Dear All, We are delighted to present the MaPSS Seminar topic of Monday 10/04; please see the abstract below. **This Semester the Seminar will always run on Monday, at 5:00pm in 535A** Following the talk, there will be pizza on offer. Speaker: Hugh Ford (Sydney University) Title: Inflammation and PDEs Structured in Cellular Quantities Abstract: Macrophages are cells which rapidly populate inflamed tissue and clear pro-inflammatory material which enables the inflammatory response to resolve. Funnily, these cells eat their dead and recycle accumulated substances. When this cannibalistic cell population is expressed as a distribution (using PDEs) across accumulated substances, we observe that a substantial proportion of cells contain an extraordinary amount of material. This is due to biomagnification where accumulated substances increase in concentration along a chain of cells which have consumed at least one dead cell. Certain substances are cytotoxic in excess and induce necrotic (bad) cell death which sustains cell recruitment to the site of inflammation. This creates a positive feedback loop which sustains both cell recruitment and necrosis and hence amplifies inflammation in time. I will support and explore this theory using a non-local partial integro-differential equation whose steady state can be determined analytically. I will conclude with the analysis of a non-local partial differential equation which suggests that cell division/proliferation can halt biomagnification and promote inflammation resolution. Supervisors, please encourage your students to attend. Thanks, MaPSS Organizers