ABOUT US
Charles G. Orosz, Ph.D - Virginia Folcik, Ph.D - Christina Sass
Virginia Folcik, Ph.D
Dr. Virginia Folcik's B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University coupled with her B.S. in Biology and Ph.D. in Regulatory Biology from Cleveland State University (specializing in Immunology) made her the ideal candidate for creating the Basic Immune Simulator using the Repast software library. She is currently working as a Research Scientist in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Pulmonary/Critical Care at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Dr. Folcik continues to conduct in silico experiments with the simulator to determine how the behavior of individual agents representing the basic cell types of the immune system leads to normal (protective) and pathological (injurious) behavior from the immune system as a whole. Initial results from experiments using the simulator to study the network properties of the immune system have indicated potential targets for limiting the immune response in situations such as transplantation where the goal is to prevent graft rejection. Her work has been presented at Swarmfest '04 and '06, the annual meetings for investigators using Agent-Based Modeling techniques to study Complex Systems, and it has been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The code for the Basic Immune Simulator will be publicly available after the initial work has been published.
E-mail: nivar.1@osu.edu
Virginia A. Folcik Nivar, Ph. D.
Research Scientist
Internal Medicine
Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine
3102 Cramblett Hall
456 W. 10th Ave
(614)366-1332
