EVENTS

Seminar: Stochastic modeling and inference in nanoscale biophysics (Samuel Kou)

Seminar

Department of Statistics

Thursday, 8 October 2009 at 3:30PM

Sidney Smith Hall, Room 1086

Stochastic modeling and inference in nanoscale biophysics

Professor Samuel Kou

Harvard University

Recent advances in nanotechnology allow scientists to follow a biological process on a single molecule basis. These advances also raise many challenging stochastic modeling and statistical inference problems. First, by zooming in on single molecules, recent nanoscale experiments reveal that some classical stochastic models derived from oversimplified assumptions are no longer valid. Second, the stochastic nature of the experimental data and the presence of latent processes much complicate the statistical inference. In this talk we will use the modeling of enzymatic reaction and the inference of DNA hairpin kinetics to illustrate the statistical and probabilistic challenges in single-molecule biophysics.