Abstract:
It has been over 30 years since the US government declared war on cancer. While there have been many positive developments over that period, we still face the world with many millions of cancer deaths per year. This talk will focus on recent improvements in our understanding of cancer and our understanding of our immune defenses against it. These improvements have come about, at least in part, by incorporating quantitative computational modeling into what has always been a rather empirical subject. Thus, following the well-known maxim of Sun Tzu, we can hope that better knowledge of ourselves and our enemy can lead us to victory in the ongoing battles of this forever war.
About the Speaker:
Herbert Levine is a University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Bioengineering at Northeastern University. He is also the co-director of a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center devoted to theoretical biological physics. He earned his Ph.D. and an M.A. in physics from Princeton University and a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For several decades, he has been an acknowledged leader in applying methods from physical science to diverse living systems — self-organization of bacterial colonies, directed motion of eukaryotic cells, biophysical modeling of cancer progression and metastasis, and tumor-immune interactions. He spent 25 years on the faculty of UCSD before moving to Rice University in 2012. He has served as an Associate Editor of Biophysical Journal and Editor-in-Chief of Physical Biology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) & National Academy of Sciences (NAS).