Royal Society Publishing

New issues of interest from Royal Society Publishing Philosophical Transactions A: 

Generative modelling meets Bayesian inference: a new paradigm for inverse problems compiled and edited by Alain Oliviero-Durmus, Yazid Janati, Eric Moulines, Marcelo Pereyra and Sebastian Reich and the articles can be accessed directly at www.bit.ly/TransA2299

Partial differential equations in data science organised and edited by Andrea L Bertozzi, Nadejda Drenska, Jonas Latz and Matthew Thorpe and the articles can be accessed directly here. 

A print version is also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org.

Upcoming Workshop

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce the third edition of the workshop on "Modelling Diffusive Systems: Theory and Applications" (MoDiS), which will take place at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute (ESI) in Vienna during the week 26-30 January 2026.

The list of speakers and the preliminary schedule are both available on the workshop website. There is a limited number of spots for additional participants - priority will be given to early-career researchers who are also encouraged to present a poster. In order to apply, please fill out the registration form available at this link by September 15.

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna!

Best,

Valeria Giunta, Annalisa Iuorio, Angelika Manhart, and Cinzia Soresina

People Section

By Ananth Srinivas

Dr. Binod Pant speaks with our new Newsletter Editor, Ananth Vedururu Srinivas. Binod is a postdoc at the Network Science Institute (NetSi) at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and is a new Co-Chair of the Mathematical Epidemiology Subgroup.

Read our interview with Dr. Pant here. 

Editorial

By Olivia Chu

The Society for Mathematical Biology welcomes submissions to the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (BMB), the flagship journal of the Society. The SMB is continuing its longstanding relationship with Springer-Nature as the publisher of BMB for another 7 years. Here, we share and encourage you to read an Editorial by the current Editor-in-Chief of BMB, Matthew Simpson, President of the SMB and former Editor-in-Chief of BMB Reinhard Laubenbacher, and Chair of the SMB Publications Committee Jennifer Flegg on publishing in BMB. 

Featured Figure

By Sara Hamis

In this issue, we feature the work of Daniel Netherwood and co-authors in their recent paper, Accidental and Regulated Cell Death in Yeast Colony Biofilms.

We asked Dr. Netherwood to tell us a bit more about his work:

Netherwood et al. (2025) investigate how the mechanisms of accidental (e.g., necrotic) and regulated (e.g., apoptotic) cell death affect the expansion speed, morphology, and cell distribution of yeast colony biofilms. Motivated by their own experiments (see fig xx) using Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the baker’s yeast) colony biofilms grown on an agar substrate, Netherwood et al. (2025) propose a continuum model for yeast biofilm expansion involving a four-species system of nonlinear reaction–diffusion equations for the living yeast-cell density, the nutrient concentration, a species of cells that have died via accidental cell death (ACD) and a species of cells that have died via regulated cell death (RCD). Spatially one dimensional numerical solutions of this system are shown in figure (xx), where the predicted profiles for each of the four species are plotted as a function of the spatial coordinate $x$ (measured from the biofilm centre) in addition to the wave speed, each as the dimensionless rate of nutrient recovery induced by the RCD mechanism (\Gamma, a control parameter) is varied. For a parameter regime in which ACD is assumed to occur faster than RCD, qualitative agreement with the experiments is reached whereby at late time RCD cells are found to adopt a pulse-like profile following the film front, whilst the ACD cells are found to decay linearly from the biofilm centre towards the front. The wave speed is found to depend nonlinearly on the rate of nutrient recovery and agrees with the hypothesis that RCD can offer a survival advantage to the colony by increasing wave speed and hence enhancing the film's ability to invade and colonise the substrate on which it is growing. For details see Netherwood et al. (2025).