Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Modeling of nonlinear and nonstationary physiological systems and signals.
Office: DRB 160
Phone: (213) 740-0841
Fax: (213) 740-0343
Email:
vzm@bmsr.usc.edu
Dr. Marmarelis is associated with
Biomedical Simulations Resource (BMSR) and
Center for Neural Engineering (CNE) labs.
Background
Vasilis Z. Marmarelis received his diploma in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1972 and his M.S. in Information Science and Ph.D. in Engineering Science (Bio-Information Systems) from the California Institute of Technology in 1973 and 1976, respectively. He was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology in BioInformation Systems from 1976 to 1978. In September 1978, he joined the faculty of the Biomedical and Electrical Engineering Departments at USC, where he is currently a Professor. Dr. Marmarelis served as Chairman of Biomedical Engineering from 1990 to 1996. He is also Co-Director of the Biomedical Simulations Resource (BMSR), a research center dedicated to modeling and simulation of physiological systems that has been funded by the National Institutes of Health through multi-million dollar grants since 1985.
Research
Dr. Marmarelis' research interests lie primarily in the areas of systems analysis and signal processing with applications to physiology and medicine. Of particular interest are the problems of identification and modeling of nonlinear and/or nonstation ary systems, analysis of nonstationary signals, and spatiotemporal signal processing. Areas of application include neural systems and signals, sensory information processing and coding, cardio-vascular autoregulation, tissue characterization from laser-induced fluorescence data, and principles of information processing in the nervous system. Recent projects have dealt with the questions of nonlinear modeling of neuronal ensembles, nonlinear feedback in physiological systems, renal autoregulation mechanisms, nonlinear mechano-electrical transduction in mechanoreceptors, the relation between biological and artificial neural networks, the use of principal dynamic modes for modeling nonlinear dynamic systems, and information processing by the nervous system. Associated with the latter is the fundamental issue of neural plasticity as it relates to memory formation and learning, viewed as a problem of modeling of nonstationary nonlinear dynamic systems.
The role and importance of dynamic nonlinearities and nonstationarities in physiological function underpins much of the research undertaken by Dr. Marmarelis and his graduate students. He has co-authored (with his brother Panos) the first book dealing exclusively with the question of modeling nonlinear physiological systems (1978), and he has edited three volumes (1987, 1989, 1994) containing contributions from leading experts in this subject area. He has published more than 100 papers on these and related subjects.
Dr. Marmarelis and his graduate students utilize in their research the extensive computing facilities of the BMSR. Experimental data are collected in collaboration with other research groups, within the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Neural Informational and Behavioral Sciences Program, the USC School of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, as well as collaborating laboratories in the U.S. and Canada.
