Our Colloquium series offers a diverse platform for research scholars, faculty, students, and industry experts to share and exchange ideas, fostering discussion and networking across mathematics, statistics, and data science.
Professor Junping Shi from College of William & Mary will speak at this week's colloquium on "Reaction-diffusion models for animal movement with spatial memory and nonlocal advection."
Abstract: Animal populations often self-organize into territorial structure from movements and interactions of individual animals. Spatial memory is one of the cognitive processes that may affect the movement and navigation of the animals. We will review several mathematical approaches of animal spatial movements: (i) reaction-diffusion-advection model with time-delayed memory-based movement; and (ii) reaction-diffusion-advection model with a non-local advection term driven by a cognitive map representing memory of past animal locations embedded in the environment. The well-posedness of models and bifurcation of spatiotemporal patterns will be discussed.
Speaker Bio: Junping Shi is a Professor of Mathematics at the College of William & Mary. He studied mathematics at Nankai University of China from 1990 to 1993 and received his PhD in mathematics from Brigham Young University in 1998. His research areas include nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations, bifurcation theory, and mathematical biology. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2003. Dr. Shi served as Chair of the Mathematics Department at William & Mary in 2018-2022 and also in 2025, and he was the director of William & Mary NSF EXTREEMS-QED program in 2013-2019. He has published more than 190 papers which have been cited more than 11000 times on Google Scholar.
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