We are pleased to welcome Zhangli Peng, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, for an ME seminar. 

Seminar title: Multiscale Modeling of Cell Passing through Pores Between Endothelial Cells 

About the talk:
The research I will present in this talk is motivated by a fascinating process happening in our body every moment: a cell squeezes through a pore between endothelial cells much smaller than itself. For example, red blood cells (RBCs), with a diameter of around 8 μm, frequently squeeze through the inter-endothelial slits (IESs) with a width of around 0.5 μm in our spleens. This is the RBC’s regular ‘physical fitness test’, which actually damages diseased RBCs in malaria and blood disorders and affects 1 billion people. Another example is the neutrophil, which plays a critical role in the immune response by squeezing through the IESs of the blood vessel walls to fight infections or damage in the tissues. In cancer, circulating tumor cells squeezing through the IESs during intravasation and extravasation results in metastasis in distant organs, which is the major contributor to mortality. To squeeze through such narrow pores, all these cells have to experience extreme mechanical deformation. A slight change at the molecular level would have significant consequences on the cells, e.g., survival or death. In this talk, I will show our multiscale computational studies of this process for RBCs, neutrophils, and tumor cells as three examples with increasing complexity.

About the speaker:
Zhangli Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. He got his Ph.D. from the University of California San Diego and carried out his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Peng was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the Scholar Award of the American Society of Hematology. His research area is computational science and engineering. Specifically, his research directions include: 1) Multiscale modeling, such as coupling of continuum-based macroscale modeling with particle-based mesoscale/microscale simulations; 2) Biomechanics and biophysics of cells/organelles/molecules/tissues, such as blood cells, primary cilia, nuclei, cytoskeletal proteins, DNA/RNA, and blood vessel walls; 3) Modeling of microfluidics/nanofluidics, such as acoustic microfluidics, inertial microfluidics, and nanopores.