Mathematical Modeling of Spatiotemporal Host Defense Mechanisms Against Pulmonary Fungal Infections

Doctoral thesis, defended 2024.

This thesis formulates the innate immune response to inhaled Aspergillus fumigatus spores as a spatiotemporal dynamical system: individual immune cells (alveolar macrophages, neutrophils) are represented as agents moving and interacting on the geometry of the alveolar space, coupled to continuum fields for diffusing signals. Simulating this agent-based/continuum hybrid across cell- and tissue-scale time horizons makes it possible to trace how local, cell-level decisions aggregate into the tissue-level infection dynamics studied in the publications below.