Spotlight: Marie E. Rognes

Marie specialises in computational mathematics, is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, and of the FEniCS Steering Council. Most recently, she is the Deputy Director of the new K.G. Jebsen Centre for Brain Fluid Research. She will celebrate her 16th year with Simula this year.

What is your educational background?

I am trained as a Computational Mathematician (PhD, University of Oslo, 2009) – a mathematician who develops theory on how to best (in some sense of the word best, for instance: most reliably, most robustly, most efficiently) perform scientific computations and studies scientific or natural phenomena via mathematical and computational models. 

What do you want to achieve with your research?

What I find particularly rewarding about my current lines of research is its dual scientific impact: both in computational mathematics and in the life sciences. 

I address life science topics characterised by unique features that lack mathematical foundations, and as such get the opportunity to design and analyse new mathematical structures, and new computational models and methods. Conversely, we contribute to gaining new physiological and clinical insights via in-silico studies – testing existing or generating new hypotheses and simulating what cannot be measured or seen. 

Can you share an example of how you collaborate with industry partners or other researchers in your work? 

In most of my research, I work closely with neuroscientists and biologists more broadly, both experimentalists (basic medicine) and neurosurgeons and neuroradiologists (clinical medicine) targeting dual scientific impact as mentioned. 

For instance, in our long-standing collaboration on brain glymphatics with Profs. Per-Kristian Eide and Rune Enger & their teams, we combine multi-modal imaging data of brain structure and brain function with simulations to better understand the mechanisms underlying brain clearance, how they vary between individuals, and how they can be controlled and targeted. 

More recently, Simula announced the new K.G. Jebsen Centre for Brain Fluid Research, of which Simula is the computational partner. It will be led by UiO Professor Per Kristian Eide, with me as the Deputy Director. This results from more than a decade of interdisciplinary collaboration and will lead to the development of new tools for diagnostics and treatment of brain diseases.

What are your current research projects or areas of focus in your field?

Earlier I named the K.G. Jebsen Centre for Brain Fluid Research (news article). 

Additionally, another major research focus has been with the project EMIx: Extreme modelling of excitable tissue (project page) which has the potential to provide a new avenue of investigation for understanding physiological processes in the brain underlying oedema, which is when the body holds onto too much fluid, causing swelling in different areas of the body. It can also help with the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases which are conditions that often lead to a decline in cognitive function, movement, or both, depending on the specific condition.

Are there emerging trends or technologies within your field that you find particularly exciting or promising?

I am absolutely excited about the amount of opportunities in the computational life sciences in general. 

There are so many topics and areas where in-silico/computational approaches have not at all had an impact yet. I’m particularly drawn towards blue-sky frontier research – breaking new ground and mapping uncharted terrain. I also think that we are at a very opportune moment in terms of technological readiness and convergence along five pillars: 

• Thanks to impressive advances in microscopy and segmentation, there is now an incredible amount of digital reconstructions of biological tissue available – for instance, breathtaking reconstructions of brain tissue – perfectly suited for computational models;
• Sufficient computational resources are now readily available  – we do not need to “break the bank” to perform even gold-standard simulations 
• Numerical algorithms and simulation technology (such as the FEniCS and Dolfin-adjoint projects described in my answer to the next question) are now at a readiness level to readily allow for high-fidelity multiphysics simulations with high biological complexity. 
• In-vivo imaging, or non-invasive imaging such as X-ray and ultrasound, provides sufficient data for calibration of models, while leaving enough of the “unseen” for in-silico studies to provide unprecedented detail. 

Can you share a turning point or defining moment in your work as a scientist?

Two dates stand out as defining for my academic career: Oct 18, 2013 and Dec 17, 2014. Let me start with the second and segue my way into the first. 

On December 17, 2014, in the queue for a register while Christmas shopping, I received a call from my Irish colleague Patrick E. Farrell (who was then a postdoc at Imperial College London, and is now a Professor at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford University). Patrick enthusiastically let me know that we (Patrick, our co-authors Simon Funke and David Ham, and I) had won the 2015 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for our software project Dolfin-adjoint. This is the most prestigious prize in the community and was top on our academic wish list. Dolfin-adjoint is an open source software library that targets adjoint models. Such models are a fundamental tool for physics-based or learning-based optimization problems, and are thus relevant essentially everywhere. Our concept and software solved the challenging problem of deriving these – not by hand but automatically – based on exploiting mathematical and computational structure. This then enables rapid and democratic development of efficient and sophisticated simulation technology. 

We had started working on Dolfin-adjoint three years earlier, in the fall of 2011, when I was invited by David Ham to Imperial College London to present the FEniCS Project. FEniCS is a larger collection of scientific software packages and libraries for the automated numerical solution of partial differential equations by finite element methods. I started working on FEniCS in 2007 during my PhD (and am still involved as a member of the FEniCS Steering Council). I then needed some functionality (specifically, conforming H(div) and H(curl) finite element spaces) that were not a standard feature in any existing simulation libraries. I was reluctant to write large amounts of cumbersome C or C++ code, but was intrigued by the code generation concept used by FEniCS: writing high-level Python code to automatically generate the corresponding C code – not for one specific case, but for a large general (abstract) class of problems. FEniCS was then relatively new, probably with hundred users tops, and most of the development was happening at Simula. Today, there are more than tens of thousands of monthly downloads of FEniCS and it is a fully international (ad)venture. Watching and contributing to this project as it  has grown over the last 15 years, has probably been the most thrilling part of my work as a researcher. 

In between starting working on Dolfin-adjoint in 2011 and Christmas shopping 2014, in October 2013, I read an article in VG (the largest Norwegian newspaper) with a heading along the lines of “Sleep cleans the brain”. I was immediately intrigued, and tracked down the underlying research article. At Simula at the time, I was leading our research department on biomedical computing – aiming at developing and applying new simulation technology for better understanding of physiological processes underlying health and disease. The idea that struck me was that we should try this approach to study brain clearance. I put this idea into motion in the Spring of 2014, and by a serendipity, found cutting-edge environments for both basic and clinical research into brain fluids at the University of Oslo (Prof. Erlend Nagelhus and his GliaLab, now led by Rune Enger) and at Oslo University Hospital (Prof. Per-Kristian Eide and Geir Ringstad), with open minds and willingness to contribute. The next challenge we faced was that the functions and structures associated with brain clearance defined a relatively new and uncharted terrain for computational mathematics. I therefore applied for ground-breaking research funding for this from the European Research Council and from the Norwegian Research Council – and received it! In the nearly 10 years since then, this activity has grown from first idea into a well-established research direction in Scientific Computing at Simula with substantial momentum and international interest. 

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Thanks to Marie E. Rognes for contributing to this researcher profile.

More than 150 scientific researchers at Simula foster a collaborative and innovative environment for science research in Oslo, Norway and abroad. Our experts are expanding the research fields at Simula from scientific computing and software engineering to communication systems, machine learning, & cryptography.

See also

• EMS Magazine: Waterscales: Mathematical and computational foundations for modelling cerebral fluid flow, a popular science interview with Marie
• Mathematics that cures us, a TEDx talk by Marie

Associated contacts

Marie E. Rognes

Chief Research Scientist

Email Marie E.