Pritha Dutta

Background

About Pritha Dutta

I am a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics at University of Waterloo, specializing in mathematical biology and medicine. My research is focused on critical areas such as renal function, calcium and magnesium homeostasis, and blood pressure regulation. In my current research I have developed mechanistic models of calcium and magnesium homeostasis and their interaction with the blood pressure regulation system to study the complex interplay between these two systems in health and various disorders such as dietary magnesium and calcium deficiency, vitamin D3 deficiency, and hypertension, In addition, the focus of my research is to simulate and understand the mechanism of action of common antihypertensive drugs, such as diuretics, ACE and ARBs, on calcium and magnesium homeostasis and blood pressure regulation. Furthermore, I have developed cell-based mechanistic models of renal function to study (i) sex and circadian influences on renal oxygen consumption and (ii) calcium and magnesium transport along nephrons to investigate sex-dependent compensatory responses during diuretic treatment and in Bartter’s syndrome and Gitelman’s syndrome. The primary focus of my Doctoral Research was to develop computational models to study the social and biological factors of type 2 diabetes. I have developed ordinary differential equation (ODE) models, Boolean network models and System dynamics models. I have also worked on protein-protein interaction networks and virus-host protein interaction networks.