| For most of us, a trip to Japan would probably be a once-in-a-lifetime experience—perhaps a never-in-a-lifetime experience. But mathematics teacher Ursula Gordon of Mundy's Mill High School in Jonesboro, Georgia has made the trip twice in her two summers as a Georgia Intern-Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) Fellow. And even that was not her first brush with that culture. |
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"I lived in Japan for a year studying Japanese when I first graduated from college," she says, "So, I knew the language and I knew Japan itself, and I think that was how I was able to go the first time. So it was an easy transition." Dr. Naresh Thadhani of Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering received a grant that allows him to place teachers into international research settings. In partnership with GIFT, a CEISMC program devoted to placing teachers into summer internships with business and industry, he sent three teachers to Japan and China. Ursula Gordon went to Dr. Marie Oshima's lab at the University of Tokyo to conduct research on the accurate modeling of brain aneurysms. "I learned a lot the first time, and learned even more the second time," Ursula says. But why travel halfway around the world to conduct this research? "Most people in the [United] States look at aneurysms in the heart and the leg," Ursula explains. Dr. Oshima's lab, by contrast, focuses on those in the brain. An aneurysm is caused by a blood clot in a blood vessel or artery. Extended blockage of a blood vessel in the brain can cause damage to nerve cells. That sort of damage is better known as a stroke. Ursula applied her mathematics knowledge to calculating the movement and rate of speed of blood traveling around the clot and the shear stress applied to the walls of the vessel by the blood flow. If enough stress is applied to the blood vessel's wall, the wall will rupture, then collapse. Ursula helped to create a numerical simulation that shows the blood moving through the arteries, and also one that models the collapse of the blood vessel's walls. Ursula hopes to bring her experience back to the classroom after the winter holidays, when students will have completed a number of courses that intersect with her research. "Right after the calculus students study partially differentiated equations and the anatomy people have studied veins in the brain, and the physics kids have studied fluid dynamics, I want to get them together. I want to take the top calc students, top anatomy students studying the veins and blood vessels, get my physics students involved when studying fluid dynamics, put a whole team of students together to do this." Ursula used two equations repeatedly during her summer work. "There's the continuity equation," she explains, "which basically says that what goes in has gotta come out. And then there's the Navier-Stokes equation, the equation that actually describes blood flow, in particular in the arteries that are extremely small. You use Navier-Stokes to derive the velocity function for describing the blood flow, which breaks down into a second-order partial differential equation." When one considers the 14 hours it takes to fly to Japan (and the arguable quality of airline food), aren't two summer experiences over there enough? "There is one more part we want to add to the numerical simulation to make it even more realistic," she says, "and hopefully I'll go back this summer to work and finish up on that." She's keeping her fingers crossed. The video was produced by Georgia Tech's Office of Institute Communications and Public Affairs (ICPA) as part of a full-length video on the GIFT program. You can download this video by clicking here. | |
To download Ursula's Implementation Plan here, click here. (MS Word Document | 458 KB)
To download Ursula's Summary Report, click here. (MS Word Document | 701 KB)
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