Smith @ Tomorrow's Mathematician Today 2013

Robyn Smith, a third year MMath student, has had her abstract selected for presentation at the Tomorrow’s Mathematician Today 2013 Conference.  The conference will be held on Saturday 16 February at the University of Greenwich, and is sponsored by IMA and GCHQ.  Robyn’s talk will be based on her summer 2012 research project on “Game Theory Models of Bone Cancer” which was funded by an EPSRC Vacation Bursary and supervised by Anne Skeldon.  An abstract of her talk is as follows.  Multiple Myeloma is a type of blood cancer which develops in the bone.  The presence of Multiple Myeloma cells can disrupt the balance of other cells in the bone marrow environment.  Evolutionary game theory is used to model the new frequencies of cells and determine how to resolve the balance to a healthy level.  Using evolutionary game theory, the interactions between cells can be analysed to identify Evolutionary Stable States (ESS).  This describes how the cancer will progress in a patient.  Further analysis reveals how changing entries in  the payoff matrix alters the ESS and in particular how to create ESS which are free of cancer cells.