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Michael R. King
Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1999, University of Notre Dame
Room: 2-5752, Medical Center
(585)275-3285
mike_king@urmc.rochester.edu
Website
http://www.bme.rochester.edu/bmeweb/faculty/king.html
Courses
ChE 466 Microhydrodynamics
Research Topics:
Dynamics of leukocyte and platelet adhesion; Computational biofluid
mechanics
Research Overview: The King laboratory
seeks to understand all aspects of the dynamic interactions between
blood, circulating cells, and the tissues that they contact. In
particular, the balance between hydrodynamic shear forces and
chemical adhesive interactions presents the most scientifically
interesting aspect of this field currently, as well as being an
area with great potential to impact public health through its
relevance to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inflammation.
The ultimate goal of our laboratory is a complete, predictive
numerical simulation of blood flow that includes all relevant
cellular interactions. The surface interactions between cells
in suspension or between suspended cells and the vessel wall is
where we stand to make the largest contribution to the field,
as a rigorous treatment of particulate flow in a biologically
realistic setting has never been previously attempted. One of
the greatest challenges that we have faced and will continue to
address is the need to bridge multiple length scales: from deviation
bond lengths measured at tens of nanometers, to micron-sized blood
cells, to larger vessels several millimeters in diameter. Continuum
rheological models at the artery scale must be matched in a seamless
way with the multiparticle adhesive dynamics (MAD) simulation
that is able to consider nearfield interactions during cell-cell
or cell-wall collisions. We have already succeeded in reconciling
bond compliance and kinetics in a cellular-scale calculation.
Our research will progress from code development and in vitro
experimentation, to later comparison of MAD with experimental animal models, to finally correlating MAD results to patient data.
Major equipment includes a 3-D motorized Olympus IX81 fluorescence
microscope, an 18-processor Sun UltraSparc computing cluster,
and a new 12-processor AMD Opteron computing cluster.
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