Åshild Telle, BSc, MSc, PhD

Åshild (pronunciation guide) was born and raised in Norway, in a town ~2 hours away from Oslo. She earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of Oslo, specializing in Mathematics and Informatics. During her undergraduate studies, she got into scientific programming, appreciating how it could be used to solve large mathematical problems. Åshild also holds a Master of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Melbourne, with a combined focus on applied mathematics, graph theory, and optimization problems. Her studies abroad in Australia introduced her to a wide range of real-world problems, and to scientific research as a trade. Most recently, she earned her PhD from the University of Oslo, for work undertaken at the Simula Research Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Aslak Tveito, Chief Research Scientist Samuel T. Wall, and others. Her dissertation research was based in part on an ongoing collaboration with researchers at the UC Berkeley Biomaterials  & Tissue Engineering Laboratory, led by Prof. Kevin E. Healy who served as one of Åshild’s doctoral co-supervisors. During her PhD studies, she got into biology for the first time, learning how mathematics and scientific computing could be combined with life sciences to explore aspects of and obtain a deeper understanding of human physiology. She developed a new mechanical cell-based model for cardiac tissue, and explored various techniques and tools for analyzing mechanical features of cardiac microtissues, developed from cardiomyocyte-like cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. In the CardSS Lab, she will serve as the lead researcher and key technical engineer on our NIH-funded project exploring the concept of the fibrotic left atrium as a pathophysiological nexus for thrombogenesis and arrhythmogenesis.

During her free time, Åshild is an avid traveller, a coffee drinker, a plant person, a hiker, and an instagrammer.

Education:

BSc: Mathematics and Informatics, University of Oslo
MSc: Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne
PhD: Informatics, University of Oslo

Dissertation title: “Modeling cardiac mechanics on a microscale; Mechanical modeling and analysis of cardiomyocytes and cardiac micromuscles”