Abstract:

Red blood cells (RBCs) constitute the major cellular part of blood and are mainly responsible for the transport of oxygen. They have a biconcave shape with a membrane consisting of a lipid bilayer with an attached cytoskeleton formed by a network of the spectrin proteins. The RBC membrane encloses a viscous cytosol (hemoglobin solution), so that RBCs possess no bulk cytoskeleton and organelles. Despite this simple structure in comparison to many other cells, RBCs exhibit fascinating properties and behavior in flow. One such example is the behavior of RBCs in shear flow, where they successively tumble, roll, deform into rolling stomatocytes, and finally adopt highly-deformed poly-lobed shapes with increasing shear rate. Another example is a traversal of RBCs through microfluidic deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) devices, which can be used for cell sorting based on cellular intrinsic properties. In both cases, the behavior of RBCs in flow is governed by their elastic and viscous properties, which are important to consider under relevant physiological and pathological conditions.

Bio:

Dmitry Fedosov received his Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia in 2002. After earning a MS degree in aerospace engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2004, he moved to Brown University, where he pursued a PhD degree in applied mathematics. Dmitry received a MS degree in applied mathematics in 2007 and his PhD in 2010. His thesis work was on multiscale modeling of blood flow and soft matter with the focus on modeling polymers and blood cells. His thesis work was recognized with the David Gottlieb Memorial Award for excellence in graduate study by the Brown University’s Division of Applied Mathematics and with the 2011 Nicholas Metropolis Award for outstanding doctoral thesis work in computational physics from the American Physical Society. After completing his PhD, Dmitry moved to Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany for a postdoctoral position in the theoretical soft matter and biophysics group led by Gerhard Gompper.  In 2012, Dmitry was awarded the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt foundation to build up an independent research group at the Institute of Complex Systems, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany. In 2016, he obtained a Habilitation in Theoretical Physics from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany. Dmitry continues to work as a research group leader at the Institute of Biological Information Processing and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Juelich with a research focus on non-equilibrium physics, including various complex systems in biophysics, and soft and active matter.

Talk: