Karin Leiderman comes to the Duke Mathematics Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor after receiving her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Utah earlier this year. Before attending graduate school in Utah, she received both her B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of New Mexico. Karin was recently awarded the 2010 SIAM student paper prize at the joint SIAM Annual/Life Sciences Meeting in July where she also organized two minisymposia on the mathematical aspects of blood clotting. Her primary research interests are mathematical biology, fluid mechanics and scientific computing.

Karin's graduate work focused largely on mathematically modeling fluid flow through biological porous materials, specifically blood flowing through materials found in the vascular system. She helped to develop two models of flow through biological porous material: one involved blood flow through the endothelial surface layer (with Laura Miller at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) and the other involved blood flow through and around growing blood clots (with her Ph.D. advisor, Aaron Fogelson, at the University of Utah). Karin is also working with Ricardo Cortez at Tulane University to develop a new numerical method to solve the equations of flow through spatially-heterogeneous porous materials.

Karin is interested in a wide range of questions in mathematics, biofluid mechanics, physiology, and medicine. How does blood flow affect the growth of a blood clot and how does the growing mass, in turn, affect the flow? The permeability of blood clots during the early stages of development may vary spatially and temporally; can we design new numerical methods to better understand this variation under flow? What are the limiting factors of blood clot growth? How do certain blood pathologies such as hemophilia and thrombocytopenia affect the clotting system under flow? Can we use new insights from mathematical models to aid in the design of antiplatelet drugs and anticoagulation strategies?

Karin will teach Math 108, Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, in Fall 2010. She brings substantial experience in vertically integrated research groups and is looking forward to interacting with undergraduates, graduate students, and the other faculty members in mathematical biology.