Exciting times: high-fidelity modeling of living tissues

Over the last three decades, advances in bioimaging have revolutionized our ability to study the structure and function of living systems. At the nano- to microscale, the new capabilities of cellular microscopy have resulted in the generation and wide availability of large-scale high-resolution imaging data, as strikingly exemplified by increasingly complex dense reconstructions of cortical tissue. In parallel, research in scientific computing and computational mathematics have led to the development of highly accurate, efficient and scalable numerical algorithms and their realization in open scientific software. In this talk, I will show how we, in the last few years, have developed high-fidelity computational models of cellular and subcellular physiology, incorporating detailed geometric structure, biophysical dynamics and advanced cell imaging data. I will highlight key numerical challenges - some that we have tackled and some open problems - and point at future directions.