Title: Modeling Dynamical Biological Systems:  DNA Helices, Semistructured Proteins, and Stem Cell Populations

Background:  Mike Colvin is Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of California at Merced, a new campus that admitted its first graduate students in the Fall of 2004 and undergraduates in 2005.  Prior to going to Merced, Professor Colvin was head of the Computational Biology Group in the Biology and Biological Research Program at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.  At Merced, Colvin is Director of the University of California-Merced Center for Computational Biology (UCM-CCB).

The UCM-CCB is a research and education center at the first new research university of the 21st century, the University of California in Merced, California. The UCM-CCB sponsors multidisciplinary scientific projects in which biological understanding is guided by computational modeling. The Center also facilitates the development and dissemination of undergraduate and graduate course materials based on the latest research in computational biology. Under Mike Colvin's leadership, the Center is undertaking a number of activities that aim to recast biology as an information science:

• Hosting multidisciplinary research projects in computational and mathematical biology that will provide a rich environment for graduate and undergraduate research.
• Developing new mathematical and computational methods that are widely applicable to predictive modeling in the life sciences.
• Developing and disseminating computational biology course materials that translate new research results into educational resources.
• Extending the successes in achieving these objectives to other universities and "university-feeder" institutions such as community  colleges.