Nonlinear Biomedical Physics

Department of Physics

Professor Aneta Stefanovska

Professor Aneta Stefanovska

I began my career by modelling the neuromuscular system, which is where I first encountered nonlinearity and came to appreciate that it is an essential feature of the dynamics of living systems, quite generally. During my PhD at the Universities of Ljubljana and Stuttgart, I encountered a second vital ingredient of living systems, namely that they are thermodynamically open. This is how I became interested in microvascular blood flow. I found that the wavelet transform was especially useful in capturing time-variability in the oscillatory dynamics of cardiovascular signals, and I came to my model of the cardiovascular system as a set of coupled oscillators. With colleagues in Oslo, Ljubljana and Tromsø I found that the activity of the endothelium (the inner lining of the entire cardiovascular system) mediates some of the oscillatory flow components. Currently I am investigating interactions between the cardiovascular oscillators. This involves developing new methods of analysis aimed at quantifying the synchronization between them and revealing the direction of coupling. At the same time I am supervising new experiments to record physiological data under a variety of different conditions. My current work also includes exploratory analyses and modelling of the phase dynamics of brain waves, seeking evidence for possible interactions between them, as well as for their interactions with the cardiovascular oscillators ...more

Publications since 1995