If you're a faculty member and this interests you, go straight to the program's web page < a href="">[here]. When you see on this page is cribbed from that page (on 2 April 2006).

If you just want to know why they are doing this any why there are interesting mathematics to be found at the molecular and cellular level, read what the IMA has to say:

Propelled by the success of the sequencing of the human and many
related genomes, molecular and cellular biology promise
significant scientific breakthroughs in the near
future. Mathematics (broadly defined) is positioned to play a
major role in this effort, helping to discover the secrets of
life by working collaboratively with bench biologists, chemists
and physicists. The critical need, which has already begun, is
the development of a quantitative body of theory for
biology. This development of theory is expected to have the same
impact on biology as it did on the sciences of physics, chemistry
and engineering in the 20th century. This quantitative body of
theory will be created by people with strong backgrounds in both
biology and in the mathematical sciences. Because of its
outstanding record of interdisciplinary research and training,
the IMA is an ideal venue for this annual program at the
interface between the mathematical sciences and biology.

This interface has been growing steadily in importance in the
last decade, but there is tremendous room for progress. Major
advances are needed in mathematical, statistical and
computational methods to generate significant impact on the
prediction and control of spatio-temporal molecular and cellular
behavior. This IMA program starts with nucleic acids, moves on to
proteins, and ends with the modeling of cellular
physiology. These areas have major interconnectedness, and the
program will emphasize these relationships. In the Fall quarter
we begin with nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) organization, structure,
function, and the interaction between DNA and RNA in the
production of proteins and the orchestration of cellular
metabolism. In the Winter quarter we study protein structure and
function. The new science of proteomics aims to understand how
proteins are produced and how they function and malfunction. We
need to understand how protein production is controlled, and the
cascade of interaction among families of proteins. In the Spring
quarter we study the mathematics of cellular physiology, a highly
complex biological system, with structures from molecular to
macroscopic scale, and processes with critical time scales from
nanoseconds to hours. Modeling cellular behavior poses
significant challenges to the mathematical sciences.

Progress at the interface will be enabled by developments in
mathematics focused on biology at the molecular level. Accurate
models of molecular forces appropriate to biological systems will
be critically needed. These will have to work well even when (as
during protein folding), molecules form, break and remake bonds,
a far more difficult and nonlinear situation than found in
crystalline substances. New and efficient methods will be needed
to model the effect of solvents on important biological
reactions. Purely stochastic methods are expected to be
important, but, equally importantly, a theory will have to be
built that supplies biologically meaningful probability
distributions that are input to those methods. In addition, the
mathematical models must be amenable to efficient computational
algorithms that can analyze realistic biological reactions.

Molecular dynamics is a critical part of almost every
quantitative study at the molecular level, and the time scales
treatable by accurate MD methods, based on truly accurate
molecular forces, are far too short to treat anything but the
most simple biological reaction. At a higher but still relatively
simple levels, there are simple organized structures in biology,
e.g., such things as microtubules, mini-chromosomes, actin
filaments, protein motors, viral capsids, membranes, that may be
amenable to mesoscale (bridging the gap between microscopic and
macroscopic) and macroscopic mathematical models. As emphasized
by members of the Biological Advisory Committee it will be
important to focus on sufficiently simple (but real) biological
systems to maximize the value of the quantitative approach.