Olivia Chu (Bryn Mawr College), Ryan Murphy (University of South Australia), Ananth Srinivas (LSU Health New Orleans), and Sara Hamis (Uppsala University). Welcome to Ryan, Ananth, and Sara, the newest members of our newsletter team! 

1. Reminders from SMB's new President, Reinhard Laubenbacher.
2. News - Updates from: 
   • SMB Subgroups
   • Royal Society Publishing
   • Upcoming Workshop
3. People - Interview with Dr. Binod Pant, Network Science Institute (NetSi) at Northeastern University.
4. Editorial - A note from the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.
5. Featured Figure - Daniel Netherwood, The University of Adelaide.

To read the subsections of this issue, click the links at the above items.

Contributing content

Issues of the newsletter are released four times per year in Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. The newsletter serves the SMB community with news and updates, so please share it with your colleagues and contribute content to future issues.

We welcome submissions to expand the content of the newsletter.  The next issue will be released in the Fall, so if you would like to contribute, please send an email to the editors by the start of November 2025 to discuss how your content can be included. This could include summaries of relevant conferences that you have attended, suggestions for interviews, professional development opportunities etc. Please note that job advertisements should be sent to the Member Forum rather than to the newsletter.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the newsletter and would like to become more involved and/or contribute, please contact us at any time. We appreciate and welcome feedback and ideas from the community. The editors can be reached at newsletter@smb.org.

Finally, be sure to follow us on social media: 

• X: @SMB_MathBiology
• Threads: @smbmathbio
• Bluesky: @smbmathbiology.bsky.social

We hope you enjoy this issue of the newsletter!

Olivia, Ryan, Ananth, and Sara
Editors, SMB Newsletter

A Message from Reinhard Laubenbacher

We warmly welcome SMB's new President, Professor Reinhard Laubenbacher, who is the Director of the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. We also thank outgoing President Jane Heffernan for her dedicated service to the Society. 

Professor Laubenbacher wants to hear from you about your experiences with SMB, what issues you want SMB to focus on, initiatives you would like to see, challenges you are dealing with, and successes you have achieved. You can write to him at reinhard.laubenbacher@medicine.ufl.edu. 

In late August, Professor Laubenbacher shared his first President's Letter with the community. Below, we highlight some exciting recent developments at the SMB in case you missed them. 

Early-career researchers.

At the 2025 annual meeting in Edmonton, CN, the membership at the General Meeting approved the expansion of the SMB Board of Directors by two seats, both reserved for early career researchers (within 5 years of Ph.D. or equivalent degree). This is the first step of an initiative to better meet the needs of this community within SMB. For the upcoming Board elections, please nominate candidates for these seats (including self-nomination).

New SMB Sections Program.

Also at the Edmonton meeting, the Board voted to establish a Sections program, modeled after a similar program SIAM has established. Regional and national sections will bring SMB closer to its members, provide more opportunities for engagement, offer more scientific meetings, and expand the global reach of SMB. More details to come.

Global Outreach.

SMB has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with SoLaBiMa, the Latin American Society for Mathematical Biology. The two societies will work together to support mathematical biology in Latin America, including joint sponsorship of the biannual conference SoLaBiMa has been organizing. The 2026 conference will take place in Paraguay. Similar efforts in other parts of the world are in the works or in planning stages, including in Africa.

News Section

By Ryan Murphy

In this issue of the News section, we highlight the updates from the SMB Subgroups, Royal Society Publishing, and an upcoming workshop. Read on below.

SMB Subgroups Updates

Cell & Developmental Biology

• Link to blog: https://smb-celldevbio.github.io/ 
• CDEV Subgroup membership has increased by about 2% since 2024.
• During SMB 2025, we organized a two-part subgroup minisymposium “From data to mechanisms: advancement in modeling in cell and developmental biology” with 8 speakers.
• We awarded 4 travel grants to early career CDEV members who traveled to attend SMB 2025 and donated $250 to the SMB 2025 Poster winners. The travel grants were awarded to Gulsemay Yigit, Rebecca Crossley, Maryam Alka and Ruby Nixson. .https://smb-celldevbio.github.io/2025-06-22-Special-SMB-Travel-Grant/ 
• The SMB CDEV poster session winners were Karen Enumah (Clarkson University) and Julio Belmonte (NC State University).
• In Fall 2025, the SMB CDEV Subgroup will host job search series, where we will have mock interviews and details on the hiring process for both academic and industry positions. More details will be sent via list serv and posted on the CDEV Blog.
• In Spring 2026, the SMB CDEV Subgroup will have a virtual research session. Attendees will have the opportunity to talk about their research in 3-minute lightning rounds, as well as ask questions and network with other attendees.

Immunobiology & Infection

The Immunobiology and Infection Subgroup is collecting nominations for both the Subgroup Chair and Secretary positions for terms beginning at the 2026 SMB Annual Meeting. Elections will be held in early 2026. Please consider nominating yourself or a colleague for these positions (see descriptions of each below). We are excited to see the subgroup’s growth and momentum keep going in the coming years!

The Subgroup Chair organizes and conducts group meetings, advises the Society for Mathematical Biology of the group’s activities and needs, and carries on any other activities which the Chairperson deems to be beneficial to IMMU and to the Society. The Secretary keeps adequate membership records of membership and works with the Chairperson on organizational and financial matters relating to IMMU.

