The school will be organized in two steps. In February-March 2015, five weeks of international course will be organized via internet. This step aims to present and discuss the basic concepts of the theory as well as the standard model of the theory.

In the second step, the interested participants will join the group in Marseille and has 3 components: classes, discussions and exercises. This second step is followed by an international symposium, with five keynotes speakers and contributed talks and posters. Typically all participants of the second step attend the symposium, but it is also open to people who did not follow the course.

Several objectives are aimed at:

1 – mixing students in biology, mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and physics to solve biological/ecological problems;

2 – providing students with a theoretical background in biology which helps them to organize their data and solve ecological problems;

3 – providing students with some mathematical methods to analyze the models derived from the theory;

4 – introducing new challenging problems where mathematical analysis is used for solving ecological questions.

5 – stimulation of biological research in a physics style, using explicit mechanistic assumptions, rather than descriptions and to think about implications of these assumptions for new situations (which were possibly never studied before)