Mechanics of the Healthy and Diseased Right Ventricular Myocardium: Fundamental Insights and Modeling

Manuel Rausch, PhD

Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics,
University of Texas

Friday, April 7th at 11:45 am

In-Person in SMBB 2650!

The right ventricle is one of our heart’s two pumping chambers. Its role is to propel deoxygenated blood to the lungs so that the left ventricle can propel oxygenated blood to the rest of our body. Clearly, the right ventricle plays a critical role in the functioning of our cardiovascular system. Notwithstanding its importance, few studies have investigated the muscle of the right ventricle, either in health or disease. We set out to fill this knowledge gap and, over the past years, have studied the hearts of healthy control sheep and sheep with pulmonary hypertension. In this talk, I will talk about our findings and focus specifically on the nonlinear mechanics of right ventricular myocardium, on disease-induced changes, and on challenges in modeling this complex material. This talk will interest anyone curious about cardiovascular biomechanics, growth & remodeling, large animal models, structure-function relationships, nonlinear mechanics, and constitutive modeling. We will have cameo appearances of machine learning, finite element modeling, diffusion tensor MRI, and many other fun tools.

Manuel is a recently promoted assistant professor at UT Austin, where he studies the biomechanics of soft tissues. Confusingly, he is also a professor in Aerospace Engineering, where he teaches many of the most beloved courses such as statics, dynamics, and materials. In his work, he combines experimental and computational methods to explore the structure-function relationship of soft tissues, including myocardium, heart valve tissue, blood clot, skin, and brain. He is prolific on Twitter and tries to spend as much time as possible playing disc golf. Despite these distractions, he has been moderately successful and has been awarded for his research and teaching. In his remaining time, he passionately pursues outreach efforts, open science, and DEI efforts.

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