When I was little, I always wondered why my parents worked late every day. While my friends went home after preschool, I would stay at my parents labs, waiting for them to finish their research. What was so interesting about science? One day, I begged my dad to show me his experiments. Smiling at my enthusiasm, he scraped some of my cheek cells and put them under the microscope. As he pointed out the nucleus and organelles of each cell, I watched in awe at the hidden complexity within my own body. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to be like my dad: to be able to look into the microscope and understand how the world works…After calibrating the basic model according to the videos and constants found in other scientic papers, I could then test the impact of different cellular foot forces on the overall rate of wound healing. I tested the effects of mechanical and chemical forces on the cell and found that mechanical forces alone could close a wound. If mechanical and chemical forces worked together, the wound would close at a much faster rate. Overall, I have created a model that can give a complete picture of cell movement during wound healing. The model is kept accurate by its close ties with reality, based on observation from actual wound healing videos. Agent-based modeling allows me to explicitly write the local causes of this overarching behavior, allowing me and future scientists to focus on specific forces for future biological study.

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• Medicine
• Biology