I am an Applied Mathematician and Mathematical Biologist at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia). My research centers around the mechanobiology of cells, especially the dynamics and structure of the cytoskeletons and how phenomena on the scale of single proteins and protein cluster lead to emergent phenomena affecting cell shape and cell movement.

I use various modeling paradigmas. On the one hand I perform computational simulations in the tradition of Brownian Dynamics , on the other hand I also formulate or derive continuum descriptions such as fluid models, which I analyse mathematically and also simulate numerically . The goal is always to draw conclusions which are meaningful to the biological system of interest and which typically complement and explain experimental data.

Ongoing projects, current scientific interests

  • Actomyosin contraction of the cell cortex
  • Epithelial mono-layers
  • Intra-cellular transport
  • Mathematical Neurobiology (transport of synaptic and neurosecretory vesicles, motile dynamics of active zone proteins)
  • Cytoplasmic streaming.
  • Mechanobiology (emergent phenomena of the cytoskeleton, cell migration)
  • Non-linear drag due to turn-over of cross-linker proteins.

People, students


  • Alistair Falconer (PhD student)
  • Sanchita Malla (IITD-UQ joint PhD)
  • Yash Vats (IITD-UQ joint PhD)

former group members


  • Alex Tam (postdoc, now lecturer at UniSA)
  • Nizhum Rahman (PhD student, now postdoc at QUT)
  • Emma Comino (Honours student)
  • Elaine Schenk (Honours student)
  • Peta Wellington (Honours student, co-advised)
  • Denni Currin-Ross (Honours student)
  • Tim Ryall (AMSI vacation research scholarship)

There are competitive UQ PhD fellowships for domestic (AUS and NZ) students as well as for overseas students .
In addition, an ear-marked PhD fellowship associated to my ARC-grant is available to commence asap. Please contact me (CV and transcripts) if you are interested in doing a PhD under my direction at one of the leading universities in Australia.
Great Court

Publications

Submitted

Refereed Papers

Articles in Conference Proceedings:

Chapters in books:

Formal academic publications:


Teaching

At UQ I am/have been teaching courses on ODEs, PDEs, Dynamical Systems (Bifurcations & Chaos), Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Biology and Scientific Computing.

Earlier I have been teaching variational calculus & PDEs (U. de San Luis), Mathematics for Biologists (U. of Vienna), Mathematics for Chemists (U. of Linz) as well as calculus (New York U.).

Short CV

I studied Technical Mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology. I also earned a Master's degree in Law and I finished the first ("non-clinical") part of Medical Studies at the University of Vienna. Under the direction of Christian Schmeiser and Peter Markowich I earned my PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Vienna in 2007. During this time I spent several months at the University of Buenos Aires and at the ENS-Paris rue d'Ulm.

Before coming to UQ, I held post-doc positions at the Wolfgang Pauli Insitute (Vienna), University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (RICAM). In 2013 I won an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). I was a post-doc researcher in the group of Alex Mogilner first at UC Davis, then at the Courant Institute of Math. Sciences (New York University).

Prizes

Fellowships, Grants

Organization of conferences and workshops

conferences, workshops:

contact

Dietmar Oelz
School of Mathematics and Physics
University of Queensland
St Lucia 4072 Qld, Australia

building-room 69-708
d.oelz@uq.edu.au
+61 7 336 53262