PhD Position F/M Mean-field modeling of coupled single-cell–population dynamics with intercellular communication

*Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais* **Type de contrat :** CDD **Niveau de diplôme exigé :** Bac + 5 ou équivalent **Fonction :** Doctorant **A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle** ------------------------------------------------------- *Created in 2008, the Inria Saclay Center is located at the heart of the Paris-Saclay scientific and technological excellence cluster, which alone accounts for 15% of French research. Serving the development of the Université Paris-Saclay and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, the Inria Saclay center employs 80 people in research support services and 500 scientists of 54 nationalities.* *Benefiting from continuous growth, the center now has a total of 42 project-teams and two in the process of being created, including 21 jointly with the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 16 with the Université Paris-Saclay, as well as 7 Inria EPs, including one in collaboration with Onera and one with the Pôle Universitaire Centre Val de Loire. These research teams are spread over more than ten sites.* **Contexte et atouts du poste** ------------------------------- The project is part of the ERC Starting Grant of Jakob Ruess (Lifeware team at Inria Saclay). Inria is the French national institute for research in computer science, control, and applied mathematics promoting scientific excellence and technology transfer. Within this project, we primarily work on the development of mathematical modeling approaches and statistical inference/estimation methods but we also collaborate with biologists to apply our methods to real data. Our main long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive methodological framework supporting the development of a quantitative understanding of biochemical processes inside single cells that are coupled to the dynamics of growing cell populations. Our research topics are at the intersection of mathematical biology, statistics, control engineering, and statistical physics applied to problems in biology. This job announcement is for a PhD position on the project. **Mission confiée** ------------------- The concrete goal of this position is to extend our exisiting modeling frameworks on coupled dynamics of single-cell and population processes with additional mechanisms that capture active cell-to-cell communication. **Principales activités** ------------------------- **Overview of the ERC Project:** Synthetic biology aims at engineering biochemical processes to supplement cells with artificial functionality. To this end, we design synthetic gene circuits that operate as dynamical systems inside cells and deploy methods from control engineering to regulate circuit functionality. A key problem in this is that biochemical processes inside single cells are inherently stochastic and create heterogeneity within cell populations that eventually leads to complex couplings between single-cell processes and population dynamics. It is thus difficult to quantitatively predict