Seminar Series continues featuring Curt Holmer on Oct. 16th
The fall semester Brown Bag Seminar Series features graduate students providing presentations on their current research or recent internships. The series continues on Wednesday, October 16th, featuring online grad student Curt Holmer presenting “Bio-Regenerative Life Support in Space and Its Long-Term Stability Analysis”
About the topic:
Closed loop biological systems are an attempt to duplicate and simplify the complex system of interdependent food webs that make up our environment. Understanding the makeup of these webs with their interdependencies is a complex and lengthy process as we have seen with such large scale experiments with Biosphere2 , Bios-3, and CEEF not to mention the entire field of environmental studies. Small scale, direct dependence closed loop systems have been proven for both short and long periods of time as we have seen with BioPLEX, MELiSSA, and CEBAS experiments and the commercial EcoSphere products. When the dependencies and factors are known and understood, as with CEBAS and EcoSpheres, creating a stable environment with known measuring points can be easily accomplished.
However as the larger experiments have shown, more complex environments are attempted, stability issues arise giving way to critical transitions, which are sudden and often irreversible, leading the collapse of the system.
Given the time and scale required to test these dependencies and conditions, knowing the precursors of an impending transition or being able to predict critical transitions in these systems is highly desirable. Generalized models can achieve this and may even reduce the amount of time series data required to validate the stability of a given system. Drawing on recent research from the biological, environmental, and systems fields, a generalized framework model can be constructed to generate early warnings of critical transitions. This presentation will focus on how these critical transition thresholds can be identified and how Ordinary Differential Equations can be used to monitor for these transition signs as part of a general model.
This series of presentations will be held in the Space Studies Library at noon. Lunch will be served.
Those unable to attend in person may view the live webcast via Connect-Pro: http://connect.aero.und.edu/r891nws19xs/ Sign in as a guest or use your Connect-Pro log-in. This series is only available live, and will not be recorded for later viewing. Online students are encouraged to attend if possible.
For information on the Brown Bag Seminar Series, please contact Space Studies faculty member Dr. Vadim Rygalov.