Physics-informed infection modeling: Bridging biophysics and epidemiology
Navn på bevillingshaver
Bjarke Frost Nielsen
Titel
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
Princeton University
Beløb
DKK 2,007,500
År
2024
Bevillingstype
Reintegration Fellowships
Hvad?
Genetic methods and imaging techniques are revolutionising our ability to see what goes on in and between the cells of the human body during infection. This project aims to exploit these ongoing advancements to develop spatially detailed mathematical models of viral spread within tissue, something that is only now becoming feasible due to the unprecedented resolution of emerging data.
Hvorfor?
Infectious diseases continue to cause immense suffering and are among the greatest risks to humanity. Understanding them is crucial, but infections are remarkably complex, operating at molecular, cellular, tissue and systemic scales. While new techniques provide increasingly clear pictures of individual processes, mathematical models are vital to integrate the data into a coherent framework.
Hvordan?
With input from transcriptomics, I will formulate computational models of viral spread within tissue, following two main approaches: cellular automata (rule-based lattice simulations) and particle-based models. I aim to derive analytical approximations whenever possible, to maximise the interpretability of the results. Ultimately, these models may inform future experiments and guide therapeutics.