Ender Finol, Ph.D.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio
Currently seeking M.S. students
Cardiovascular disease
Soft tissue mechanics
Organ-scale modeling of vascular disease
At the Vascular Biomechanics and Biofluids Laboratory (VBBL) we investigate the dynamics of blood flow and its relationship with disease. During the past two decades, biofluid mechanics has become appreciated by researchers in medicine and biology as a key factor in the cause of arterial disease and the regulation of haemostasis in normal and diseased blood vessels. The ability to model biological flow systems experimentally and numerically is now an important component to fundamental research of vascular disease. It is of great interest to both clinical researchers and bioengineers to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of flow-induced parameters in arterial geometries under diverse flow conditions. Image-based modeling techniques and numerical methods can provide quantification of flow and structural variables for select regions of interest. With the continuous improvement of computer architecture and the development of sophisticated modeling tools, one can envision large-scale computational solutions of a multiphysics problem being used by physicians as diagnostic tools in the future.
Related Diseases: abdominal aortic aneurysms, pulmonary hypertension
Techniques: computational modeling, uniaxial and biaxial tensile testing, pressure-inflation testing