Achievement

IGERT Trainees Michael Trogdon and Tie Bo Wu set out to understand blood chemistry under flow conditions in the presence of an injury. Their collaborators at UCSB built a microfluidic channel to experiment with blood flow over an injury and measured the concentration of the key blood coagulation protein, thrombin, at the end of the channel, as time progressed for different shear rates. Michael and Tie developed a computational model of blood chemistry under flow corresponding to the experimental conditions and validated the model with the experiment. The model was key to finding flaws in early experimental designs, thus speeding up the experimental process. Michael and Tie have moved on to develop models of experiments that have yet to be performed and have found some very interesting results when the plasma is diluted (which is often the case in clinical situations) in both flow and static conditions.