HEMI Seminar: Antoine Jerusalem, Modeling the Brain, a Multiphysics and Stochastic Computational Challenge

The mechanics of the brain has traditionally been studied independently of many recent advances in neuroscience. For example. while many computational mechanistic models are able to simulate a traumatic brain injury from a purely mechanical perspective. they generally lack any patient-specific prognosis ability on the cognitive outcome of the disease. Paradoxically, the field of neuroscience is increasingly recognising the role of mechanics in neurophysiology and neurological diseases. For example. we now have ample evidence that action potentials are not solely electrical in nature. but that they also carry mechanical changes coupled with the electrical wave at the cellular scale. To add to the complexity, these properties and the mechanical properties of the underlying structures are non-deterministic; varying in time and space and in-between subjects. Reaching out to the neuroscience and clinical community thus means that current brain models need to bridge the gap between deterministic mechanics and the multi physics stochastic reality of the brain. In this presentation. we will present the brain through this particular lens. and propose new computational methods aimed at capturing the multiphysics and stochastic properties of the human brain in the context of a few neuroclinical applications.

Antoine Jerusalem is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. After graduating from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (Toulouse, France) with an Engineering Diploma in Aeronautics and Space and from MIT with a Master of Science in 2004, he obtained his PhD from MIT in 2007. After a short postdoc, he then led the Computational Mechanics of Materials Group in IMDEA (Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies) Materials until 2012, after which he joined the University of Oxford. Antoine Jerusalem‘s research work is at the interface of computational mechanics and materials multiphysics, with the brain as his main focus and a particular interest in neuron multiphysics and its clinical applications (TBI, anaesthesia, neuromodulation, etc.).