The majority of my professional career has been devoted to development of blood-wetted medical devices. Equally important as the devices themselves, my research focuses on the methodology by which they are designed, and deployed. For example, my group was one of the pioneers in physiological feedback control of implanted ventricular assist devices. We also developed one of the first decision support programs for identifying heart failure patients who could potentially recover with the acute mechanical circulatory assistance. Over the past 24 years, I have contributed to the development of several heart-assist devices used clinically, including the Heartmate-II, Novacor, Ventracor, TandemHeart, and Levacor. In 1997, I directed a multidisciplinary team that produced the Streamliner heart-assist device – the world’s first magnetically levitated rotodynamic blood pump to be tested in-vivo. The current emphasis of my research involves five application areas: circulatory support systems for children, decision-support tools for optimal use of ventricular assist devices, feedback-control algorithms for optimizing cardiac recovery, multi-scale modeling of thrombosis in artificial circulation, and development of medical devices for global health. A nascent, overarching interest is to accelerate medical innovation by providing an infrastructure for networking between physicians and engineers. In summary, my interest and experience is diverse, yet share a common theme of improving healthcare though biomedical engineering. Thank you.

artificial intelligence; biomedical engineering; innovation; medical devices; multiscale modeling; social & decision sciences; systems modeling