2024 Class of SIAM Fellows: Aaron L. Fogelson
April 4, 2024
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has honored Aaron L. Fogelson's distinguished work with its fellows program.
This year's 26 esteemed fellows were nominated in recognition of their outstanding research and service to the community. Through their various contributions, SIAM Fellows form a crucial group of individuals helping to advance the fields of applied mathematics, computational science, and data science.
A professor of mathematics at the U, Fogelson, who lists his research interests as mathematical physiology, modeling of blood clotting, gels and viscoelastic fluids and numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), is being recognized by SIAM for his pioneering work on mathematical modeling and numerical methods for platelet aggregation and blood clotting.
On his lab's website, Fogelson writes, "Because transmural pressure differences vary greatly in the circulatory system and because blood flowing at different speeds through vessels of widely varying diameter leads to great variation in shear stress, the challenges of forming a blood clot to stop the outflow of blood differ substantially in different vascular beds. The system that has evolved to cope with these disparate challenges involves the aggregation of cells (platelets) and the formation of fibrous protein gel (fibrin). In addition, there is a complex, powerful, and tightly regulated enzyme network (the coagulation system) involving reactions on the surfaces of activated platelets, that leads to production of an enzyme, thrombin, that is key both in activating platelets so they can cohere to one another and in forming the protein fibrin from which the fibrin mesh is constructed."
40 Years of Modeling Clotting
The Fogelson research group has been developing models of many of the disparate aspects of blood clotting for close to 40 years. "We have built and analyzed models based on PDEs, ODEs [ordinary differential equations], or SDEs [stochastic differential equations] and, as needed, we have developed novel numerical methods with which to study the PDE-based models," writes Fogelson.
Projects of current interest in this research space includes, first, developing ODE-based compartment models of platelet deposition and coagulation under flow that treat developing thrombi as porous materials and which can track resulting flow, the growth of aggregates, and the biochemistry of platelet signaling and coagulation from the initiation of clot formation through vessel occlusion. The goal is a high-throughput simulation tool that will allow extensive investigation of model behavior as model parameters and other inputs are varied to reflect different physiological situations and disease states.
A second project of interest is integrating the Fogelson lab's models of fibrin polymerization with models of platelet deposition and coagulation under flow during arterial thrombosis, to produce a more comprehensive model of the clot formation process.
