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BEER-X: The 10th Anniversary of the International Symposium for Biomathematics and Ecology, Education and Research

The International Symposium for Biomathematics and Ecology, Education and Research celebrated it's tenth anniversary this weekend. BEER-X was held at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, home of the new Center for Biomathematics Collaborative Studies and the Intercollegiate Biomathematics Alliance (IBA).

For those that do not know, IBA is an institutional partnership consortium whish allows schools to access each other's personnel and academic resources. This allows small schools and centers to offer synchronously streamed Biomathematics courses to consortium members. It also allows institutions to bring research experiences to their students by hosting a hybrid virtual and in person summer research experience, access to computing facilities, and provides discounts to BEER conference registration and publication in Spora or Letters in Biomathematics.

QUBES has been a Partner with IBA since the conception of the QUBES community. Our Leadership Teams regularly collaborate on Biomathematics education initiatives. The cleverly acronymed BEER QUBES symposium has been organized by QUBES as the annual BEER meeting for 4 consecutive years now.

This year's minisymposium was on teaching discrete modeling - Calculus-free approaches to teaching modeling for biology. We opened with Dr. Dmitry Kondrashov of the University of Chicago who shared his love of Markov models with us.  You can learn more about his book here (link). Then we got our ducks in a row with Dr. Holly Gaff of Old Dominion University who engaged us in fun hands on activities which she uses for graduate students. She is running and FMN right now on hands-on activities on qubeshub.org (link). Dr. Erin Bodine talked about discrete modeling as approachable for students with only high school mathematics pre-requisites. Dr. Bodine is also starting an FMN soon and she has generously shared course materials here (link). Lastly, QUBES postdoc, Dr. Gaby Hamerlinck, talked a little about upcoming QUBES events, where to find more information, and our new site redesign project.

 
 

Thanks for sharing another amazing BEER conference with us!

PS… if you find QUBES near you, ask us for a sticker! Carrie had fun giving QUBES stickers to all our QUBES Community members. :)

 

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