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Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging/IngridvdLeemput

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Notes by user Ingrid vd Leemput (Wageningen Univ.) for Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

The workshop was a good mix of theoretical and practical insights on resilience in human aging. I see a lot of parallels with the work we do on ecological resilience, and I think we could learn a lot from each other. One of the things I noticed is the different definitions of resilience used (and other semantics), which may become confusing. It would be good to make an overview of the different definitions, and to not invent new words for the same concept.

To really get a proper understanding, and to develop well-grounded indicators of the system dynamics and resilience, a combination of the different presented methods would make a lot of sense. This ideal path in my opinion would be 1) for each 'sub-system', to develop a solid idea of the large-scale feedbacks and dynamics, and develop a mechanistic model based on that, taking into account temporal and spatial scale. This should lead to some idea on the stability, and dynamics of the particular sub-system: is the sub-system expected to have alternative stable states/ tipping points/ oscillating dynamics/ chaos/ flickering/ spiraling? 2) This basic understanding should lead to hypotheses on what type of indicators of resilience could be useful and realistic (e.g. perform stress tests, measure DIORs, potential analysis etc) 3) These hypotheses should be tested both in the field, and in more realistic, fully parameterized models, as presented by Alfons Hoekstra.

I enjoyed the talk by Porter a lot. On one hand, it touched me personally, to see how resilience these communities can be after so much suffering, but also it reminded to think about what makes a system more resilient? We talked about feedbacks a lot, but not so much about other relevant factors, such as functional redundancy, response diversity, and connectivity. A vary obvious example of functional redundancy is, I think, the two kidneys a human being has (you can survive without one).

In my opinion, the mouse models, while a mouse is not a human being, can be extremely useful to get a grip on the coupling between subsystems, and the way we could approach the resilience questions in human beings.

The last discussion was interesting, because Sanne Gijzel pointed to an example case, in which several sub-systems failed in a row. I think we can learn a lot from these type of examples (also the example of Heather Whitson) about the coupling between subsystems.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Presenter on the following Agenda items

Ecology for doctors: system dynamics models as a tool to understand observed behavior

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