Prof. Dr. Gabriel Wittum
Titel: Modelling and Simulation of Biological Systems
Zeit: 9th July, 2013 at 16:30 h
Ort: HS 11.02/ground floor
Institute of Mathematics and Scientific Computing
Heinrichstraße 36, 8010 Graz
Zusammenfassung:
Biological systems are distinguished by their enormous complexity and variability. That is why
mathematical modeling and computational simulation of those systems is very difficult, in
particular thinking of detailed models which are based on first principles. The difficulties start
with geometric modeling which needs to extract basic structures from highly complex and
variable phenotypes, on the other hand also has to take the statistic variability into account.
Moreover, the models of the processes running on these geometries are not yet well
established, since these are equally complex and often couple many scales in space and time.
Thus, simulating such systems always means to put the whole frame to test, from modeling
to the numerical methods and software tools used for simulation. These need to be advanced
in connection with validating simulation results by comparing them to experiments.
To treat problems of this complexity, novel mathematical models, methods and software
tools are necessary. In recent years, such models, numerical methods and tools have been
developed, allowing to attack these problems. In the talk we consider two examples as
paradigms for the process of modeling and simulation in biosciences. The first example is the
diffusion of xenobiotics through human skin, the second one is the automatic reconstruction
of neurons and nuclei by means of numerical methods for partial differential equations.
