Recruiting beneficiary: University College Cork, Ireland
Internal supervisors: Prof. Sebastian Wieczorek, Dr. Kieran Mulchrone
Brief project description: In this project, we will identify key questions in the area of stability analysis in evolutionary games and build on the existing techniques from bifurcation theory, critical transitions theory, and network science to develop a new mathematical framework to study instabilities in evolutionary games. The focus will be on stability criteria for Nash and Stackelberg equilibria, and on critical transitions (tipping points) that are triggered by changing external conditions. The methods developed will be applied to identify:
Updates: The first half of the project focused on carcinogenesis, i.e. the onset of cancer respectively the transition from a healthy state to non-health one. Frank built a deterministic non-autonomous base model and combined it with a stochastic process. By choosing breast cancer as a case study and tuning the parameters of the model, the cumulative risk of breast cancer was replicated accordingly. The next step is to expand the deterministic base model with treatment and evolving resistance to investigate optimal treatment strategies against breast cancer.
Selected contributions:
Bastian, F., Alkhayuon, H., Mulchrone, K., and Wieczorek, S. (2024) Cancer model with moving extinction threshold reproduces breast cancer data. In preparation.
Bastian, F. (2024, April 16) A conceptual cancer development model with time-varying extinction threshold: Breast cancer case study [Talk]. Models in Population Dynamics, Ecology, and Evolution (MPDEE 24). Leicester, UK.
Bastian, F. (2024, July 16) A conceptual cancer development model with time-varying extinction threshold: Breast cancer case study [Talk]. Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution (MMEE 24). Vienna, Austria.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the
Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement number 955708.
