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Olivia Chu (Bryn Mawr College), Ryan Murphy (University of South Australia), Ananth Srinivas (LSU Health New Orleans), and Sara Hamis (Uppsala University).
We apologize for our brief hiatus, but we are back with this Spring 2026 newsletter and some exciting bonus material to come - stay tuned!
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News - updates from:
- People - Interview with Greg Rempala and Hye-Won Kang, chair and vice-chair of the new Reaction Networks subgroup
- Editorial - SMB Annual Meeting and engaging with SMB
- Featured Figure - Kira Pugh, Uppsala University
- In our next issue...
To see 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 Summer, so if you would like to contribute, please send an email to the editors by the start of June 2026 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.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the newsletter!
Olivia, Ryan, Ananth, and Sara
Editors, SMB Newsletter
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News Section
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By Olivia Chu
In this issue of the News section, we highlight the updates from the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (BMB) and our SMB Subgroups. Read on below.
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From BMB
SMB Subgroup Updates
Reaction Networks
As a newly established subgroup within the Society for Mathematical Biology (launched in January of this year), we wanted to highlight a few items—particularly since this is our first opportunity to communicate with the broader SMB community.
We have several upcoming activities:
- As part of introducing the subgroup, we note that we are organizing multiple minisymposia at the 2026 SMB Annual Meeting (joint with ECMTB in Graz), highlighting recent advances in reaction network theory and applications.
- We would also like to highlight the upcoming CRNT 2026 conference at the University of Hawaii (May 17–22, 2026), which will be of strong interest to our community
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- In addition, we have just launched our official subgroup website, which provides information on our scope, activities, and resources:
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We are very much looking forward to growing the subgroup and contributing to SMB activities in the coming years.
Immunobiology and Infection
The IMMU subgroup is excited to announce the results of our most recent elections. Jason Shoemaker, University of Pittsburgh, was elected as subgroup Chair and Tin Phan, Los Alamos National Laboratory, was elected as subgroup Secretary. Congrats to both! Jason and Tin will start their terms at the upcoming annual meeting. Keep a look out for announcements about IMMU social activities in Graz.
Mathematical Oncology
- Call for Co-Chair Self Nominations: The terms of two of the three Mathematical Oncology Co-Chairs expire this summer. An election will be held to identify two new co-chairs to serve alongside Rebecca Bekker. If you are interested in serving as MathOnco co-chair from 2026-2028, you can self-nominate here. Nominations will be due by Friday, April 24th.
- The Mathematical Oncology Subgroup is pleased to announce its inaugural annual awards for outstanding early career researchers. These awards will recognize exceptional work at the graduate and postdoctoral levels (or equivalent) within the field of mathematical oncology. Details, including the self-nomination form, are available at: Mathematical Oncology - Call for Award Nominations. If you are an earlier career researcher giving a talk (in a mini-symposium or a contributed session) at the 2026 Annual Meeting in Graz, we encourage you to apply. If there is a member of your group who fits the criteria, please encourage them to apply! The deadline is Friday, May 1st.
Upcoming Annual Meeting
The Annual Meeting, held jointly by SMB and ESMTB, will take place July 13-17, 2026 at the University of Graz in Austria. For more information, see the conference website.
Note that early bird registration ends on April 30th!
Check out Ananth Srinivas's Editorial about the annual meeting below.
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People Section
By Sara Hamis
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Read our interview with Professors Greg Rempala (The Ohio State University) and Hye-Won Kang (UMBC), the chair and vice-chair of the newly-finalized Reaction Networks subgroup.
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Editorial
By Ananth Srinivas
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Upcoming Annual Meeting
Read Ananth's Editorial on the SMB Annual Meeting, all it offers, and what it means to the SMB community here.
Engaging with SMB
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The SMB board will produce a monthly webinar series using the Springer-Nature platform Cassyni. See here for a description of what this is.
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Listen to the SMB Podcast, Biology in Numbers, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
- Follow us on social media
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Featured Figure
By Ryan Murphy
Dr. Pugh tells us more about the article below:
In this study, we take a step back and look at mathematical oncology from a science-of-science perspective. Specifically, we use bibliometrics—the statistical analysis of publication metadata—to study how the field has developed over time. We were especially motivated to do this because, while there are many excellent literature reviews of mathematical oncology, there are few bibliometric studies. As a result, there is limited quantitative understanding of how the research field and community have evolved. Such insights can, for example, help inform research communication, funding allocation, and education strategies.
To ground our work in mathematical biology, we identify journals that have consistently published mathematical oncology research and collect publication metadata from bibliographic databases. We then investigate interdisciplinarity, international collaboration, and trending topics through discipline-based citation flows (left panel), global author connectivity (middle panel), and word frequencies (right panel).
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Our results demonstrate that mathematical oncology has changed substantially since the 1960s, becoming more internationally connected, more collaborative, and more diverse in the topics it studies. The field remains strongly interdisciplinary, interacting closely with the life sciences while continuing to be cited in mathematics journals. In this sense, paraphrasing Reed (2015), our results suggest that mathematical biology is good for both the biological and mathematical sciences.
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