Co-hosted by Georgia Tech's Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. 

Elsje Pienaar
Director of Undergraduate Programs
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Purdue University

**Register HERE to participate virtually

ABSTRACT
Individual-based computational models are powerful tools that complement in vitro and in vivo experimental studies in host-pathogen interaction research. These models allow the characterization of complex spatio-temporal emergent mechanisms while accounting for cell-to-cell variability, patient-specific data, and stochasticity. Our individual-based models (agent-based models) represent bacterial and immune cells as virtual agents in 3D simulation spaces, and allow us to recapitulate a variety of experimental conditions in silico. This talk will review how we implemented digital twins of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in vitro infection assays, integrated these twins with experimental data, and identified key spatial and temporal mechanisms that drive infection progression. It will also briefly review opportunities to integrate patient-specific data into these types of simulations, advancing our methods toward personalized medicine and patient-specific digital twins.

RESEARCH
Infectious diseases kill >10 million people each year. Several challenges remain in treating infectious diseases. Combination therapies, using multiple drugs simultaneously, are complex and expensive to develop and optimize; and drug concentration and action at the sites of infection remains relatively unknown for many diseases; drug resistance is on the rise; and some infections, like HIV, remain without cure.

Our systems pharmacology approach constructs multi-scale, hybrid computational models that describe host immune, pathogen and drug dynamics within an infected patient. In close collaborations with experimentalists, we integrate these computational models with multiple in vitro and in vivo datasets to: predict drug efficacy, optimize treatment, identify new drug targets, and inform future experiments; all in the context of complex host-pathogen-drug interactions.

Faculty host: Melissa Kemp

2025-2026 Bioengineering Seminar Schedule