Alison Marsden is an associate professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) and of Bioengineering, by courtesy, of Mechanical Engineering at at Stanford University. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University in 1998, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford in 2005 working with Prof. Parviz Moin. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in Bioengineering and Pediatric Cardiology from 2005-07 working with Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Feinstein. She was the recipient of an American Heart Association postdoctoral fellowship, an AHA beginning grant in aid award, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, an NSF CAREER award, and is a member of an international Leducq Foundation Network of Excellence. She has published over 60 peer reviewed journal papers, and her lab has received funding from the NSF, NIH, and several private foundations. Her work focuses on the development of numerical methods for simulation of cardiovascular blood flow problems, medical device design, application of optimization to large-scale fluid mechanics simulations, and use of engineering tools to impact patient care in cardiovascular surgery and congenital heart disease.

Shawn Shadden is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the advancement of theoretical and computational methods to quantify complex fluid flow. He received a BS in Aerospace Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin (2001), and PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology (2006). From 2006-2009 he carried out an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to translate his work in dynamical systems to research on cardiovascular biomechanics at Stanford University. From 2009-2013 he served as an Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley.

Dr. Nathan Wilson has started two medical-related software companies, served as a Principal Investigator on two SBIR research grants, co-authored over thirty peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, and teaches introductory classes in entrepreneurship, business plan development, and technology and science commercialization at UCLA. Nathan has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson.

Dave Parker is the lead software engineer for SimVascular. He received his Ph.D. in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford University. While at the Georgia Institute of Technology he completed his B.S. in Computer Science and did graduate work in Applied Mathematics, concentrating on research in fractals and nonlinear dynamics. Prior to joining Stanford, he worked on various scientific and engineering software projects involving molecular simulation and visualization, analysis of next generation DNA sequencing data, simulating thermo-plastic deformations for 3D metal printing processes, finite element simulations of shock wave propagation in complex materials, and scientific visualization. While in Charles Taylor’s lab he developed software for image-based modeling of the human vasculature for patient-specific computational blood flow simulations.

Vijay Vedula is an Assistant Professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. His expertise is in modeling cardiac biomechanics and leads svFSI solver development for the SimCardio project. His other research interests include modeling fluid flow in and around complex bodies, multiphysics modeling and fluid-structure interaction, numerical methods and high performance computing. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He completed a Masters in Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2009 and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Trichy (India) in 2007.

Martin Pfaller is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Pediatrics (Cardiology) at the Stanford School of Medicine. He graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a Ph.D. where he co-founded a group dedicated to the prediction of cardiovascular diseases using simulation methods. His research mission is to make simulations more accurate and more accessible for clinicians with a long-term vision to develop combined physics-based and data-based approaches to enable personalized therapies for the cardiovascular system.

Fanwei Kong is a PhD student majoring in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from Georgia Tech with a BS degree in biomedical engineering.