Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Bioengineering (courtesy), and Cardiothoracic Surgery (courtesy). My area of professional expertise is living matter physics, the creation of theoretical and computational models to predict the acute and chronic response of living structures to environmental changes during development and disease progression. My specific interest is the multiscale modeling of growth and remodeling, the study of how living matter adapts its form and function to changes in mechanical loading, and how this adaptation could be traced back to structural alterations on the cellular or molecular levels. Growth and remodeling might be induced naturally, e.g., through elevated pressure, stress, or strain, or interventionally, e.g., through prostheses, stents, tissue grafts, or stem cell injection. Combining theories of electrophysiology, photoelectrochemistry, biophysics, and continuum mechanics, my lab has specialized in predicting the chronic loss of form and function in growing and remodeling cardiac tissue using patient-specific custom-designed finite element models.
