A Dundee University lecturer is using her ground-breaking mathematics research to help tackle heart disease.
Dr Irene Kyza has created complicated algorithms she believes will enable medics to better simulate blood flow in the body’s arteries.
She hopes that by utilising and building up her work they will ultimately be better able to prevent heart attacks in the future.
The next step is to brief politicians and a panel of experts on her work at the Houses of Parliament in London next week.
She is one of a number of academics who taking part in the national SET for Britain competition, which looks to support early stage or early career researchers in a variety of fields.
Dr Kyza, who is a lecturer in computational mathematics, said she was “excited” by the opportunity to present her work to the Parliament and learn more about the activities of other young researchers.
The 33-year-old said of her research: “The accurate simulation of blood flow in arteries can give insights on several biological processes and ultimately help to prevent more heart attacks,.
“One of the mathematical difficulties of biological flows is that the geometry the shape of the arteries changes in time.
“This makes it very difficult to come up with efficient algorithms that simulate well the flow with affordable computational cost.
“By developing new mathematical tools we were able to overcome this difficulty, along with my collaborators.”
It is the second successive year that mathematical sciences have been involved in the competition.