Computational Biomechanics Group

President Biden announced the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. Dr. Arzani is honored to be among the awardees (nominated by NSF). This highly prestigious award and a lifetime honor comes as a result of 7 years of hard work by all the amazing students in our lab and the support of many collaborators, friends, family, mentors, reviewers, and funding agencies throughout the past years. The last year PECASE awards were announced was 2019.

We are hosting APS DFD 2024 in Salt Lake City (Nov 24-26). Dr. Arzani is part of the organizing committee and all lab members are involved as student volunteers. We have several talks this year ranging from podium talks to undergraduate poster and the new DFD-Interact session. Our talks range from fundamental/applied scientific machine learning research to cardiovascular fluid mechanics and even a talk on the flow physics of wildfire transport. To see our presentations search Arzani here. During the conference, our amazing undergraduate student Nathan Sudbury won undergraduate poster competition.

Dr. Arzani is appointed as a Consulting Editor for the Journal of Biomechanics (a leading journal in the broad field of biomechanics). Thanks to the Editors-in-Chief for the invitation and appointment.

Dr. Arzani has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure (starting July 1st 2024). Thanks to all of our amazing current/past lab members, collaborators, and anyone who supported us along the way.

Dr. Arzani will present “Scientific machine learning with little physics: Interpretable operator learning and spatial neural ODEs” at the Advancing fluid and soft-matter dynamics with machine learning and data science workshop. The workshop includes only invited talks by leading researchers in the field (free to attend for everyone). Thanks Mike Graham for the invitation and organizing this exciting event! (June 3-5, Madison, WI).

Congrats to Hunor for being selected to present his paper at NeurIPS (a very prestigious and leading deep learning and AI conference). Hunor’s work is titled “Modeling Coupled 1D PDEs of Cardiovascular Flow with Spatial Neural ODEs” and is based on his summer internship and collaboration with the Los Alamos National Lab.

Dr. Arzani, Hunor, and Siva will also present on scientific machine learning modeling of blood flow at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Conference. Dr. Arzani is part of this year’s invited speakers and will present at the Fluid Dynamics in Clinical Imaging Minisymposium. Nov 19-21 Washington, DC.

We have received the NIH Trailblazer Award! We will be working on developing new approaches for improving targeted embolization and drug delivery. This was a two-PI grant and would not have been possible without our collaborator Jingjie Hu. This is our lab’s first NIH grant. More details here (PI: Jingjie Hu & Amir Arzani).

We have received an NSF EAGER grant (one year) from CBET for our proposal “EAGER: Understanding complex wind-driven wildfire propagation patterns with a dynamical systems approach”. We will use our lab’s expertise in modeling convective transport and dynamical systems to study wildfire transport. PI: Amir Arzani, Co-PI: Dr. Rob Stoll (Utah), Dr. Ali Tohidi (SJSU), and Dr. Fatemeh Afghah (Clemson).

Hunor will present his work titled “Enhancing Corrupt Cardiovascular Flow Data With Machine Learning” at the Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering, and Biotransport (SB3C) conference. Dr. Arzani will chair the “Machine Learning in Biofluids” session (June 4-8, Vail, CO). Later this summer, Dr. Arzani will present our latest research on explainable AI (XAI) titled “Towards Interpretable and Generalizable Deep Learning in Mechanics” at the U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USNCCM) conference (July 23-27, Albuquerque, NM ). Dr. Arzani’s XAI presentation can be viewed below. Also, a longer version of this talk was recently delivered at the DDPS seminar series and can be viewed here.

Dr. Arzani recently presented at the CRUNCH seminar series at Brown University about scientific machine learning modeling of near-wall transport.

Dr. Arzani, Hunor, and Maryam will present their research on scientific machine learning at the APS DFD conference. Dr. Arzani will chair the “Boundary Layers: General I” session and has also been invited to judge the Gallery of Fluid Motion video submissions. Nov 20-22 Indianapolis, IN.

Our previously called cardiovascular biomechanics Lab at Northern Arizona University (NAU) has now moved to the University of Utah (SCI Institute and Mechanical Engineering Department).

Our undergrad researcher Ethan Shoemaker will start an internship at NASA Glenn Research Center this summer where he will continue his research on physics-informed neural networks (PINN). Ethan will then move to UC Irvine for grad school. Also, our PhD student Maryam has been going through multiple internship interviews at Apple and Google.

Dr. Arzani received the NAU College of Engineering, Informatics, and Applied Sciences 2022 Distinguished Mentorship Award (one award for the entire college).

Dr. Arzani has received the highly prestigious NSF CAREER Award. The five-year project (~$508k) is titled “CAREER: Synergistic physics-based and deep learning cardiovascular flow modeling” and is funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program. The award will build a foundation for scientific machine learning and fluid dynamics research and will enable lifetime leadership for integrating the related research with education activities.

Dr. Arzani, Maryam, and Mostafa will present their work at APS DFD conference. Dr. Arzani is part of the organizing committee (abstract sorting and in charge of assigning session chairs) and will chair the “Biological Fluid Dynamics: Data-driven Hemodynamics” session. This is a new session at APS that we created for the first time due to the growing interest in using data science and machine learning in blood flow modeling. Nov 21-23 Phoenix, AZ.

We have received a new Collaborative NSF grant (ECCS-Comms Circuits & Sens Sys Program) to support our scientific machine learning research. Specifically, we will be enhancing 4D flow MRI data by data assimilation, deep learning, and image processing. In collaboration with Roshan D’Souza at UW-Milwaukee (NAU PI: Amir Arzani; UWM PI: Roshan D’Souza). Thanks NSF!

Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering, and Biotransport (SB3C):

Sara will present her work titled “Role of coherent structures in airflow mediated infectious disease spread with expiratory particles”, and MohammadReza will present his work titled “Aortic valve dynamics coupled with growth and remodeling due to aging and calcification”. Dr. Arzani will co-chair the “Patient Specific Flow and Physiology II” session.

U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USNCCM):

Dr. Arzani will present his work titled “Hybrid Physics-based and Data-driven Modeling of Near-wall Blood Flow with Physics-Informed Neural Networks”. The recorded talk could be accessed here:

Dr. Arzani and Milad will present at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) 2020 conference (virtual). Dr. Arzani’s talk on data-driven modeling in blood flow could be viewed here:

We have been awarded an NSF grant from NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC). The project is about multiscale modeling of cardiovascular disease growth. Thank you NSF! (PI: Amir Arzani).