Zhangli Peng, PhD

My research area is computational science and engineering. My research directions include: 1) Multiscale modeling, such as coupling of continuum-based macroscale modeling with particle-based mesoscale/microscale simulations; 2) Biomechanics and biophysics of cells/organelles/molecules/tissues, such as red blood cells, cancer cells, primary cilia, nuclei, cytoskeletal proteins, DNA/RNA, blood vessel walls; 3) Modeling of microfluidics/nanofluidics, such as acoustic microfluidics, inertial microfluidics, and nanopores. Specifically, an important goal of my group is to apply multiscale modeling to predict how proteins mutations and modifications affect the biomechanics and mechanobiology of cells and tissues within in vitro and in vivo microenvironments. This will help understand the mechanisms of related diseases such as hematologic disorders, ciliopathies, laminopathies, malaria, and cancer metastasis. In pursuit of this goal, the objective of my group is to integrate particle-based simulations such as all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) and coarse-grained dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) with continuum-based modeling approaches such as finite element method (FEM) and boundary element method (BEM) to model the cell-microenvironment interactions starting from the molecular scales. Furthermore, my group is also applying multiscale modeling to help develop deformation-based, acoustic-based, inertial-based, thermal-based, and electric-based microfluidics/nanofluidics for disease diagnostics and biotechnologies. For example, we developed acoustic microfluidics to separate circulating tumor cells for early caner diagnostics.