Marina Echeverria will defend her thesis on Monday, September 14th

The defence will take place at Adela Moyua Aretoa Faculty of Science and Technology (EHU - Leioa) at 11:30

Marina is a PhD researcher in Mathematics at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She joined BCAM in September 2019, as part of what was then the Mathematical Modeling in Biosciences group, led by Luca Gerardo Giorda. She holds a BSc in Biomedical Engineering from TECNUN and an MSc in Computational Biomedical Engineering from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her doctoral research focuses on the computational modelling of cardiac radiofrequency ablation and early thrombosis, combining continuum and particle-based approaches to study tissue response to ablation and blood coagulation under flow. She has undertaken research stays at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) and Johann Radon Institut (RICAM) in Linz. Alongside her research, she has also become a mother of two during the course of her doctorate.

Her thesis, titled “Mathematical Modeling and Computational Simulation of Radiofrequency Ablation and Coagulation Processes” is supervised by Prof. Marco Ellero (BCAM & Ikerbasque) and Prof. Luca Gerardo-Giorda (Johann Radon Institut (RICAM)), Linz. It is scheduled to be defended on September 14th, 2026, at Adela Moyua Aretoa, Faculty of Science and Technology (EHU - Leioa) at 11:30 a.m. 

On behalf of all members of BCAM, we would like to wish her all the best for the future, both professionally and personally.

Abstract
Cardiac radiofrequency catheter ablation is a widely used treatment for cardiac arrhythmias. Although the procedure is generally effective, complications such as thrombus formation may occur during or after the intervention. Thrombosis near the ablation catheter can result from the combined effects of thermal tissue injury, biochemical activation and altered blood flow, motivating the development of computational approaches to better understand these processes.
This thesis develops two complementary computational frameworks to study different aspects of this problem. The first part presents a continuum-scale finite element model of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) that accounts for tissue deformation, electrical conduction and heat transfer. The model is used to investigate catheter-tissue mechanical interaction, temperature distributions and lesion formation, including the comparison of different contact algorithms.
The second part investigates early blood coagulation at the mesoscopic scale using Smoothed Dissipative Particle Dynamics (SDPD). Reduced models of the intrinsic and extrinsic coagulation pathways are coupled with diffusion and flow in idealised microvascular geometries. This framework allows the spatial transport and reaction of coagulation species to be resolved and is used to investigate how flow, geometry and localised biochemical activation influence thrombin and fibrin formation during early clot initiation.
The two modelling approaches are developed separately but are conceptually connected through the broader problem of thrombus formation in the context of cardiac RFA. They also provide a basis for future work towards integrating the different physical and biochemical processes involved.