Mathematical Neuroscience

The Mathematical Neuroscience subgroup hosted a successful virtual mini-conference https://sites.google.com/brandeis.edu/smb-mathneuro-2025 on July 12-13, 2025. This event featured 10 invited speakers, 12 contributed talks, and attracted over 230 registered participants across multiple time zones. During the annual SMB meeting 2025, our subgroup held a social gathering - a great opportunity to connect in person while enjoying the talks and posters. Additionally, the subgroup is now gathering interests in officer positions for the 2025-2027 term and expect to announce the new team soon.

Mathematical Oncology

1.    We want to make the community aware of the upcoming Mathematical Oncology Conference at the end of October (evening of the 28th-31st) on the St. Pete beach in Florida. The goal of this recurring meeting is to provide an international venue for collaboration, integration, training and synergy for mathematical oncology research. A major focus of this conference will be Evolutionary Therapy but not exclusively so and there will be an emphasis on junior investigators. More info is available here: MathOnco25, including the opportunity to apply for travel awards. There is also the chance for conference participants to stay the weekend and attend the 13th IMO Workshop.

2.    There is a special issue of Mathematical Biosciences devoted to the memory of Professor Siv Sivaloganathan. Dr. Sivaloganathan (University of Waterloo) made many important contributions to mathematical medicine, including modeling of hydrocephalus and tumor growth, treatment responses, and the evolutionary dynamics of cancer cells. You can read more about this special issue, entitled "Perspectives on Mathematical Oncology" here: Mathematical Biosciences | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier - Mathematical Biosciences | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier.  All participants of the Thematic Program on Mathematical Oncology from the Fields Institute, July-Dec 2024 in Toronto, CAN are encouraged to submit to this special issue.

Royal Society Publishing

New issues of interest from Royal Society Publishing Philosophical Transactions A: 

Generative modelling meets Bayesian inference: a new paradigm for inverse problems compiled and edited by Alain Oliviero-Durmus, Yazid Janati, Eric Moulines, Marcelo Pereyra and Sebastian Reich and the articles can be accessed directly at www.bit.ly/TransA2299

Partial differential equations in data science organised and edited by Andrea L Bertozzi, Nadejda Drenska, Jonas Latz and Matthew Thorpe and the articles can be accessed directly here. 

A print version is also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org.

Upcoming Workshop

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce the third edition of the workshop on "Modelling Diffusive Systems: Theory and Applications" (MoDiS), which will take place at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute (ESI) in Vienna during the week 26-30 January 2026.

The list of speakers and the preliminary schedule are both available on the workshop website. There is a limited number of spots for additional participants - priority will be given to early-career researchers who are also encouraged to present a poster. In order to apply, please fill out the registration form available at this link by September 15.

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna!

Best,

Valeria Giunta, Annalisa Iuorio, Angelika Manhart, and Cinzia Soresina

People Section

By Ananth Srinivas

Dr. Binod Pant speaks with our new Newsletter Editor, Ananth Vedururu Srinivas. Binod is a postdoc at the Network Science Institute (NetSi) at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and is a new Co-Chair of the Mathematical Epidemiology Subgroup.

Read our interview with Dr. Pant here. 

Editorial

By Olivia Chu

The Society for Mathematical Biology welcomes submissions to the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (BMB), the flagship journal of the Society. The SMB is continuing its longstanding relationship with Springer-Nature as the publisher of BMB for another 7 years. Here, we share and encourage you to read an Editorial by the current Editor-in-Chief of BMB, Matthew Simpson, President of the SMB and former Editor-in-Chief of BMB Reinhard Laubenbacher, and Chair of the SMB Publications Committee Jennifer Flegg on publishing in BMB. 

Featured Figure

By Sara Hamis

In this issue, we feature the work of Daniel Netherwood and co-authors in their recent paper, Accidental and Regulated Cell Death in Yeast Colony Biofilms.

We asked Dr. Netherwood to tell us a bit more about his work:

Netherwood et al. (2025) investigate how the mechanisms of accidental (e.g., necrotic) and regulated (e.g., apoptotic) cell death affect the expansion speed, morphology, and cell distribution of yeast colony biofilms. Motivated by their own experiments (see fig xx) using Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the baker’s yeast) colony biofilms grown on an agar substrate, Netherwood et al. (2025) propose a continuum model for yeast biofilm expansion involving a four-species system of nonlinear reaction–diffusion equations for the living yeast-cell density, the nutrient concentration, a species of cells that have died via accidental cell death (ACD) and a species of cells that have died via regulated cell death (RCD). Spatially one dimensional numerical solutions of this system are shown in figure (xx), where the predicted profiles for each of the four species are plotted as a function of the spatial coordinate $x$ (measured from the biofilm centre) in addition to the wave speed, each as the dimensionless rate of nutrient recovery induced by the RCD mechanism (\Gamma, a control parameter) is varied. For a parameter regime in which ACD is assumed to occur faster than RCD, qualitative agreement with the experiments is reached whereby at late time RCD cells are found to adopt a pulse-like profile following the film front, whilst the ACD cells are found to decay linearly from the biofilm centre towards the front. The wave speed is found to depend nonlinearly on the rate of nutrient recovery and agrees with the hypothesis that RCD can offer a survival advantage to the colony by increasing wave speed and hence enhancing the film's ability to invade and colonise the substrate on which it is growing. For details see Netherwood et al. (2025).