Niall Mangan

Niall Mangan is an assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. She is also a Scientific Leader at the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB). Niall’s primary research goal is to connect the speed and automation of top-down, data-driven model selection methods with the explanatory power of bottom-up mechanistic modeling. Mechanistic modeling provides a powerful framework for systems design and optimization but relies on the sometimes slow integration of model development and experimental validation. Data science methods promise rapid, automated, descriptions and predictions for complex systems, generally without knowledge of underlying mechanisms. Statistics and information theory allow us to evaluate how well our models describe a system, given the data. By combining methods, Niall will rapidly develop explanatory mechanistic models and use them to optimize system performance and design engineering solutions. At NITMB, in addition to being a Scientific Leader for the Institute, Niall Mangan is a principal investigator on the NITMB-supported research project, “Inferring Models for Microbial Dynamics.”