Event category: Fall 2022

Imagine someone having a heart attack. Do you visualize the dramatic Hollywood portrayal of a heart attack, in which a man collapses, grabbing his chest in agony? Even though heart disease is the leading killer of women worldwide, the misconception that heart disease is a men’s disease has persisted. A dangerous misconceptions and risks women ignoring their own symptoms. Gender biases and false impressions are by no means limited to heart attack symptoms. Such prejudices exist throughout our healthcare system, from scientific research to disease diagnosis and treatment strategies. A goal of our research program is to address this gender equity, by identifying and disseminating insights into sex differences in health and disease, using computational modeling tools.

Over the past decades, computational neuroscientists have developed ever more sophisticated and morphologically complex neuron models. Most of these models assume that the intra- and extracellular ion concentrations remain constant over the simulated period and thus do not account for concentration-dependent effects on neuronal firing properties. Of the models that do incorporate ion concentration dynamics, few account for the electrodiffusive nature of intra- and extracellular ion transport. In this talk, I will present the first multicompartmental neuron model that accounts for ion concentration dynamics in a biophysically consistent manner [1]. I will also show how electrodiffusive modeling of neurons and glial cells can be used to explore the genesis of slow potentials in the brain [2].