Principal Investigator
Johannes Weickenmeier, PhD
email: johannes.weickenmeier@stevens.edu | twitter: @weickenmeierlab
Prof. Johannes Weickenmeier completed his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 2015 and worked as a postdoc in the group of Prof. Ellen Kuhl at Stanford University. His research includes the experimental and computational characterization of soft tissues with a specific interest in the skin and brain. His current work focuses on our fundamental understanding of mechanobiological properties and mechanisms in the healthy and aging brain, as well as coupled multi-field formulations for the spread of neurodegenerative diseases, such as in Alzheimer’s disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Postdoc
Andreia Caçoilo, PhD
email: acacoilo@stevens.edu | twitter: @andreiacacoilo
Andreia received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2019 where she conducted research as a member of the Impulsive and Structural Dynamics Group. During her PhD she also worked as a Research Engineer for the Belgian Defense at the Royal Military Academy of Brussels. She specialized on the effects of explosions on military compounds for protection of personnel and the assessment of injury levels through an experimental and numerical approach. Past experience includes the analysis of trauma induced by ballistic impacts on military helmets using advanced finite element modeling.
PhD Students
Xuesong Zhang
email: xzhan67@stevens.edu | twitter: @suresong123
Xuesong graduated from the University of Bridgeport with a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and started his PhD at Stevens in January 2019. He is leading our work on the mechanical characterization of soft tissues. Xuesong’s main focus will be on indentation-based testing of brain tissue properties and their changes in neurodegenerative diseases.
Shima Jalalian Sedaghati
email: sjalalia@stevens.edu | twitter: @shima_jalalian
Shima graduated from the University of Tehran with a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering and joined Stevens in August 2019 to work in the field of computational soft tissue mechanics. Shima’s past experience includes modeling of the mechanical behavior of cervical tissue in preterm pregnancy. Her PhD project focuses on modeling and simulation of disease progression in dementia.
Ahsanul Torza
email: atorza@stevens.edu | twitter: @torzaahsanul
Ahsanul graduated from Stony Brook University with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Information Systems in May 2019 and joined our lab in July 2019. Ahsanul is an expert in additive manufacturing and will develop novel computational tools for personalized simulations of neurological disorders such as neurogenesis, stroke, and dementia.
Lauren Cunniff
email: lcunniff@stevens.edu
Lauren graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in May 2023. She has been working with us since she participated in the Mechanical Engineering Summer Undergraduate Program in 2021- where she placed first in the Student Research Competition. Lauren wrote her Master’s thesis with us on nonrigid image registration in order to quantify brain shape changes from longitudinal imaging which has turned into her current research project.
Current Master and Undergraduate Students
Loris Togninalli, master student
Loris is a visiting master student from the ETH Zurich. He is currently working on modeling the progression of white matter hyperintensity volumes as a result of healthy aging brain.
Brendan McGarr, master student
Brendan was a Center for Neuromechanics Summer Fellow and helped design a sample clamp for our multiaxial testing machine in summer 2022. He then worked with us to calibrate our tri-axial testing machine to measure brain tissue behavior during the summer 2023. He is currently reviewing literature on machine learning based methods to combine experimental data and constitutive modeling of brain tissue behavior.
Aashi Kulakarni – Aashi is currently development of a finite element framework to simulate healthy brain aging with a particular focus on ventricular enlargement.
Alumni – Postdocs
Sudeep Joshi, PhD
Sudeep was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab in 2018-2019. He worked on 3D cell cultures for multi-modal mechanical characterization of in-vitro cell structures. He is now a Senior Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Science.
Alumni – PhD Students
Yana Blinkouskaya, PhD
Yana received her Master’s Degree in Biomedical Devices from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2019 and graduated with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in August 2022. Her thesis included simulations of the biomechanical brain response in ischemic stroke and developing computational models for Alzheimer’s disease progression predictions.
Alumni – Master Students
Eva van den Hurk
Eva was a visiting master student from the Technical University Eindhoven. She helped develop an experimental protocol to test mouse brain tissues using our indentation machine with the long-term goal to establish a unique relationship between tissue microstructure and mechanical properties. Eva is now a PhD student at the Technical University Eindhoven.
Nina van den Velsen
Nina was a visiting master student from the Technical University Eindhoven. She worked on longitudinal medical image registration to extract ventricular shape changes during aging.
Trisha Gollamudi
Trisha was a master student in Biomedical Engineering and particularly interested in Alzheimer’s disease. She has been studying Alzheimer’s disease since high school and started looking into the transport of nutrients and toxins along the neuritic network since joining our lab. She won a Stevens CHI Healthcare Undergraduate Scholarships in 2020 that resulted in co-author-ship on our lab’s brain aging review. Trisha is now a PhD student at Stony Brook University and is co-author on our lab’s highly cited review article: Blinkouskaya_MECHAGEINGDEV21!
