Students from ESTALMAT, a programme supported by the Royal Academy of Sciences (RAC) and focused on the promotion of mathematical talent, held a series of workshops on the morning of Saturday 22nd February at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (a joint centre of the University of Valencia and CSIC).

 

This activity is part of the collaboration that ESTALMAT maintains with the Delegation of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Valencia, thanks to which a visit to I2SysBio is organised every two years. The event took place at the institute's headquarters, located in the UV Science Park. Around fifty ESTALMAT students, accompanied by the programme director, Rafael Crespo, and several monitors, were welcomed by Gustavo Gómez and Javier Buceta, director and deputy director of I2SysBio, respectively, as well as by researchers Mireia Coscollá, Antonio Santiago, Jone Echeverria, Pablo Romero and Paula Ruiz Rodríguez.

 

Gustavo Gómez offered an overview of the work of I2SysBio, highlighting its organisation into three programmes: Systems Biotechnology, Pathogenic Systems Biology and Theoretical and Computational Systems Biology. This was followed by the presentation of the three workshops to be carried out by the students, designed to highlight and put into practice the relevance of mathematics and computing in the biological sciences. The first workshop, called ‘Mathemagic’, was led by Javier Buceta (Theoretical and Computational Systems Biology) and combined mathematics with magic tricks. The second, ‘The Red Queen’, by Mireia Coscollá (Pathogenic Systems Biology) used a card game to illustrate pathogen-host dynamics, showing how population frequencies can vary until they overlap. Finally, a workshop dedicated to Mendelian genetics and the Chi-square test, led by Antonio Santiago and Jone Echeverria (Systems Biotechnology), used tomato traits to verify the correspondence between Mendel's laws and the results obtained through the Chi-square test.

 

To round off the visit, the ESTALMAT students had the opportunity to learn about ‘Garnatxa’, the high-performance computing system at I2SysBio, where many of the projects that apply mathematics to data calculation and analysis processes are developed.

 

Avoiding failure and maladjustment

 

ESTALMAT is a project to encourage mathematical talent in children with a special aptitude for this discipline. Extracurricular activities are carried out on Saturdays for two years. Its origins date back to 1998, when the RAC realised that there were young people with a special talent for mathematics who not only went unnoticed during their school years, but could also fail or become maladjusted due to boredom. In the words of Rafael Crespo, ‘the idea was to take advantage of their aptitude for mathematics to fulfil these young people's potential and encourage their vocation for research’.

 

More information:

http://estalmat.org

http://estalmatcv.blogs.uv.es/