Course Identification

The course is designed for an interdisciplinary audience. We will help each other understand the parts that are basic for some and new for others. For physicists/CS/Math, no previous background in biology is assumed. For biologists, the level of math will be challenging but doable (differential equations), and some exercises will include programming. The emphasis is on how to build a good model of a biological system that addresses important questions. 

The human body is a wondrous system. It is able to maintain healthy function despite huge molecular and environmental variations. The circuits that enable it to function so robustly have specific fragilities that lead to diseases. This course will provide basic principles for understanding human physiological circuits and concepts for making sense of disease processes and their dynamics. The course will include guitar songs and other enjoyable methods to improve attention and learning.

SYLLABUS

• Circuits for organ size control and dynamic compensation. Example: insulin control of glucose, and its breakdown in type-2 diabetes.
• Feedback loops of hormonal glands: seasonal clocks, mood disorders.
• Rules for autoimmune diseases: why some tissues are attacked by the body and others are not. Example: type-1 diabetes.
•  How tissues maintain proper ratios between cell types. Example: inflammation and scar formation (fibrosis).
• What sets the rate of aging? What determine the incidence of age-related diseases?
• Evolutionary concepts in medicine. Example: cancer as evolution in the body.

Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to:

1. Understand physiological systems in terms of general mathematical principles that unify different systems.
2. Describe physiological systems and their diseases using simple mathematical models, and generate new hypotheses that can be tested experimentally.

U. Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology: design principles of biological circuits. CRC press (2006).

S. Stearns, R. Medzhitov, Evolutionary Medicine, Sinauer (2016)

S. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: with applications to physics, biology, chemistry and engineering, CRC press (2000).