Mark Fricker

University of Oxford

Talk title: Reliability, repeatability, reproducibility and responsibility

Mark Fricker started as a plant physiologist with Colin Willmer in Stirling on dissecting signal transduction pathways in stomatal physiology, and then quantitative imaging of Ca²⁺ in Edinburgh with Tony Trewavas and Nick Read. He continued with in vivo imaging of Ca²⁺, pH and redox dynamics in plant and then fungal systems after the move to Oxford sometime last century, which evolved into the current interest in signalling and transport in networked systems, and an IgNobel prize in 2010. Experimental investigations cover a range of scales including confocal ratio imaging on a micron scale, radiolabel scintillation imaging at an intermediate scale, and network analysis and mathematical modelling to predict behaviour across all scales. As part of this work, he has been developing  image analysis methods to quantify network architecture, dynamics and internal flows at different organisational scales, including sub-cellular ER networks, and macroscopic networks, such as fungi, slime molds, and leaf veins. The resultant fully-weighted network graphs then provide the input to predictive biophysical models to probe the mechanisms leading to the emergence of self-organised, adaptive behaviour.