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Mathematics Colloquium


PEDRO MAIA
University of California, San Francisco

Title: Computational Neurology and Translational Modeling of Brain Disorders
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Place and Time: Room 101, Love Building, 3:35-4:25 pm
Refreshments: Room 204, Love Building, 3:00 pm

Abstract. There is an ample need for mathematical and computational models in neurology. Traumatic brain injuries and neurodegenerative diseases affect millions of people every year, and in all these disorders, pathologies occur across multiple spatial scales: at a micro scale, the accumulation of misfolded proteins lead to the neuron's axon to suffer traumatic injury or demyelination. As injured neurons fail to transmit electrical information, neuronal networks at a mesoscale lose their specialized functionality. At a whole-brain level, one may observe large-scale network disruption that will ultimately lead to measurable cognitive deficits. The emerging field of computational neurology provides an important window of opportunity for modeling of complex biophysical phenomena, for scientific computing, for understanding functionality disruption in neural networks, and for applying machine-learning methods for diagnosis and personalized medicine. In this talk, I will illustrate some of our latest results across different spatial scales spanning a broad array of mathematical techniques.