Johan Hake successfully defended his PhD thesis

The picture shows a part of the interior in a heart cell, and in the front you can see a tiny cleft with black structures. This is called the dyadic cleft. Calcium signaling in this cleft controls the contraction strength of a heart cell. It is believed that this signaling is impaired during heart failure, a progressive and chronic disease, characterized by an impaired ability of the heart to fill and pump blood. Microscopic structures such as the dyadic cleft are inaccessible for direct experimental measurements, and computational studies of the calcium dynamics in the cleft has therefore emerged as a complement to the experimental ones.

Hake investigates possible causes for impaired calcium signaling during heart failure. He shows that physiological conditions during heart failure can impair the contraction of a heart cell. Hake's work is done in close collaboration with medical professionals, who can use the results presented in the thesis in studies of possible treatments for heart failure.

Hake defended his thesis in Storstua on Monday 2 November. Prior to the defence, Hake presented his trial lecture Modeling approaches to understanding electromechanical coupling in the heart - from stochastic processes to partial differential equations.

The adjudication committee

Dr. Martin Falcke, Mathematical Cell Physiology, Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin
Professor Nic Smith, Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Professor Hans Petter Langtangen, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

Chair of the disputation
Dag Langmyhr

Supervisors
Glenn T. Lines, Joakim Sundnes og Ole M. Sejersted

Read More
Announcement of the PhD defence at the University of Oslo’s web pages (in Norwegian)