IAM-PIMS Distinguished Colloquium: Paul K. Newton

The talk will describe a recent mathematical/computational model for understanding aspects of cancer metastasis, initiated when primary tumor cells enter the vasculature and lymphatic system becoming circulating tumor cells (CTC's).  The model is based on a Markov chain dynamical system designed so that the transition matrix has as it's steady-state a `target' vector obtained from an autopsy data set.  The target vector, chosen for a given type of primary cancer (i.e. lung), contains the distribution of metastatic tumors from an ensemble population.