Computational modeling of heart valves in health and disease

The student will work directly under the guidance of Dr. Vedula on modeling the biomechanics of healthy and calcified cardiac valves using finite element methods. The student will have the opportunity to learn multiple skills including developing technical expertise on the underlying finite element methods, understand and interpret clinical data, and build patient-specific models. The student will then perform fluid-structure interaction simulations on high performance compute clusters and analyze the results to understand the effect of local biomechanical environment on the disease progression. The project has strong clinical implications and the student is exposed to interactions with cardiologists and surgeons to discuss the findings and understand the clinical needs.