Isabella Gimon

Biography

Isabella Gimon is a graduate student in The Integrated Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. She is using rule-based and agent-based models to study protein aggregation. Protein aggregation has been correlated with many neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's. Protein aggregation may begin at a conformational state or by a monomeric protein. The outcome is extremely deleterious for any organism since it prevents a protein from acquiring its functional state. Rule-based models uses a set of rules translated into, among other things, a set of ordinary differential equations. Over the last decade, both types of models have had a far-reaching effect in the biomedical sciences, mainly in accommodating complex problems seen in vivo and easily reflecting those in a model. Using rule-based models to study protein aggregation, Isabella is investigating the processes that leads to aggregation.