Hi! I'm a mathematician specializing in mathematical biology and stochastic physics. I'm also interested in novel methods of mathematics education for non-STEM related students. And I'm a level 3.0 tennis player (so, needs improvement)!
If you're a biologist here to use one of our models to quantify your assay results, check out Webtools above!
BTW, the picture and sculpture of an HIV virus above is by Luke Jerram and you can find more of his work
here.
As a mathematical biologist, I'm fundamentally attracted to the unique and interesting mathematics that characterize biological systems. More specifically, I'm fascinated by problems that are fundamentally stochastic in nature, often arising in small numbers of interacting agents. Thus my mathematical interests fall under stochastic processes, combinatorics, mathematical physics, and statistical mechanics. This has led me to biological problems in emergent swarms, virus dynamics, chromatin folding, molecular evolution, and the physics of biological assays.
HIV Infection: I'm interested in quantitatively modeling the dynamics of HIV infection and treatment. Specific work includes kinetic models of receptor/coreceptor mediated viral entry, quantifying fusion inhibitor efficacy, and the stochasticity of HIV latency and recovery under anti-viral treatment.
Physics of Biological Assays: Many biological assays can be sensitive to stochastic and combinatoric effects, especially when these protocols involve small numbers of viruses, ligands, receptors, etc. I've created stochastic models of viral infection to inform new analysis techniques for infectivity assays such as the plaque assay, endpoint dilution assay, and luciferase reporter assay. Furthermore, I derived a kinetic model of fluorescent antibody binding in the FACS protocol and developed an automatic gating procedure to increase confidence in flow cytometry data.
Emergence: Biological swarms, molecular evolution (SELEX).
Polymer Physics: X-chromosome inactivation, membrane pore transport.
Publications
- Mistry, B.A., Chou, T. Nonspecific Probe Binding and Automatic Gating in Flow Cytometry and Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS). Mathematical Biosceinces and Engineering. 16(5):4477-4490. 2019.(link)
- Mistry, B.A., D’Orsogna, M.R., Chou, T. The Effects of Statistical Multiplicity of Infection on Virus Quantification and Infectivity Assays. Biophysical Journal. 114(12):2974–2985. 2018.(link)
- Mistry, B., D’Orsogna, M.R., Webb, N.E., Lee, B., and Chou, T. Quantifying Sensitivity of HIV-1 Viral Entry to Receptor and Coreceptor Expression through Kinetic Models. Journal of Physical Chemistry B. 120(26):6189–6199. 2016.(link)
This is about my teaching.