This award provides funds for the support of two undergraduates working with the principal investigator on mathematical problems arising in the modeling of transport of medical drugs within brain tissue. The models will be designed to explain the types of transport (convection, diffusion or absorption) by which a drug may spread from an injection site into the brain. Students will concentrate on developing the appropriate mathematical analysis necessary to formulate the model through their studies of systems of nonlinear equations, regularity of solutions of the heat equation and the application of multivariate analysis to regression. Work will also be done on the design of experimental computational schemes for testing various models Although the students will use data derived from live experiments, their work consists solely of mathematical modeling and mathematical analysis.
