Wing Ki (Catherine) Wong

PhD in Bioinformatics, Scientist in Antibody Development

Finite Element

How can you tell whether a bridge can bear the load of all the vehicles on it?

Yours skin is stretchy – until a point it breaks. But how far can you stretch your skin before it breaks?

In cases where you can’t repeatedly build a million bridges nor stretch your skin a million times to test your hypothesis, Finite Element Method can provide an estimate, based on the material properties (stiffness, shape etc.).

The Simplest Illustration

Simplex, Linear Elastic

Converting into Weak Form

How it comes about: Finite Deformation

Biological Material Properties: Constitutive Laws

Module 11: High Performance Computing

This was the final module of the year – and perhaps one of the most relevant modules (although this was only one-week long!) since the majority of us need to speed up our algorithms at some points in our research projects for some forms of screening.

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Module 10: Object-oriented Programming

One more week until Easter break!
This week we had an intensive one-week course on C++. Since I have used C++ in one of my previous projects, I opted to do the assignment straightaway. It was on class inheritance for different Ordinary different equation solvers, and running CxxTest to assert warnings if the code failed to behave as expected – according to the instructions given on the assignment (one should be reminded that, even when the code runs, ie. when miracle happens, it might not run according to the specification as we thought we had coded). It was fairly useful suite if you know what you should expect (in my case, the boundaries/end points data).

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Module 9: Structure-based Drug Discovery

After four weeks of Mathematical Biology, I decided to switch to a chemistry course to explore something drastically different. In Structural Biology, modelling takes a different approach. In the previous module of Structural Biology, we had been exposed to the experimental methods and a tiny bit of physics behind solving for the crystal structures of proteins using X-ray crystallography, and how the structures are realised computationally. This module then provides the subsequent development in terms of using these crystal structures (or using the pharmacophore structures) to aid drug design. The overall idea is to predict the way proteins interact.

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