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Biography

My career began at age 16 when I started studying at the University of Minnesota where I graduated summa cum laude in Biomedical Engineering and Mathematics.  In 2005 I started a PhD at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute working with Prof Nicolas Smith and Prof Peter Hunter on fluid-solid coupling in the heart.  In 2006, I transferred to the University of Oxford Computing Laboratory, where I worked with Dr. David Kay on analysis of fluid-solid coupling schemes.  My thesis entitled Fluid-Solid Coupling for the Simulation of Left Ventricular Mechanics was approved in 2009.  After graduating, I worked as a post-doc at MIT with C. Forbes Dewey while also carrying on active research at the University of Oxford.  In 2010 I joined Kings College London Department of Biomedical Engineering as a Lecturer.

Roots of the CHeart Project began from the parallel multi-physics finite element solver developed during my PhD for fluid-solid modelling in cardiac mechanics applications.  Seeing the broader utility of this developed functionality, I began the CHeart Project together with Prof Nicolas Smith and Dr. Jack Lee in 2011.  Here we had the general aim of uniting multi-physics cardiac research into a single parallel framework.  Today CHeart has grown from its beginnings in FSI to support many physics phenomena including:

  • 1D Blood Flow
  • Darcy Flow
  • Navier-Stokes
  • ALE Navier-Stokes
  • Eikonal Equations
  • Scalar Reaction Diffusion
  • Monodomain
  • Finite Elasticity
  • Periodic Wave Equations
  • Periodic Nonlinear Wave Equations
  • Fluid-Solid Coupling
  • 1D-3D Blood flow
  • Poromechanics
  • Electromechanics

Scientific Research

My research interests span the spectrum from numerical methods, numerical analysis, scientific computing, mathematical modelling through to clinical translation.  Although I am engaged in a number of research projects, the common focus of my research is the application of novel numerical / modelling techniques to problems of fluid mechanics, solid mechanics and fluid-solid coupling.

CHeart Development

My core role is leading the CHeart development team.  I also remain active in the development of core CHeart infrastructure.  My key responsibilities were the development of CHeart’s parallelization strategy, core finite element support routines and broader software architectural design to streamline the integration of new physics modules as well as facilitate different multi-physics problems.  More recently I have engaged in higher level solver implementations as well as parameter estimation procedures.