College of Science & Engineering
Twin Cities
The Tithof lab utilizes a combination of complementary laboratory experiments and numerical simulations to probe important questions at the forefront of fluid mechanics. One of their primary research areas concerns numerical modeling of the glymphatic system, which is an important waste clearance pathway in the brain relevant to many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. MSI provides the computational resources necessary for performing many of the glymphatic system simulations, including a recently developed model of amyloid-beta aggregation and clearance in the brain interstitial space (amyloid-beta is a protein waste molecule believed to play an important role in Alzheimer's disease). The researchers also use MSI to numerically investigate advective-diffusive transport in biofilms in the presence of fluid flow and to test new machine learning approaches to forecasting complicated, aperiodic fluid flows.
Research by this group was featured on the MSI website in December 2022: Explaining Evolutionary Success in Biofilms.