Professor Aneta Stefanovska
Professor of Biomedical Physics
Room: C507 Physics Building
Tel: +44 (0)1524 592784
Fax: +44 (0)1524 844037
Email: aneta@lancaster.ac.uk
Research Interests
Aneta Stefanovska applies her expertise in mathematics/physics to living systems, for which she has long had great admiration. She began her career by modelling the neuromuscular system, which is where she first encountered nonlinearity and came to appreciate that it is an essential feature of the dynamics of living systems, quite generally. She completed her PhD in 1992 at the University of Ljubljana, and partly at Stuttgart University. In doing so, she also encountered a second vital ingredient of living systems, namely the fact that they are thermodynamically open. This is how she became interested in microvascular blood flow - where the cells and tissues exchange energy and matter. She pioneered an integrated measurement system for the simultaneous non-invasive recording of cardiovascular functions and she proposed a coupled oscillator model to describe the oscillatory components in blood flow.
With colleagues in Oslo, Ljubljana and Lund she has been studying the physiological origins of the oscillatory components that regulate vascular conductance. She was the first to show that the activity of the endothelium (whose cells form the inner lining of the entire cardiovascular system - a network 40,000 km in length) mediates some of the oscillatory components. She was also the first to apply the wavelet transform to capture time-variability in the oscillatory dynamics of cardiovascular signals.
Currently she is investigating interactions between the cardiovascular oscillators. Accordingly, she is developing new methods of analysis aimed at quantifying the synchronization between them and revealing the direction of coupling. At the same time she is supervising new experiments to record data under a variety of different conditions. Together with collaborators in Lancaster, Ljubljana, Oslo, Prague, Lausanne, Potsdam, New York, Florence and Pisa she is studying the oscillatory changes that occur in physiological and pathological states such as anaesthesia, ageing, exercise, paraplegia, tetraplegia, cardiac failure, post-acute myocardial infarction, diabetes, hypertension and cancer. Her current work also includes exploratory analyses of the phase dynamics of brain waves, seeking evidence for possible interactions between them, as well as for their interactions with the cardiovascular oscillators.