Dr. Janna Nawroth (Emulate Inc.)

Biological Colloquium at the Biology Center of the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel
Monday, 4th September 2017, 16:00 pm

Seminar room 4th floor of the Center for Molecular Biosciences (ZMB)
Am Botanischen Garten 11

As guest of the CRC 1182
Dr. Janna Nawroth
Emulate Inc., Boston USA

Talks about:
The dark matter of biology: Extracellular fluids and their role in function and disease
Living systems of all scales, including cells, tissues and organisms, move and interact with the extracellular environment, and their motions and behaviors are often readily observable. Much less is known about the response and impact of the surrounding – and mostly invisible – extracellular fluids. Here, I will describe my experimental and computational approaches that make it possible to visualize and probe the diverse roles of fluid dynamics in physiology and pathophysiology. I will show the striking flow patterns and their potential functions in a variety of model systems, including microbe-host interactions on ciliated surfaces, propulsion in muscle-powered pumps, and hydrostatic pressure in soft tissues. In ongoing work, my collaborators and I explore the fluid dynamic constraints on the morphological diversity of tissues and the resulting categories of fluid transport functions.