Dr. Jeungeun Park, State University of New York at New Paltz
Abstract: Bacterial swimming mediated by flagellar rotation is one of the most ubiquitous forms of cellular locomotion, and it plays a major role in many biological processes. A typical swimming path of flagellated bacteria looks like a random walk with no purpose, but the random movement becomes modified as environmental conditions change. Modified random movement is particularly characterized by their motility pattern or a combination of their swimming modes. Further, such individual swimming patterns characterize the collective behavior of a population of the bacteria. In this talk, we present several distinct motility patterns exhibited by bacterial species. We also discuss how to analyze the collective behavior of bacteria from the individual swimming pattern, particularly, by using an example of E. coli’s swimming behavior in response to chemical signals. This talk is based on two joint works with Zahra Aminzare (Univ. of Iowa) and Yongsam Kim (Chung-Ang Univ.), Wanho Lee (National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, South Korea) and Sookkyung Lim (Univ. of Cincinnati).
Bio: Dr. Park newly joined the department of Mathematics at State University of New York at New Paltz as an Assistant Professor this semester. She is interested in modeling bacterial chemotaxis and analyzing pattern formations. Recently, Dr. Park has been working on modeling swimming behavior of flagellated bacteria at the microscopic and macroscopic levels.