The Biomathematics Research Group (BRG) was initiated by Juan B. Gutiérrez in 2012 at the University of Georgia (UGA). It grew from two students coming to office hours twice per week to a lab occupying half of historic Pound Hall at UGA, with up to 22 lab members. It transitioned to the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 2019. The BRG explores mathematical and computational models at multiple scales (from molecules to ecology).

For those outside academia (and even inside) it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the achievement. The BRG was a lab with modeling, robotics & information system capabilities consisting of a lab manager and nearly two dozen students from mathematics, bioinformatics, engineering, and computer science… created without startup funds. It was pure grit and 4 AM efforts submitting for years (and eventually winning) brutally competitive research proposals. It paid off; the BRG hit the grand-slam of research by 2016: NSF, NIH and DARPA, totaling $2.5M in sponsored research. The BRG graduated 8 Ph.D. students & 3 masters students in all the disciplines represented in the lab.

We devote a substantial portion of our resources to harmonization of heterogeneous data, and interoperability of distributed data repositories and computational facilities. The BRG has expertise in mathematical modeling using a wide array of techniques, data management of very large and heterogeneous biological data sets, software development from micro-controllers to super-computers, and hardware design. The long-term research goal of the BRG is to build a computational facility capable of quantifying biological processes across multiple scales.

Our current direction of research includes: (i) mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission (malaria, COVID-19, etc), (ii) methods to study and understand the epidemiology of infectious ideas (i.e. spread of misinformation), (iii) integration of multiple omic technologies (transcriptomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, proteomics, etc) capturing the dynamics of host-pathogen interactions into mathematical, computational, and statistical models, (iv) systems biology in multiple contexts, and (v) multi-scale epidemiology. The BRG has built a continuous computational pipeline to integrate multi-omic data, within-host dynamics (i.e. pathogen vs. immune system), vector dispersal, and human movement.

The BRG has been funded by the following sponsored projects:

• ALICE (Adaptive Learning for Interdisciplinary Learning Environments) (PI Gutierrez, co-PI Arnold, co-PI Portes) , 2016-2018, $299K, NSF award #1645325.
• Technologies for Host Resilience – Host Acute Models of Malaria to study Experimental Resilience (THoR’s HAMMER) (Co-PI Gutierrez, co-PI Tirouvanziam, PI Galinski) , 2016-2019, $1.9M subaward out of $6.5M, DARPA contract contract #W911NF-16-C-0008, 2016-2019.
• Collaborative Research: NSF INCLUDES: An Integrated Approach to Retain Underrepresented Minority Students in STEM Disciplines (Co-PI Gutierrez, PI Barbour), 2016-2018, $117K, NSF award 1649226.
• MaHPIC (Malaria Host-Pathogen Interaction Center) (Co-I Gutierrez, PI Galinski), 2012-2017, $19M, MaHPIC, NIAID contract #HHSN272201200031C.
• International Centers of Excellence in Malaria Research (ICEMR) – Center for non-Amazonian regions of Latin America (CLAIM) (Co-I Gutierrez, PI Herrera), 2011-2017, $140K subaward out of $5.5M, NIAID cooperative agreement #U19AI089702-01.