The grant supports Ryu's travel to work with Dr. Susanna R枚blitz at the University of Bergen in Norway on her research project, "A Population Model of Macrophage Differentiation in the Tumor Microenvironment."
Assistant Professor Hwayeon Ryu from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics was awarded a highly-competitive 聽of $5,000 from the 聽with pass-through funds from the National Science Foundation. It is the second time she received this travel award.
This grant will support her聽travel expenses to work with聽聽at the University of Bergen in Norway on her proposed project, 鈥淎 Population Model of Macrophage Differentiation in the Tumor Microenvironment鈥澛爁or the month of June 2025.
The proposed project on macrophage differentiation process builds on their successful collaboration as well demonstrated in the recently published papers (both appeared in Journal of Theoretical Biology), while further helping them expand previous studies into a new direction. Specifically,聽, they developed a聽model for macrophage polarization in a single-cell level, which was the聽first solid step to better understand the regulatory signaling dynamics of macrophages at population level in a realistic tumor microenvironment. In , they have extended the previous model to analyze the stochastic behaviors of macrophage dynamics.
The Association for Women in Mathematics is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The objective of the Mentoring Travel Grants is to help junior women develop a long-term working and mentoring relationship with a senior mathematician. This relationship should help the junior mathematician to establish her research program.聽Applicants for mentoring travel grants may,in exceptional cases, receive up to two such grants throughout their careers before receiving tenure.
In 2020, Ryu received this grant for the first time with a plan to visit in summer 2021 but her visit could not be made until June 2023 due to COVID-19 restrictions. With the second-time grant support, Ryu hopes to聽expand their work beyond the scope of the previous studies by exploring聽a new direction based on agent-based modeling.