Research infrastructure Integrated Science Lab, IceLab, seeks to be a hub for communication and collaboration in the life sciences at Umeå University. We take a modelling approach for causal understanding and connect researchers from different backgrounds.
IceLab is an interdisciplinary hub working to break down the traditional boundaries between different scientific disciplines. When researchers with wide-ranging backgrounds, questions and ways of thinking are brought together, they may come up with innovative ideas if conditions are favourable for generating outside-the-box thinking. To create the most favourable conditions, IceLab and its approximately 30 scientists, from fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, ecology, molecular biology and plant physiology, actively promote various events and activities where researchers from different disciplines meet to identify and discuss connections and synergies between their research projects.
IceLab Camp, for example, provides an opportunity for young scientists from diverse scientific backgrounds to propose new research questions and to more fully develop their analyses through interdisciplinary methods. Another example is IceLab Lunch Pitches, where researchers present open problems to a broad audience with the goal of collaborating on new analytical approaches and creative solutions. Each activity stimulates creativity and increases the chances for new collaborations and research ideas.
IceLab, funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council to establish a center of excellence, is also home to the Center for Modeling Adaptive Mechanisms in Living Systems Under Stress - Stress Response Modeling at IceLab. The center, and IceLab, is also funded by Kempestiftelserna and Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse. Our goal is to discover fundamental common mechanisms in adaptive behaviors of living systems across organizational scales—from cells to ecosystems—in response to stress. With an integrative systems approach and an interdisciplinary complexity center that transcends traditional disciplines, we address research questions related to how living systems respond to stress.
Read more on our website icelab.se
IceLab launches the Stress Response Modeling Graduate Research School with five PhD positions now available.
IceLab members turned network science inwards to visualize research overlaps during their annual meeting.