OCIAM, Oxford

Coronary heart disease is characterised by the formation of plaque on artery walls, restricting blood flow. If a plaque deposit ruptures, blood clot formation (thrombosis) rapidly occurs with the potential to fatally occlude the vessel within minutes. Von Willebrand Factor (vWF) is a shear-sensitive protein which has a critical role in blood clot formation in arteries. At the high shear rates typical in arterial constrictions (stenoses), vWF undergoes a conformation change, unfolding and exposing binding sites and facilitating rapid platelet deposition. 

To understand the effect of  stenosis geometry and blood flow conditions on the unfolding of vWF and subsequent platelet binding, we developed a continuum model for the initiation of thrombus formation by vWF in an idealised arterial stenosis. In this talk I will discuss modelling proteins in flow using viscoelastic fluid models, the insight asymptotic reductions can offer into this complex system and some of the challenges of studying fast arterial blood flows. 

Data assimilation is a particular form of state estimation. That's partly the "what". We'll also look at the how's, the why's, some who's and some where's.

In the first JAM seminar of 2013/2014, I will discuss the topic of singular perturbed hyperbolic systems of PDE arising in physical phenomena, particularly the St Venant equations of shallow water theory. Using a mixture of analytical and numerical techniques, I will demonstrate the dangers of approximating the dynamics of a system by the equations obtained upon taking a singular limit $\epsilon\rightarrow 0$ and furthermore how the dynamics of the system change when the parameter $\epsilon$ is taken to be small but finite. Problems of this type are ubiquitous in the physical sciences, and I intend to motivate another example arising in elastoplasticity, the subject of my DPhil study.

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Note: This seminar is not intended for faculty members, and is available only to current undergraduate and graduate students.