Speaker
Description
The brain is protected by a complex and highly coordinated network of immune cells, regulated in part by the blood–brain barrier. When this tightly controlled system becomes dysregulated, the consequences can be profound, contributing to neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis. Despite rapid advances in experimental neuroimmunology, fundamental questions remain unanswered: How do immune cells coordinate their activity within the brain? What mechanisms govern their response to infection or injury? And how do these interactions give rise to the fluctuating symptoms observed in chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis?
Our group is using mathematical modelling to interrogate the neuroimmune system across the many scales. Using everything from ODEs, to PDEs and even ABMs, we investigate how microglia — the brain’s resident immune cells — respond to bacteria stimuli, how interactions between immune populations may generate oscillatory disease dynamics in multiple sclerosis, and how mechanistic models can be leveraged to explore therapeutic strategies beyond current treatments. Mathematical neuroimmunology is an exciting frontier in mathematical biology. In this talk, I will share some of our early work that explores how mathematics may help us understand the neuroimmune system and its role in disease.
