PhD Thesis Defence | Stephanie Abo, Multiscale Modelling of Biological Rhythms and Systems

Wednesday, June 5, 2024 9:30 am - 10:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Location

MC 6460

Candidate 

Stephanie Abo | Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo

Title

Multiscale Modelling of Biological Rhythms and Systems

Abstract

Living organisms can respond to and generate rhythms, influencing everything from biochemical reactions to lifestyle habits. Our focus is on systems that actively generate rhythms, known as clocks. We develop mathematical and computational frameworks to study rhythms and their impact on biological processes at tissue and system levels. We examine the interaction between biological clocks and physiological processes. Specifically, we model cell-cell interactions within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the brain's hypothalamus. We investigate how cellular noise affects ensemble properties like period, oscillation amplitude, and bifurcation boundaries, deriving macroscopic descriptions called mean field limits for interacting cells.

At the organ level, we model interactions between the peripheral circadian clock in the lung and the immune system during inflammation, focusing on protein-protein interactions between clock proteins and cytokines and how circadian disruptions affect these interactions. At the whole-body level, we develop multi-organ models of metabolism that integrate exercise and diet to study how external signals, beyond neural signals from the SCN, re-synchronize peripheral rhythms and maintain homeostasis.