Anne Marie Warren

Contact
amw9588@cims.nyu.edu
office: CIWW 1004
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10012

Anne Marie Warren

I am a second year PhD student at NYU's Courant Institute. Here's my CV.

Bio

*Biomolecular condensates forming in cancer cells [video]* ¹

Currently I'm working with Dr. Ofer Kimchi on reduction-of-dimensionality in the biological search problem. In what ways do the macromolecular structures within the cell allow for biologically feasible association rates between sparsely distributed ligands and precise reaction sites in cells?

The basic principle is related to the drunkards walk (or, more formally, the non-recurrence of 3D random walks). We hypothesize that macrostructures acting as 2D surfaces within the cell- for example, biomolecular condensates- essentially function as antannae, providing crucial advantages in efficiency to searching ligands.

A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may be lost forever.

— Shizuo Kakutani

Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction pattern — *The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, a classic pattern-forming system.*

I enjoy using a PDE and dynamical systems based approach to understand the underlying mechanics of highly complex and efficient biological processes. Coherent structures, pattern formation, and other emergent properties of interacting systems are of particular interest to me.

I recently graduated with my bachelor's in mathematics from the University of Minnesota, where I completed a thesis on rate induced tipping and related effects in nonautonomous spatially extended systems, advised by Dr. Arnd Scheel.

Papers and preprints

O. Clifton, A. Chavez, A. Madrigal, A. Warren, P. Yeung, A. Scheel.

Vacuum bubble and fissure formation in collective motion with competing attractive and repulsive forces. Journal of Nonlinear Waves, 2026. (PDF)

Conferences and talks

Conference on order and function in complex systems. August 10 – 14, 2026, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Poster: Reduction of dimensionality in biological search. (PDF)

Details

I presented a poster on some preliminary results from my work on the biological search problem. We found a rather surprising result in what was intended to be an artificial limit, where surface diffusion is impossible. In this case the ligand can only interact with the surface via reflection or annihilation, depending on whether it contacts the passive or reactive portion of the surface. However, somehow, at an appropriate scale of the target patch, a larger passive structure is advantageous to the search for the embedded reactive site. (This is in the absence of surface diffusion, which was the original basis of the reduction-of-dimensionality hypothesis!)

Theses

Latin Honors Thesis, summa cum laude, U Minnesota 2025

Understanding non-classical tipping: rate-induced tipping and novel reverse tipping phenomena in a nonautonomous spatially extended system. (PDF)

Varun Sheel & Dr. Walter Huynh. Confocal, 100× objective. Nikon Small World in Motion, 2022. ↩