Xiaopeng Zhao, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and
Biomedical Engineering, recently received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for
a project entitled “Integrated Research and Education in Nonlinear Dynamics in Biological
Systems.” The goal of his project is to develop a framework for understanding the
dynamics of heart rhythm disorders that lead to fatal cardiac diseases such as
ventricular fibrillation and atrial fibrillation. This research could have a profound
impact on human health worldwide; in the United States alone, sudden cardiac death kills
more than 350,000 people every year. In addition, Zhao’s research will support new
cross-disciplinary collaborations in the areas of biomedical engineering, life science,
and mathematics. 

Zhao earned his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and joined UTK in 2007. Since then he has been
conducting research in the areas of computational cardiology, mathematical physiology,
nonlinear dynamics in biology and medicine, and system biology.

Articles

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Period-Doubling Bifurcation to Alternans in Paced Cardiac Tissue: Crossover from Smooth to Border-Collision Characteristics (with Carolyn M. Berger, David G. Schaeffer, Hana M. Dobrovolny, Wanda Krassowska, and Daniel J. Gauthier), Physical Review Letters (2007)

We investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the period-doubling bifurcation to alternans in heart tissue. Previously,...

 

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Small-signal Amplification of Period-doubling Bifurcations in Smooth Iterated Maps (with David G. Schaeffer, Carolyn M. Berger, and Daniel J. Gauthier), Nonlinear Dynamics (2007)

Various authors have shown that, near the onset of a period-doubling bifurcation, small perturbations in...

 

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Near-grazing Dynamics in Tapping-mode Atomic-force Microscopy (with Harry Dankowicz and Sambit Misra), International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics (2007)

In tapping-mode atomic-force microscopy, non-linear effects due to large variations in the force field on...

 

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Characterization of Intermittent Contact in Tapping-Mode Atomic Force Microscopy (with Harry Dankowicz), ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics (2006)

Tapping-mode atomic force microscopy has wide applications for probing the nanoscale surface and subsurface properties...

 

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Unfolding Degenerate Grazing Dynamics in Impact Actuators (with Harry Dankowicz), Nonlinearity (2006)

In this paper, a selected analysis of the dynamics in an example impact microactuator is...

 

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