Michelle’s interests lie at the interface between mathematics and biophysics — modelling and analysing biological processes with mathematical methods.

Her Master’s thesis concerned fluid-structure interaction for biological cells: a system of coupled partial differential equations describing the fluid flow around a cell in a blood vessel and the elastic deformation of the cell induced by the flow. The methods used were unfitted finite elements for the Stokes equation on moving domains and elasticity, with a monolithic variational formulation in fully Eulerian coordinates and coupling via a Nitsche term.