Steffan Puwal publishes article in Physical Review E

Steffan Puwal is a graduate of the Biomedical Sciences: Medical Physics PhD program, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics, working with CBR member Brad Roth. Puwal’s research interest is the electrical and mechanical properties of biological tissue. Recently, Puwal and Roth published a paper in Physical Review E (Volume 82, Article number 041904) describing a new mathematical model of the mechanical properties of cardiac tissue. For decades, the electrical properties of the heart have been represented using the bidomain model: a set of partial differential equations that account for the electrical properties of both the intracellular and extracellular space within the tissue. Puwal extended this model to represent the mechanical properties of the heart, developing a mechanical bidomain model of cardiac tissue. His paper predicts new qualitative behavior of the tissue.

Puwal is supported by an ARRA supplement (stimulus funds) to a grant from the National Institutes of Health.