The digital twin concept has its origins in industry. One industrial equipment manufacturer advertised its digital twin capabilities to its customers as ”No unplanned downtime” for its products. There is a compelling aspirational analog in healthcare: ’No unplanned doctor visits.” Of course, the challenges of building digital twins for human patients are incomparably greater than for machinery. Nonetheless, there are now several instances of what might be called digital twins in medicine, and many more ongoing development projects. Aside from our incomplete understanding of human biology, relative sparseness of data characterizing human patients, and logistical difficulties in implementing computational models in healthcare, there are many mathematical and computational problems that need to be solved. Examples include calibration and validation of multiscale, hybrid, stochastic computational models, forecasting algorithms, and optimal control methods. This talk will describe some of these problems and outline a mathematical research program for the field.

Bio: Dr. Laubenbacher joined the University of Florida in May 2020 as a professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. He is the director of the Laboratory for Systems Medicine. Prior to joining UF, he served as director of the Center for Quantitative Medicine and Professor in the Department of Cell Biology in the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Concurrently, he held an appointment as Professor of Computational Biology at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. He is a fellow of AAAS, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and the American Mathematical Society. Since 2016, he serves as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the flagship journal of the Society for Mathematical Biology. Dr. Laubenbacher is a mathematician by training, and his broad research interests lie in computational and mathematical systems biology, with applications to human health. Most of his research is in collaboration with a broad spectrum of scientists and clinicians.

See all upcoming talks at https://www.anl.gov/mcs/lans-seminars