| Speaker: | Joshua Ross (Adelaide) |
| Title: | The beauty, potential and impediments of Markov chains |
| Abstract: |
Peter Whittle FRS (my academic great grandfather) wrote "Any stochastic process can be formulated as a Markov process by an appropriate choice of variables, and for most physical models the Markov formulation is a natural one, so that no generality and little convenience is lost if we restrict our attention to processes of the Markov type." This generality, and the beauty of Markov chains, and their potential for modelling biological systems, will be conveyed in this talk. This will lead us to encounter some impediments to their successful practical employment in this field of study; herein, however, many research questions arise.
Joshua studied at the University of Queensland culminating in a PhD in the area of stochastic modelling of ecological systems. He then spent 3.5 years in the UK, firstly as a post-doc at the University of Warwick researching stochastic methods for infectious disease dynamics, and subsequently as a Junior Research Fellow at King's College, University of Cambridge, continuing research for stochastic biological systems. He is now a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide. When not thinking about maths he loves spending time with his wife and baby daughter. |
