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The 2025 Karl Menger Lecture and Activities

April 10-11, 2025

Featured Speaker:

, Bren Professor of Computational Biology, California Institute of Technology

Title: 

A Mathematical Tour of the Molecular Biology of the Cell

Abstract: 

Recent technological advancements in genomics have enabled genome-wide measurements of transcriptional dynamics in cells, providing exceptional resolution for mathematical models in systems biology. I will survey the mathematical foundations of these models and theories, highlighting key discoveries and open problems at the intersection of mathematics and molecular biology.

Speaker bio:

Lior Pachter was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa where he attended . After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from in 1994, He left for where he was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics in 1999. He then moved to the where he was a postdoctoral researcher (1999-2001), assistant professor (2001-2005), associate professor (2005-2009), and until 2018 the Raymond and Beverly Sackler professor of computational biology and professor of mathematics and molecular and cellular biology with a joint appointment in computer science. Since January 2017 he has been the Bren professor of computational biology at Caltech.

His research interests span the mathematical and biological sciences, and he has authored over 100 research articles in the areas of algorithms, combinatorics, comparative genomics, algebraic statistics, molecular biology and evolution. He has taught a in mathematics, computational biology and genomics. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology and has been awarded a , a , the , and a for the successful technology transfer of widely used sequence alignment software developed in his group.

He is married to and has daughters.

Made possible with the generous support of the Menger family; Department of Applied Mathematics, Illinois Institute of Technology; and the Menger Fund.

The 2025 Menger Distinguished Lecture will be available for live streaming:

Karl Menger Research Seminar by Lior Pachter

Thursday April 10, 10 a.m., Robert A. Pritzker Science Center Rm 111

Speaker: , Bren Professor of Computational Biology, California Institute of Technology

Title: Applications and implications of spectral neural approximations of  the chemical master equation 

Abstract: I will discuss the use of neural networks to approximate steady state solutions of bivariate distributions arising from the chemical master equation for the RNA life cycle, and, in turn, the application of such fast solvers to modeling genomics data with variational autoencoders. 

Coffee/Tea to follow in RE 112/114.

2025 Activities Schedule