"Competitive exclusion for selection-mutation models with discrete or continuous trait spaces: A unifying measure-valued modeling approach"

Friday, March 31, 2017 The event started -2553 days ago

3:00 PM 4:00 PM

Shelby Center

Room 218

As part of the Mathematical Sciences Colloquium Series Dr. Azmy S. Ackleh, Devon Endowed Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the College of Sciences at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette will present her talk "Competitive exclusion for selection-mutation models with discrete or continuous trait spaces:  A unifying measure-valued modeling approach".

Competitive interactions between organisms play a significant role in structuring ecological communities. The questions of when do competing species coexist and when do they exclude each other have long intrigued both ecologists and mathematicians. In 1932, Gause formulated the well-known Competitive Exclusion Principle, which states that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist if other ecological factors are constant.  Thereafter, experiments and mathematical models (beginning with the Lotka-Volterra model) have been used to support or violate this tenet.  Recently efforts have been devoted to understanding this phenomenon in selection-mutation models in which individuals are distributed over a phenotypical trait space and compete with one another.  In this talk, a few recent selection-mutation models formulated using discrete or continuous trait spaces will be reviewed.  Then, a measure-valued selection-mutation modeling approach will be presented. This approach has the advantage of combining models with discrete or continuous trait spaces under one formulation. The long-time behavior of solutions of this measure-valued model is discussed and competitive exclusion or coexistence between traits is demonstrated.  

Dr. Azmy S. Ackleh is the Dean of the College of Sciences and the Devon Endowed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Ackleh received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1993. He then joined the Center of Research in Scientific Computation at North Carolina State University as a postdoctoral fellow until 1995 where he became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and rose through the ranks to become a Full Professor in 2003. In 2007 he received the University Distinguished Professor award and was selected to become the R.P. Authement Eminent Scholar and Endowed Chair in Computational Mathematics. From 2011-2013 he served as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has been serving as the Dean of the College of Science since 2013.

Dr. Ackleh’s research is in the areas of Mathematical Biology with particular emphasis on population ecology and epidemiology. He is interested in the development of continuous and discrete models to describe the dynamics of populations and in using mathematical tools to understand the short-term and long-term behavior of solutions to these models. Particular applications that he has worked on include selection-mutation models, amphibian dynamics, the competitive interaction between blue and yellow irises, and the impact of oil spills on marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico. He served as the PI or Co-PI on more than $8M in external research funding. He mentored 3 postdocs and served as the major advisor for15 Ph.D. students and is currently directing two more. 


Details

Category
Conference/Lecture
department
College of Science, Department of Mathematical Sciences
Audience
Public, Students, Faculty and Staff, Alumni

Contact

Tamara Lang 256.824.6400 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Venue

Shelby Center

301 Sparkman DriveHuntsville, AL 35899

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