Title: The Tumor-Immune Interaction: Pieces of a Multiscale Story

Abstract:

One of the most important advances in cancer research over recent years has been the renewed excitement regarding using the immune system to attack malignant cells. Understanding and managing the battle between adaptive immunity and the tumor is a complex multiscale problem, involving the molecular biophysics of immune recognition, the cellular processes of direct checkpoint-dependent evasion, and the ecological dynamics of the microenvironmental milieu. This talk will highlight some of our recent attempts to analyze pieces of this problem and to begin to assemble these pieces into a coherent picture.

About the speaker:

Herbert Levine is a University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Bioengineering at Northeastern University. He is also the co-director of a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center devoted to theoretical biological physics. He earned his Ph.D. and an M.A. in physics from Princeton University and a B.S. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For several decades, he has been an acknowledged leader in applying methods from physical science to diverse living systems – self-organization of bacterial colonies, directed motion of eukaryotic cells, biophysical modeling of cancer progression and metastasis, and tumor-immune interactions. He spent 25 years on the faculty of UCSD before moving to Rice University in 2012. He has served as an Associate Editor of Biophysical Journal and as the Editor-in-Chief of Physical Biology. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society (APS), and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) & National Academy of Sciences (NAS).