Phase Transitions in Electrophysiological Systems at SIAM DS23

My colleague Dr. Yingjing Feng and I are organising and chairing a mini symposium on ‘Phase Transitions in Electrophysiological Systems’ at the upcoming SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems in Portland, USA on May 17 and 18, 2023. Delegates from five countries, spanning different career stages from Graduate students to Senior Professors will be giving talks at the symposium.

Phase transitions are ubiquitous in physiological processes and systems, for instance, the transition between quiescence and firing in neurons, rhythmic and arrhythmic oscillations in the heart and synchronous and asynchronous oscillations in a network of pancreatic cells. Many a time, these transitions are also indicative of the shift from a healthy state to disease. For instance, synchronous bursting of neurons may lead up to a seizure.

Approaches based on nonlinear dynamics and bifurcation theory have been imperative in improving our understanding of these transitions and developing techniques to detect an impending transition. As such, they find applications in seizure detection (neuroscience), cardiac arrhythmias (cardiology), and insulin secretion (endocrinology), to name a few.

The breadth of both approaches and applications motivated us to organise this mini symposium on the subject to enable cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques. We intend to provide a platform to present different approaches adopted in studying phase transitions and deliberate over their merits and limitations relative to different applications.

We look forward to meeting you all at Portland this May!