Biomechanical Engineering
Faculty: Bright, Carlson, Daily, Ferguson, Greenberg, Hertzberg, Qi, Lee, Mahajan, Shandas, Stoldt, Tan
Biomechanical engineering research largely builds on strength in cardiovascular bioengineering and includes: non-invasive diagnostic and imaging techniques, cardiovascular instrumentation and device design, cardiovascular bio/fluid mechanics, experimental fluid diagnostics, microsystems in bioengineering, nano-scale characterization of biomaterials, multi-scale structure-property-function relationships for biological tissue, cell and tissue engineering biomaterials, and mechanics of biological materials for biomimetic material design. Additional activities are underway in the design and analysis of upper-limb prostheses and rehabilitation engineering. An NIH T32 graduate training grant in Cardiovascular Bioengineering provides significant support to our research efforts.
Recent projects include:
- Biomechanics of pulmonary hypertension.
- Microstructural modeling of pulmonary artery mechanics.
- Fluid mechanics and non-invasive imaging of prosthetic heart valves.
- Hemodynamics of the total cavopulmonary connection.
- Development of non-invasive methods to quantify pulmonary hypertension.
- Three-dimensional echo/doppler imaging and quantitative analysis.
- Ultrasonic particle image velocimetry.
- Multiscale modeling for large deformation behavior of erythrocyte membrane.
- Finite deformation constitutive behavior of biomacromolecular networks containing folded domains.
- Shape memory polymers - constitutive behavior and their use in biomedical device design.