Higgins Lab

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Phone: 617-643-6129

I study the dynamics of human pathophysiologic processes by developing mathematical descriptions of complex human disease phenotypes and how they change over time. Pathophysiology may be described at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and organismal levels and may show clinically significant variation over time scales ranging from less than a second to more than a decade. The research combines medical insight, dynamic systems theory, and experiments utilizing microfluidics, video processing, flow cytometry, simulation, and large-scale analysis of medical databases in pursuit of two goals: (1) advancing fundamental understanding of the dynamics of human pathophysiology, and (2) improving patient diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment.

Recent Publications

  • Williams DC, Higgins JM, Wood DK

    Quantifying the unique mechanical properties of irreversibly sickled cells in sickle cell disease. Blood Vessel Thromb Hemost. 2025;2(3):100077 - PMID: 40765910 - PMCID: PMC12320412 - DOI: 10.1016/j.bvth.2025.100077

  • Tozzo V, Zhang LH, Ranganath R, Higgins JM

    Transformer-based artificial intelligence on single-cell clinical data for homeostatic mechanism inference and rational biomarker discovery. medRxiv. 2025;:ePub - PMID: 40196278 - PMCID: PMC11974774 - DOI: 10.1101/2025.03.24.25324556

  • Szafraniec HM, Bull F, Higgins JM, Stone HA, Krüger T, Pearce P, Wood DK

    Suspension physics govern the multiscale dynamics of blood flow in sickle cell disease. bioRxiv. 2025;:ePub - PMID: 40161781 - PMCID: PMC11952557 - DOI: 10.1101/2025.03.13.642599

  • Tozzo V, Petherbridge R, James K, Hsu S, Michalopoulos C, Foy BH, Thaweethai T, Mow C, Maya J, Camero CB, Shook L, Gray KJ, Mauney L, Higgins JM, Powe CE

    Hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and their association with obstetric complications: a retrospective cohort study. medRxiv. 2025;:ePub - PMID: 39990572 - PMCID: PMC11844592 - DOI: 10.1101/2025.02.13.25322250

  • Foy BH, Carlson JCT, Aguirre AD, Higgins JM

    Platelet-white cell ratio is more strongly associated with mortality than other common risk ratios derived from complete blood counts. Nat Commun. 2025;16(1):1113 - PMID: 39875373 - PMCID: PMC11775293 - DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56251-9

  • More publications ...

Research projects

Physiologic and pathologic population dynamics of human blood cells in various forms of anemia.

Rheodynamics of vaso-occlusion in sickle cell disease.

Patient immunologic response to blood transfusion.

Other important pathophysiologic processes where states can be measured with temporal and spatial resolution sufficient for productive mathematical modeling.