Did you ever wonder how much you're going to burn yourself if you touch a hot plate with your finger? Or how long can a firefighter stay in an extremely hot environment wearing a particular protective gear? We investigate damage to living cells due to external heating particularly relevant to skin burns due to a contact with a hot surface but also applicable to other types of heat damage. Along with a criticism of the traditional approach to this problem we derive a very novel model for heat damage for a general class of chemical kinetic systems. Based on this results, we identify a fundamental underlying dynamical system and build a simple phenomenological model that shows a good agreement with experimental data.

This is a joint work with Sabino Pietrangelo (a former undergraduate student at U Michigan).