Profile

Dr Irina V. Biktasheva

Honorary Senior Lecturer

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Dr Irina Biktasheva has over 30 years of research and teaching experience, with full time appointments at the Institute of Mathematical Problems in Biology of Russian Academy of Sciences (former : Research Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences), University of Cambridge (UK), University of Liverpool (UK), and visiting and honorary appointments with University of Leeds (UK), University of Exeter (UK), Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California Santa Barbara (USA), and Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland (New Zealand).   Dr Biktasheva enjoys invitations to the leading international venues: e.g. German Physical Society Spring Conference (2020), KITP UCSB USA (2006, 2018), as well as organised a number of international workshops/mini symposia herself. 

Her main research interest is the asymptotic theory of dissipative vortices (aka spiral waves) and its applications.

Among Dr Biktasheva's main theoretical achievements are the discovery and explanation of the  macroscopic dissipative wave-particle duality of spiral waves  (Phys Rev E, 67: 026221, 2003), quantitative prediction of stationary orbits for the drift of spiral waves around localised inhomogeneities (cover picture of Phys Rev Lett 104: 2010), and prediction of the drift of dissipative vortices caused by small variations of thickness in thin layers (Phys Rev Lett, 114: 068302, 2015), the latter is already confirmed in experiment. This recent progress in the quantitative understanding and prediction of dynamics of dissipative vortices in biological, physical and chemical media, most importantly in bio-medical applications, makes it close to a significant impact in many areas of science, medicine, and technology as never before, because the re-entrant waves represent e.g. (pathological) regimes of self-organisation, and transition to chaos, in cardiac (fibrillation) and brain (stroke and migraine) tissues, where the possibility of an effective control is of vital importance, with the high impact expected in, for example, improved cardiac ablation and implantable defibrillators. On the other end of the scale are re-entrant waves of epidemics, and the re-entrant weather fronts in the atmospheric layer (aka weather systems: storms and hurricanes) underlying and manifesting the climate change.

In April 2020, Dr Biktasheva's latest paper "Role of a Habitat's Air Humidity in Covid-19 Mortality" (Sci. Total Environ., 736: 138763, 2020) was submitted to UK Parliament and Government surveys on expert insights around the short, medium and long-term concerns and issues relating to COVID-19 and its impacts. It also received immediate worldwide attention. 

  Research interests

• Applied and Computational Mathematics;
• Non-linear waves in regimes of Self-organised Synchronisation (excitable and oscillatory systems);
• Asymptotic theory of spiral waves: Wave-Particle Duality of Dissipative Vortices;
• Computer modelling for Cardiology;
• High Performance Computing.

Public Lectures

•  "Wave-particle duality of dissipative vortices and implications for cardiology" (Video) , in Auckland Bioengineering Institute seminar series , 30th August 2016, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
• "Cardiac re-entry dynamics in MRI- and micro-CT based models of the heart" (Podcast) , in Integrative Cardiac Dynamics Research Program, 6th July 2018, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

  Referee for

• UK Funding Bodies: EPSRC; BBSRC; National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
• Peer-Reviewed Journals: Algorithms; Biophysical Journal; BioMed Research International; Briefings in Bioinformatics; Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science; Chaos, Solitons & Fractals; Journal of Chemical Physics; Journal of Theoretical Biology; Phys Rev E; Phys Rev Lett; PLoS ONE; Proceedings of the Royal Society A; Scientific Reports - Nature.    

Qualifications

• PhD (University of Leeds, UK);
• PhD (Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences);
• M.Sc. (cum laude, Tomsk State University, Russia).