PLEASE NOTE: This seminar is a hybrid event taking place in-person and online. You can choose to order an in-person ticket or a virtual attendance ticket when registering to attend.

Title:
Fluid dynamics of brain clearance

Abstract:
The brain is immersed in water-like fluid that flows around and through tissue, with profound implications for human health. Occurring almost exclusively during sleep, the flow serves to clear metabolic wastes like the amyloid-beta whose accumulation correlates with Alzheimer’s disease. In unhealthy situations like stroke and cardiac arrest, the fluid contributes to severe swelling that permanently damages brain tissue.

My team and I combine experiments and modeling to study the fluid dynamics of brain clearance. I will talk about the characteristics of fluid inflows and the spaces they traverse, pathological flows during stroke, clearance from the skull via cervical lymph vessels, and inference of unmeasurable quantities like pressure gradients using a combination of velocity measurements, known physics, and artificial intelligence.

Biography:
Douglas H. Kelley is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester. He and his group study biophysical and technological fluid mixing, especially cerebrospinal fluid flow in the brain and metal melt flows in liquid metal batteries and aluminum reduction cells.

Doug earned a PhD from University of Maryland and did postdoctoral research at Yale University and MIT. He won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the University of Rochester’s David T. Kearns Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award, and the University’s G. Graydon Curtis ’58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching.