Foundations and Current Trends

This is the 2nd installment of the new Gordon Research Conference. The meeting is to introduce the foundations for stochastic dynamical descriptions of living processes, and to discuss the trend of current biomedical research, which reveals cellular molecular fluctuations, nonlinear feedbacks, and emergent behaviors at different time scales. It brings together a group of scientists to help establish an emerging new discipline. Researchers will discuss fundamental questions, approaches, and principles relating to how cells function, develop and evolve in the presence of noise and fluctuations at the mesoscopic systems. Emergent phenomenon is a key to understand many of such stochastic systems. A part of the meeting focuses on the current experimental and theoretical areas such as fluctuation measurements and stochastic thermodynamics. It also displays a wide range of new developments and approaches in the application of stochastic measurements and analysis to biological systems and processes. We particularly focus on cellular level gene expression, biochemistry, mechanics, and spatial dynamics, as well as the role of nonlinearity, and their relations to evolution theory. The meeting will help in supporting interdisciplinary research at the interface between physical, biological sciences, and mathematics.