The 2025 Karl Menger Lecture and Activities
April 10-11, 2025
Featured Speaker:
Lior Pachter, 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 Pretoria Boys High School. After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech in 1994, He left for MIT where he was awarded a PhD in applied mathematics in 1999. He then moved to the University of California at Berkeley 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 wide range of courses in mathematics, computational biology and genomics. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology and has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Miller Professorship, and a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for the successful technology transfer of widely used sequence alignment software developed in his group.
He is married to Ingileif B. Hallgrímsdóttir and has three 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: Lior Pachter, 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
| Thursday, April 10 | ||
| 10–11:15 a.m. | Research seminar | Robert A. Pritzker Science Center Rom 111 |
| Friday, April 11 | ||
| 12:45–1:45 p.m. | Undergraduate session with Menger speaker | RE 258 |
| 2–3 p.m. | Campus tour | |
| 3:15–4:30 p.m. | AMAT faculty research overviews | MTCC Auditorium |
| 4:30–5:45 p.m. | Poster exhibit | RE Atrium |
| 6–7:15 p.m. | Menger lecture | MTCC Auditorium |
| 7:15–7:30 p.m. | Awards ceremony | MTCC Auditorium |
| 7:30–9 p.m. | Reception and alumni networking | MTCC Pritzker Club |
