Meet The Speaker
“Integrative Modeling of the Cardiac Ventricular Myocyte”
Joseph L Greenstein is an assistant research professor in the department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute of Computational Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He received a B.S. degree in biomedical engineering from Boston University in 1995, and a Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2002. His research interests are in computational medicine as applied to the study of cardiac function in health and disease.
Seminar Abstract
“Integrative Modeling of the Cardiac Ventricular Myocyte”
Excitation-contraction coupling in the cardiac myocyte, the process by which electrical depolarization of the cell membrane leads to mechanical cell shortening, is mediated by a number of highly integrated mechanisms of intracellular Ca2+ transport. The complexity and integrative nature of heart cell electrophysiology and Ca2+ cycling has led to an evolution of computational models that have played a crucial role in shaping our understanding of heart function. An important emerging theme in systems biology is that the detailed nature of local signaling events, such as those that occur in the cardiac dyad, have important consequences at higher biological scales. Multiscale modeling techniques have revealed many mechanistic links between microscale events, such as Ca2+ binding to a channel protein, and macroscale phenomena, such as excitation-contraction coupling gain. In this talk I will describe experimentally based multiscale computational models of the cardiac myocyte and the insights that have been gained through their application.
