Department of Mathematics colloquium - Sibe Mardešić presents a sequence of lectures given by leading experts in the fields of theoretical and applied mathematics. The lectures take place at the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Bijenička cesta 30, Zagreb.
Lecture announcement
About the lecturer: Suncica Canic earned her Ph.D. in 1992 in the area of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the State University of New York in Stony Brook under the supervision of James Glimm and Bradley Plohr. Upon her move to the University of Houston in 1999, she began collaborating with several medical specialists at the Texas Medical Center in Houston on problems related to cardiovascular treatment and diagnosis. She was honored for her research by the National Science Foundation as Distinguished MPS (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) Lecturer in 2007, she received the US Congressional Recognition for Top Women in Technology in 2006, and the most prestigious award at the University of Houston, the Esther Farfel Award in 2018. Canic was also invited to present a Congressional Briefing on Applied Mathematics, on Capitol Hill on December 6th, 2011. In 2014 she was elected Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for her “contributions to the modeling and analysis of partial differential equations motivated by applications in the life sciences.” In 2020, Canic was elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for her “distinguished contributions to mathematics.” Canic moved to UC Berkeley’s Mathematics Department in the Fall of 2018, and is currently serving as Full Professor there. In 2024 Canic received the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture Prize and the same year she was elected Corresponding Member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art. Canic ‘s current research interests include analysis and numerical simulation of partial differential equations with application to problems in medicine, active materials, and more generally mathematical physics.
Lecture abstract: It is a great honor to deliver this lecture in recognition of Professor Sibe Mardesić’s significant contributions to topology, dimension theory, shape theory, homotopy theory, mathematics education, and the global visibility of the Mathematics Department at the University of Zagreb. In this talk, I will review recent advancements in the analysis of partial differential equations and the development of numerical methods for studying a class of fluid-structure interaction problems inspired by the science-fiction-like challenge of designing bioartificial organs. We will explore a new class of mathematical models involving multi-layered (encapsulated) poroelastic media interacting with blood flow, simulating encapsulated transplanted cells in the design of a bioartificial pancreas. I will present our latest analytical results proving the existence of solutions to these linear and nonlinear models and their continuous dependence on the data. The talk will conclude with a demonstration of how our numerical simulations have significantly contributed to the design of a bioartificial pancreas for the treatment of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. This work is a collaborative effort with Martina Bukač (Notre Dame University), Boris Muha (University of Zagreb), Shuvo Roy (Director of the Biodesign Laboratory at UCSF), Jeffrey Kuan (University of Maryland), Yifan Wang (Texas Tech), Justin Webster (University of Maryland), and Lorena Bociu (NC State).