Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s are devastating conditions with poorly understood mechanisms and no known cure. Yet a striking feature of these conditions is the characteristic pattern of invasion throughout the brain, leading to well-codified disease stages visible to neuropathology and associated with various cognitive deficits and pathologies. This evolution is associated with the aggregation of key toxic proteins. In this talk, I will show how we use multiscale modelling to gain insight into this process In particular, by looking at protein dynamics on the connectome, we can unravel some of the universal features associated with dementia that are driven by both network topology and protein kinetics leading to changes in brain activity.
Alain Goriely is a mathematician with broad interests in mathematical methods, sciences, and engineering. He is well known for his contributions to fundamental and applied solid mechanics, and, in particular, for the development of a mathematical theory of biological growth, He joined the University of Oxford in 2010 as the inaugural Statutory Professor of Mathematical Modelling and fellow of St. Catherine’s College. He is currently the Director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In addition, Alain enjoys scientific outreach based on problems connected to his research including tendril perversion in plants, twining plants, umbilical cord knotting, whip cracking, the shape of seashells, visual illusions, and brain modelling,. For his contribution to mathematics and sciences, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022, received the Society of Engineering Science Engineering Medal in 2024 and the David Crighton Medal in 2025. www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/alain.goriely