Mathematical Modeling and Simulation of the Cell Envelop, an Active and Adaptable Biological Interface

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Marino Arroyo

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) - BarcelonaTech 

Monday, July 17, 1:30 pm

Abstract:

The cell envelop is an active and adaptable interface that plays a fundamental role in many biological events. To name a few, it determines cell shape and mechanics, controls the way cells adhere to each other, drives cell division and motility, and controls the structure and remodeling of multicellular tissues. Fundamental mechanical and chemical determinants of its biological function can be described with mathematical models involving partial differential equations on curved surfaces coupled with the geometric evolution laws for those surfaces. In this talk, I will describe instances of such models coupling chemistry, elasticity, hydrodynamics and active force generation, their numerical discretization, and how they can be used to connect with experiments and understand various phenomena in cell mechanobiology.

Biography:

Marino Arroyo is Associate Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where he is a member of the Laboratory of Computational Methods and Numerical Analysis (LaCaN) group. He is also affiliated to the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC). Before joining the UPC, he obtained a PhD from Northwestern University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been awarded the O. C. Zienkiewicz Award for Young Scientists in Computational Engineering Sciences by ECCOMAS (2010), two ICREA Academia Awards (2009, 2015), and the ASME/BOEING Structures and Materials Award (2003). He was awarded by the European Research Council a Starting Grant in 2009 and a Consolidator Grant in 2016. His research goal is to develop theories and computational methods to understand the small-scale mechanics of materials and biological systems, with a recent emphasis on cell and tissue mechanobiology and bio-inspired materials.