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The National Simulation Resource Facility for
Circulatory Transport and Exchange operates as a part of the
Department of Bioengineering in the School of Medicine and the
College of Engineering. It serves as a focal component of
the departmental program in Computational and Integrative
Biology and serves to provide materials for graduate and
undergraduate classes, and settings in which graduate students,
postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scientists can expand their
careers.
The Resource was created with a focus on studying complex
biological systems and networks involved in the transport and
exchange of solutes and water in the microvasculature, within
whole organs, and within the whole body. While the focus of much
of modern biology has been on the study of individual genes,
proteins, channels, signaling pathways, and the basic biophysics
and biochemistry of cellular and molecular biology, the future
trend is a shift of focus to studying systems. The premise is
that only by analyzing ever more complete systems can one
understand the enchanting beauty and remarkable behaviors of
intact, functioning organisms.
The analysis of biological systems requires the development of
powerful new tools, computational and intellectual, that aid the
investigator in the analysis of experimental data, and allow
these results to be integrated with the other types of
observations present in the literature. Mathematical models can
serve as one such vehicle, but, more than that, they allow
rapid, sensitive, and semi-automated approaches to designing the
most discriminating experiments, expressing data in quantitative
and mechanistic terms, and in distinguishing good hypotheses
from better ones.
The Resource Facility and the programs in computational and
integrative bioengineering are committed to the development of
tools for the advancement of medical science, where the problems
range from the behavior of gene regulators and protein insertion
into membranes to the physiological or pathophysiological
functioning of the intact system. Our expertise lies in bringing
together the molecular events into an understanding of the heart
and lung, but most of the methods have direct applicability in
other areas. Our models and simulation analysis systems are
being used by investigators and collaborators around the world
in the elucidation of events in brains, livers, and other
organs. Because our support has come from the National
Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources, we
release our software, models and modeling systems for general
use by the investigative community. You are welcome to download
whatever is obviously useful to you, and to browse our pages to
see if we are working toward something of interest to you.
We believe our Resource Facility and our graduate programs in
Computational and Integrative Bioengineering provide unique
opportunities for collaboration with farseeing young scientists
and investigators at other universities. The interdisciplinary
training we can offer here and our focus on systems analysis
provides students with the opportunity to be at the leading edge
of contemporary biology and medicine. The courses we offer to
visiting scientists each year extend these opportunities to
faculty and private sector investigators anywhere.
We look forward to collaborating with you in research and in
education.
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