Course - Quantitative viral dynamics across scales

This one week workshop is part of a series of winter schools organized by PSL and its Qlife program in quantitative biology and taught at the Ecole normale supérieure.

Description

Viral infections transform the fate of cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has revealed how rapidly an emerging viral disease can spread within hosts and between individuals in a connected population - with devastating consequences. In response, quantitative modelling has become a key component of response efforts : shaping the rationale for non-pharmaceutical interventions, helping to structure and implement novel mitigation strategies, and providing a glimpse of how immunity, transmission, and evolution converge in shaping a potential transition to post-pandemic dynamics. The quantitative foundations that have helped shape these models share common themes with a growing range of quantitative approaches to explore viral infections of organisms across the spectrum of life’s diversity - from humans to microbes. Indeed, quantitative models of viral dynamics often focus on linkages between scales, e.g., how host state (including immune state) shapes organismal-level outcomes, how the organismal fate of infection shapes population dynamics, and how joint evolutionary dynamics of viruses and hosts can lead to distinct imprints on the relatedness structure of propagating lineages.

The workshop will intentionally focus on organizing principles of multi-scale dynamics spanning both epidemiology (primarily the dynamics of viral infections in humans) and ecology (primarily the dynamics of viral infections in bacteria).

The workshop will provide

• The conceptual basis for understanding viral impacts across scales
• Quantitative methods for analysing within and between host spread
• Computational toolkits to integrate robust quantitative methods into research practice

For the digital practical, the students will have to choose between two series:

1. Ecology
2. Epidemic

Keywords

Digital practical, quantitative viral dynamics, cellular infection, within-host dynamics, population dynamics, evolutionary dynamics, impacts on ecosystems

Application (deadline January 7th, 2021):

The winter school is limited to 24 participants. It is open to M2 students and PhD students, as well as postdocs, engineers and junior scientists with backgrounds in biology, physics, computer science or mathematics. Some coding ability in R or Python is required.

A Covid-19 sanitary pass might be required to attend the course depending on the sanitary situation

Registration fees: 150 € for academic participants. It covers food and lodging. Some travel grants will be available.

1) Register through the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/LE54VuVmn9
2) and provide a CV, a motivation letter (including justification for travel grant if requested) and a supporting letter from a supervisor to qlife.events@psl.eu with “Qlife winter VirDyn school 2022 – LASTNAME” as object.