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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Applied Mathematics

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Theses/Dissertations

2017

Biology

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Dynamics And Clustering In Locust Hopper Bands, Jialun Zhang Jan 2017

Dynamics And Clustering In Locust Hopper Bands, Jialun Zhang

HMC Senior Theses

In recent years, technological advances in animal tracking have renewed interests in collective animal behavior, and in particular, locust swarms. These swarms pose a major threat to agriculture in northern Africa, the Middle East, and other regions. In their early life stages, locusts move in hopper bands, which are huge aggregations traveling on the ground. Our main goal is to understand the underlying mechanisms for the emergence and organization of these bands. We construct an agent-based model that tracks individual locusts and a continuum model that tracks the evolution of locust density. Both these models are motivated by experimental observations …


Dynamics Of Gene Networks In Cancer Research, Paul Scott Jan 2017

Dynamics Of Gene Networks In Cancer Research, Paul Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cancer prevention treatments are being researched to see if an optimized treatment schedule would decrease the likelihood of a person being diagnosed with cancer. To do this we are looking at genes involved in the cell cycle and how they interact with one another. Through each gene expression during the life of a normal cell we get an understanding of the gene interactions and test these against those of a cancerous cell. First we construct a simplified network model of the normal gene network. Once we have this model we translate it into a transition matrix and force changes on …