Bio
Vivienne Leech is a second year PhD student at University College London working in the field of Mathematical Biology. She did her MSci in Mathematics at UCL where she worked on a PDE based model for nuclear growth. She is currently working with Dr Angelika Manhart on agent based modelling of cells in tissue. She works closely with experimentalists and is interested in how to best incorporate experimental data to guide and validate mathematical models.
Research interests
Vivienne is interested in modelling the alignment and organisation of fibroblasts in keloid scar tissue, as a pathway to better understanding the causes of tissue fibrosis. In her research, by working closely with experimentalists at Kings College London, she aims to create and analyse a variety of agent-based models to test hypotheses and help better understand the mechanisms behind this long-range alignment of fibroblasts that we observe in keloid scar tissue. She is interested in how to most efficiently simulate agent based models and how to best combine the experimental data (mostly in the form of images and videos) and the agent based simulations in order to explore parameter space and develop the models further. She is looking at incorporating methods such as approximate bayesian computation to improve parameter inference and make best use of the experimental data available.