Postdoctoral Fellow Yellappa Palagani, PhD, Receives Stanford MCHRI Postdoctoral Support

by Roxanna Van Norman
February 25, 2025

Yellappa Palagani, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, recently received the 2025 Postdoctoral Support Award from the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI).

The Stanford MCHRI Postdoctoral Support program provides funding for innovative research focused on maternal and child health across all disciplines. Funding through this program is available for up to two years for research primarily related to maternal and child health.

With this support, Palagani will advance his research on the “Novel Adjustable Pulmonary Artery Band for the Management of Congenital Heart Diseases.” He aims to gain extensive training in the specialty, expand his expertise beyond bioelectronics and biomechanics, and acquire the skills needed to become an independent medical investigator.

“My long-term goal is to secure a tenure-track academic position that integrates medicine and engineering, advancing innovative technologies to improve the treatment of complex cardiac diseases,” said Palagani.

Palagani is a research member of the Cardiovascular Engineering Research Laboratory (Dr. Michael Ma’s Lab), where he is currently developing an MRI-compatible mock circulatory loop using cardiac phantoms to simulate complex congenital heart defects and an ex-vivo preservation system for pediatric heart transplantation.

Before joining Stanford, Palagani was a postdoctoral associate in adult cardiac surgery at Yale University from April 2021 to March 2023, where he worked under the supervision of Pramod Bonde, MD, on left ventricular assist devices and smart inductive stents. In August 2020, he received his PhD in electronics engineering from Kyungpook National University, South Korea, under the supervision of Jun Rim Choi, PhD. During his doctoral program, Palagani worked on wirelessly powered cardiac pacemakers and wearable cardiac arrhythmia indicators.

Brief Project Summary

Pulmonary artery banding (PAB) is a widely used intervention in congenital heart surgery to address various pathologies. It can prevent flooding of the lungs (“over-circulation”) by limiting pulmonary blood flow and strengthening a weak ventricle through pressure training. Despite its widespread use, the main drawback lies in its fixed design in the context of a growing patient. Namely, while the patient grows, the band does not, often requiring multiple additional surgeries to readjust the band. In addition to natural growth, physiological changes may also necessitate several adjustments, leading to additional surgeries for the patient. This research proposes an innovative technique for developing an Adjustable Pulmonary Artery Band (APAB) that can not only be adjusted remotely to avoid additional surgeries but also provide critical information about pulmonary and ventricular hemodynamics via sensor technology, without the need for invasive procedures (e.g., cardiac catheterization).