Mathematical Biology Education: Changes, Communities, Connections, and Challenges

Abstract

Mathematical biologists have been leaders in many of the programmatic efforts over the past 60 years to reform both mathematics and biology education. This issue brings together a review of initiatives that have been particularly effective as well as addressing challenges that we need to face.In planning the issue, we discussed how the variety of methods to cover mathematics for biology students have changed since the Cullowhee Conference on Training in Biomathematics held in 1961 at Western Carolina (see Rashevsky 1962) and the NRC/NAS publication of Bio 2010. When Bio 2010 initially appeared, a special conference at NIH organized by MAA brought together three funders: NSF, NIH, and HHMI to address the challenges and an edited collection of responses appeared in book format: "Math and Bio 2010: linking undergraduate disciplines" (2005) edited by Steen. Since the re-activation of the Educational Committee of the Society for Mathematical Biology in 1996, authors have been invited to submit educational articles to the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, but this is the first special issue on education. The timing for this issue is propitious because it has been ten years since a National Academy of Sciences symposium celebration of the NRC/NAS ( 2003) publication Bio 2010. While three major publications resulted from that symposium: (1) a special issue of cbe Life Science Education (2010) edited by Jungck and Marsteller; (2) a special issue of Mathematical Modelling of Natural Phenomena (2011) edited by Jungck and Schwartz; and (3) Undergraduate Mathematics for the Life Sciences: Models, Processes, and Directions (2013) edited by Ledder, Carpenter, and Comar, there has been a significant change in the past decade and many resources were not described in

Current trends and perspectives in mathematical biology

“…In mathematical biology education more generally, there has been an enormous spectrum of initiatives and considerable changes in the past 1-2 decades. An impressive collection of these changes are summarised in the review by Jungck et al (2020). Many, if not most, major research universities now have courses on mathematical biology; some universities even offer degree programmes in this area.…”

Fascination with Fluctuation: Luria and Delbrück’s Legacy

“…Much has been written in the last two decades about the need for substantive curriculum restructuring as a way for educating the "quantitative biologists" of the future (see, e.g., [2][3][4]). It has also been emphasized that in order to acquire a toolbox of diverse mathematical problem-solving approaches appropriate to answer important questions in modern biology, mathematics education needs to change as well and incorporate more applied quantitative problems [5].…”