Competition across scales in biology

Many biological phenomena emerge from interaction and competition between its parts. I will share some examples across biological scales where data-driven theory can reveal new rules of biological competition. At the molecular scale competition between mitochondrial genomes within budding yeast depends on genome architecture; dynamics of adaptive immunity in microbes reveal different modalities of competition and coexistence of bacteria and its phages; in mammals cellular reprogramming may be driven by elite clones, and tumor response to drugs is driven by "epigenetic" switching. Going beyond, I will present some ideas on understanding dynamical systems that govern cell fate dynamics and if competition may play a role in it.

Short bio:
Sidhartha Goyal got his PhD in Physics at Princeton in 2009 and then moved to Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara for a postdoc. He got his first degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. He is now an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at University of Toronto interested in collective phenomena in biology across scales.