The focus of the seminar series is to call for experts related to academia and research in the areas related to biomechanics, variability, motor disorders, physical therapy, and related studies.

Presentation Title: In Search of the Fountain of Youth: Dynamical Approaches for Assessing Biological vs. Chronological

Presentation Abstract:

From molecular to cellular to systemic levels, attention is increasingly targeted at developing novel biomarkers to distinguish biological (physiological) from chronological (temporal) aging. Interest is kindled by proposed interventions to retard or even reverse the pace of aging, perhaps en route to the elusive “fountain of youth.” My talk will focus primarily on symbolic dynamical analysis of physiological signals (e.g., heart rate, beat-to-beat blood pressure variability). I will discuss applications to prediction of correlates of frailty, cognitive function and all-cause mortality using the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) and Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Study. Additionally, I will discuss dynamical changes that occur in response to sleep. The work is based on a basic concept in physics, namely that information about a system’s functionality is encoded in the fluctuations generated by that system, not just in average and variance values.

About the speaker:

Madalena Damásio da Costa, PhD, is a statistical physicist concentrating in physiologic signal analysis. She did her undergraduate and graduate training at the Faculty of Sciences in Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She is also Co-director of the Margret and H.A. Rey Institute for Complex Physiologic Signals in Physiology and Medicine. She and her colleagues have introduced widely-used methods of physiologic time series analysis. These methods have been shown to be useful for studying a broad range of problems in physiologic and biomedicine. Her work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.