Parkinson's Evolution

For our Supercomputing Challenge project, we will study how Parkinson’s disease develops, focusing on dopamine and the brain cells that produce it. Parkinson’s is a neurological disorder that affects movement and can cause shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with balance. One important part of the disease is the loss of dopamine-producing brain cells, which causes dopamine levels to decrease.

Our goal is to understand why these brain cells are lost, how this affects dopamine levels, and whether protecting these cells could help slow the progression of the disease. Throughout this year-long project, we will research how Parkinson’s develops and explore possible ways to maintain dopamine levels in the brain. We hope to better understand the disease and the factors that may contribute to its progression.

To demonstrate what we learn, we will create a computer simulation using Python. Our model will represent dopamine-producing brain cells and show how changes in the number of healthy cells can affect dopamine levels over time. We will adjust different variables to observe how the disease might progress under different conditions and how protecting brain cells could affect the results.

We chose this project because Parkinson’s affects many people, and understanding how it develops could help researchers explore better treatments in the future. By combining scientific research with computer modeling, we hope to gain a better understanding of Parkinson’s disease and use our simulation to demonstrate what we discover throughout the year.