The grant supports Ryu's travel to work with Dr. Susanna Röblitz at the University of Bergen in Norway on her research project, "A Population Model of Macrophage Differentiation in the Tumor Microenvironment."
Assistant Professor Hwayeon Ryu from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics was awarded a highly-competitive Mentoring Travel Grant of $5,000 from the Association for Women in Mathematics with pass-through funds from the National Science Foundation. It is the second time she received this travel award.
This grant will support her travel expenses to work with Susanna Röblitz at the University of Bergen in Norway on her proposed project, “A Population Model of Macrophage Differentiation in the Tumor Microenvironment” for the month of June 2025.
The proposed project on macrophage differentiation process builds on their successful collaboration as well demonstrated in the recently published papers (both appeared in Journal of Theoretical Biology), while further helping them expand previous studies into a new direction. Specifically, in the first paper, they developed a model for macrophage polarization in a single-cell level, which was the first solid step to better understand the regulatory signaling dynamics of macrophages at population level in a realistic tumor microenvironment. In the following study, they have extended the previous model to analyze the stochastic behaviors of macrophage dynamics.
The Association for Women in Mathematics is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The objective of the Mentoring Travel Grants is to help junior women develop a long-term working and mentoring relationship with a senior mathematician. This relationship should help the junior mathematician to establish her research program. Applicants for mentoring travel grants may,in exceptional cases, receive up to two such grants throughout their careers before receiving tenure.
In 2020, Ryu received this grant for the first time with a plan to visit in summer 2021 but her visit could not be made until June 2023 due to COVID-19 restrictions. With the second-time grant support, Ryu hopes to expand their work beyond the scope of the previous studies by exploring a new direction based on agent-based modeling.