Alena Talkachova

Alena Talkachova

Contact

Nils Hasselmo Hall, Room 6-128
Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Biomedical Engineering

The mechanical contractions of the heart are triggered by electrical waves of excitation propagating through cardiac tissue. Abnormalities in the wave propagation, including fast and chaotic propagation in the heart, may lead to fatal cardiac arrhythmias, such as atrial and ventricular fibrillation. The general goal of Dr. Talkachova’s group is to investigate the electrical activity of cardiac cells and whole heart from a nonlinear dynamics perspective, aiming to reveal mechanisms of complex cardiac rhythms leading to arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death. We use high resolution optical mapping to visualize electrical activity in the heart to study complex spatio-temporal changes in electrical activity encountered during arrhythmia. To further drive experiments, we perform numerical simulations of different physiological ionic models of cardiac action potentials