi-scale research in contemporary life sciences. As experimental and computational approaches grow increasingly powerful, it is ever more pressing to ask how scales should be aligned and integrated, how models should be connected and evaluated, and how explanatory priority should be assigned. We are thinking of the issue broadly to include perspectives from evo-devo, biomedicine, computational biology, as well as practices such as cross-omic data alignment, and integration of mechanistic and formal frameworks.

List of speakers and provisional titles:

[Dan Brooks] Scale Ranges, the Variety of Matter’s Forms, and Levels of Organization as Local Maxima

[Julia Bursten] Middle-Out Approaches in Modeling and Explaining (Bio)Materials

[Patrick Ferree] Image registration as a modelling practice: A case study of mouse brain atlases

[Sara Green] Bridging Scales and Disciplines: Multiscale Modelling from Physics to Biology

[Fridolin Gross] Tissues vs. cells: can modeling provide insights into explanatory relevance?

[Robert Meunier] Towards a historical epistemology of post-genomics: Explanatory and other models in data-intensive research

[Cassandra Yang] The Poblem of Synchronicity: Temporal Alignment in Multi-Scale Biological Explanations

[Yoshinari Yoshida] Intermediate models: Bridging between mechanistic models in biology and formal models in physics