Speaker
Description
This talk aims at opening a debate on i) how to address important challenges in predicting microbial community dynamics and ii) how to leverage state-of-the-art ecology to control microbial community dynamics.
I will begin with a brief overview of the dynamics of natural communities in terms of stability in composition and functions, fluctuations, and response to perturbations. Next, I will review recent contributions to understanding community dynamics from statistical physics, systems biology, and experimental approaches.
Then I will highlight some remaining gaps between these fields and motivate a few questions for discussions. How do dynamical regimes (e.g. competition-based vs stochasticity-driven) affect the evolution of community members? How do we move from a statistical understanding to predicting, perhaps controlling, the dynamics of specific communities? How can we leverage transitions between dynamical regimes for specific applications--such as fighting the spread of antibiotic resistance?
