Brain researchers receive award

A team of Pitt professors and students are working to make the computer act like the brain…. A team of Pitt professors and students are working to make the computer act like the brain.

Thanks to the nearly $1.8 million Research Training Group award from the National Science Foundation, complemented by Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences to total $2.5 million, researchers in the department of mathematics will utilize mathematical processes to create computer simulations of the body’s neurological and inflammatory responses to different diseases.

Professor G. Bard Ermentrout, one of the math professors awarded the grant, anticipates the various computational models will help to expose important biological pathways in greater detail.

“Most biologists know how the body works through signaling pathways,” said Ermentrout. “What we do is convert those pathways – those boxes and arrows – into computers and simulate the body’s response,” he said.

“How the little pieces interact is a much larger question that one can’t just guess by following the arrows.”

Jonathan Rubin, an associate professor in the math department and the team leader for the project, said the majority of the money will be used to train students in the application of math to medical problems during a projected four-year span.

The models will apply math to two broad biological areas – neuroscience and the inflammatory response – and will study an assortment of models from deep brain simulations to the body’s odor-processing systems.

For the inflammatory response models, the team will model influenza, wound healing and multiple-organ failure. Once an infection takes place, for instance, many patients are victim to immune systems that go berserk, said Rubin.

“You can go to the intensive care unit for some infection, pick up another infection at the hospital, and then it can spread throughout the body where multiple organs fail. We’re trying to understand how the bloodstream and the organs interact to understand the progression of the infection,” he said.

Computational biology is the broad term used to describe this kind of mathematical approach to biology.

In this approach, differential equations – mathematical equations with an unknown function of one or more variables – are used in the models, said Rubin.

“The models are systems of differential equations that tell us how quantities evolve over time or space. Once we have those equations, we can develop approximations of the equation which can be simulated on a computer,” he said.

Ermentrout expects the award to attract some of the best and most talented graduate students to the math department because it’s fully funded.

“Four graduate students and two post-docs have already been recruited for the fall, and we’re now starting to recruit undergraduates,” he said.

Rubin is optimistic about the award and the projects, too.

He said the field of math biology is continuing to advance.

“Computational power is skyrocketing,” said Rubin. “We can study more and more complex models with finer resolution over larger scales.

“I like to think of math as a microscope sort of zooming in on a model and understanding what’s driving things.”