We are extremely proud of our two graduating CardSS Lab members from the UW Bioengineering Class of 2022: Griffin Scott and Kelly Zhang!!
Kelly will be moving to Baltimore, the greatest city in America (true), to pursue a PhD in Prof. Natalia Trayanova’s Computational Cardiology Lab! Meanwhile Griffin is taking an exciting industry job investigating CAR-T therapy at Bristol Myers Squibb. Holy smokes, these are some incredibly bright graduates! We are sad to see them go, but we are excited to hear about their many future accomplishments! Congratulations to both!
Kelly’s capstone project is entitled “Iterative and self-evolving search algorithm for fitting computational models of cardiomyocyte electrophysiology to published action potential morphological feature values”. In this project, she developed a genetic algorithm to help us adapt the parameterization of ionic models representing membrane kinetics to better match experimental values different from those used to develop the model in the first place. Kelly applied her new methodology to help us gain much greater understanding of computational tools used to study cardiomyocyte-like cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. So cool!
Griffin’s capstone project is entitled “Systematic Parameter Analysis for Determination of Reentrant Driver Inducibility”. In this work, he used a Design of Experiments (DoX) approach to conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the cell- and tissue-scale electrophysiological factors underlying particular types of arrhythmogenic behavior in computational models of the human atria. Excitingly, in the process of doing so, Griffin serendipitously discovered that it is possible fine-tune the model parameters to steer the fate of induced arrhythmias towards different specific morphologies (e.g., macro-reentrant flutter or more chaotic fibrillation). Holy smokes!