University of Amsterdam

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is one of Europe’s leading research universities. It collaborates with hundreds of national and international academic and research institutions, as well as businesses and public institutions. UvA forges a meeting of minds for the advancement of education and science. UvA has a long- standing tradition of excellent research. Its fundamental research in particular has gained national and international recognition and led to numerous grants. UvA has 7 faculties, 3000 academic staff members and 30000 students.

The Computational Science Lab of the faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam aims to describe and understand how complex systems in nature and society process information. The abundant availability of data from science and society drives its research. It studies Complex Systems in the context of methods like multi-scale cellular automata, dynamic networks and individual agent based models. Challenges include data-driven modelling of multi-level systems and their dynamics as well as conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations that are necessary to understand these processes and the associated predictability limits of such computer simulations. The Computational Science Lab has extensive experience in EU Framework projects. The lab provides a wealth of experience in computational science and specifically in information processing in complex systems, multiscale modelling and simulations, and applications in the socio- economic domain. Their work on modelling complex systems in general and complex networks in particular together with long experience in the application of Cellular Automata, Agent-based models and Complex Networks methods, as well as advanced modelling methods, will be crucial to this project.

UvA will bring in expertise in computational biomedicine, modelling and simulation, and high performance computing. Specifically, UvA will work on applications in the Cardiovascular field, with focus on complex multiscale models related to treatment of Coronary Arteries, as well as modelling thrombosis using high end fully resolved blood flow models. UvA will lead WP3: Training and Outreach, contributing not only UvA’s domain knowledge, but also its expertise and reputation as a large academic institution.

 

Key Personnel

Professor Alfons Hoekstra – Professor in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam and the national research university ITMO, St Petersburg, Russia. His research focuses on multi-scale multi-science modelling, large-scale simulations, and high performance computing, mainly in the biomedical domain and complex systems science. He has a longstanding expertise in Computational Biomedicine, Complex Systems simulations, and high performance parallel and distributed computing. He has published over 250 research papers. He has extensive experience in participation and management of EU Framework projects. He was the project coordinator of the COAST project (FP6) and the MAPPER project (FP7), the SOPHOCLES project (FP7) and currently the ComPat project (H2020). He participated in more than 10 other EU funded projects.

 

Dr Gábor Závodszky – Background in physics and obtained his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2015. He is currently a PostDoc at the Computational Science Lab of the University of Amsterdam and an assistant professor at the Budapest University of Technology, Hungary. Areas of his research include: applications of the lattice Boltzmann method, GPU programming, data visualisation, particle transport physics, chaotic flows and cellular suspensions.

 

Anna Nikishova – PhD candidate in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Prof. A. G. Hoekstra. She is working on the e-Musc project of the Netherlands eScience Centre, where efficient Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis methods for multi-scale modelling and simulation are developed, explored and applied to real world problems.

 

Victor Azizi – Scientific programmer at the computational science lab at the university of Amsterdam. He is currently developing high performance code for modelling blood as a suspension in both 2D and 3D. He got his bachelor in computer science and his master in computational science at the UVA.