Invitation to the ICTP Colloquium by Prof. Mercedes Pascual, on "Hyper-diversity and negative frequency-dependent interactions in host-pathogen systems" on Wednesday 29 May 2024 at 14:00 hrs, Budinich Lecture Hall

[Infopoint]

Dear All,

You are most cordially invited to the I*CTP Colloquium by Prof. Mercedes 
Pascual*, New York University , on *"Hyper-diversity and negative 
frequency-dependent interactions in host-pathogen systems"*.

The Colloquium will take place (in presence) on Wednesday 29 May 2024 at 
14:00 hrs in the Budinich Lecture Hall.

*Biosketch: *Mercedes Pascual is a Professor of Biology and 
Environmental Studies at New York University, and an external faculty of 
the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Pascual is a theoretical ecologist 
interested in the population dynamics of infectious diseases, their 
response to changing environments and their interplay with pathogen 
diversity. She is also interested in the structure and dynamics of large 
interaction networks in ecology and epidemiology. Dr. Pascual received 
her Ph.D. degree from the joint program of the Woods Hole Oceanographic 
Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She was 
awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Alexander Hollaender Distinguished 
Postdoctoral Fellowship for studies at Princeton University, and a 
Centennial Fellowship in the area of Global and Complex Systems by the 
James S. McDonnell Foundation for her research at the University of 
Michigan.  She received the Robert H. MacArthur award from the 
Ecological Society of America. She is a fellow of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences. *
*

*Abstract: *How important are specific ecological interactions to the 
assembly of a diverse community of species? Can coexistence reflect 
instead neutral assembly, simply resulting from stochastic birth-death 
processes? What signatures in macroscopic diversity patterns can help us 
distinguish among these two explanations? These long-standing questions 
from Ecology and its interplay with Evolution, can be similarly asked at 
a different level of biological organization for strain diversity within 
a pathogen population. I do so here for the hyper-diverse malaria 
parasite Plasmodium falciparum in high-transmission regions. Strains 
compete for hosts as these acquire specific immune memory, which creates 
an advantage of the rare and a disadvantage of the common, resulting in 
negative frequency-dependent selection (NFDS). I show that networks 
describing patterns of limiting similarity can help us identify the 
importance of this non-neutral process to coexistence.  With a more 
analytically tractable PDE model, I further discuss implications of the 
positive feedback between diversity and transmission/competition 
intensity for resilience of the pathogen population. I end with brief 
mention of other microbial populations of large diversity under NFDS, 
and of other ecological systems to which similar ideas may apply.

More information can be found at the following link: 
https://indico.ictp.it/event/10714/

The Colloquium will be livestreamed on www.ictp.it/livestream

Light refreshments will be served on the Leonardo Building Terrace at 
the end of the talk.

Looking forward to your participation.

With best regards,

Director's Office, ICTP


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