Valery Visser
Valery was a visiting graduate student from the Technical University Eindhoven in the Netherlands and specialized in computational and experimental methods to advance our understanding of mechanical properties of biological tissues. She developed a numerical model that predicts the onset of white matter damage in the aging brain which has led to two publications thus far. Valery is now a PhD student at the University Zurich in Switzerland and we have published two papers together: Visser_SCIREP21 and Visser_JMBBM23.
Luke Langner
Luke graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a master degree in Mechanical Engineering in May 2021. He was working on characterizing the micromechanical properties of meningeal tissue surrounding the brain and developed a computational model to study the origin of white matter hyperintensities during brain aging. Luke is now a PhD student at the Boston University.
Lisanne Kuntz
Lisanne was a visiting master student from the Technical University Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She visited the lab for 4 months in 2019 and developed a nanoindentation protocol for stiffness measurements in ultrasoft biological tissues.
Harry Lim
Harry was a master student in ME at Stevens and wrote his master thesis with us on the spatio-temporal spreading patterns of prions in Alzheimer’s disease.
Alumni – Undergraduate Students
Rimmo Loyi – Literature view on the anatomy and functional changes of the septum pellucidum during brain aging.
Ella Santoro – Microindentation of mouse brain tissue to infer the relationship between mouse brain microstructure and tissue stiffness.
Kayden Cannilla – Bi-axial testing device to measure the mechanical properties of the septum pellucidum.
Isaac Cho – Tri-axial testing of blood clots as a surrogate for brain tissue.
Avery Aquino – Conversion of graph-based protein progression data to a finite element simulation input file.
Parker Petty – Nanoindentation of scarred cortical mouse brain tissue post probe insertion.
Jack Franco – Design, manufacture, and build a bi-axial testing machine to measure the mechanical properties of the septum pellucidum.
Samuel Grinberg – Design of a soft tissue clamping system compatible with our custom multiaxial testing machines.
Enkhsanaa Enkhbayar – Enkhsanaa was an undergraduate student from biomedical engineering and created heterogeneous phantom samples for testing the spatial distribution of mechanical sample properties.
Jacob Billotti – Jacob wrote several different codes to convert labeled finite element brain images into lego-like finite element brain models.
Grace McGraw, REU student, University of Notre Dame – Grace was a visiting student from the University of Notre Dame and worked with us to incorporate the septum pellucidum in our finite element brain models.
Katherine Ohotin – Kate started a new project in our lab where we are evaluating blood clot samples as a brain surrogate material.
Kaylyn Sullivan – Kaylyn created a first version of our indentation protocol to test synthetic blood clots.
Matthew Hartzler – Matt helped us identify a suitable myelin staining protocol to visualize myelin in white matter tissue.
Vrinda Modi – Vrinda wrote code to quantify the myelin fraction in white matter histological slides.
Madison Grigg, REU Student, West Virginia University – Madison was a visiting student from West Virginia University and helped us validate 3D white matter lesion simulations using amplified MRI.
Nathan Carpenter – Nathan started a project to create an automated pipeline that allows to convert MR images into 3D printed brain models. This project turned in his senior design project.
Joe Demateis – Joe helped us derive a graph representation from the human brain connectome dataset.
Tyler Huff – Tyler helped with tracking skin deformations in ultrasound videos of deforming skin.
Hailey Tanner – Hailey was an undergraduate student pursuing a Chemical Engineering Degree and is particularly interested in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In the WLab, she studies the pathologies, biomarkers, and atrophy patterns of ALS, as well as that of many other neurodegenerative diseases. Hailey is now a PhD Student at Princeton University.
Erin Kreis – Erin is an undergraduate student studying Mechanical Engineering. She first became interested in neurodegenerative disease research while writing a paper on Alzheimer’s disease in high school. She is the inaugural winner of the Bernice H. Johnson Memorial Scholarship for the promotion of Alzheimer’s research.
Jonathan Ku – Jonathan is a rising undergraduate senior studying Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Sustainable Energy. He is conducting summer research in the WLab to expand his horizons toward the field of neuromechanics. He will implement an inverse finite element problem using Abaqus and Python that we will use to fit our experimental data.
Edward Hunter – Edward is an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering and is particularly interested in the structural connectivity of the brain. Edward’s focus will be on implementing a graph theory-based connectome model to assess the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in subjects exposed to single or repeated head injuries associated with concussion. Edward hopes to gain experience creating personalized models and is working towards simulating tactile signals for individuals who suffer from motor loss.
Caleb Sang – Caleb is a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is studying the effect of abnormal tau protein seeding on the progression of tauopathies such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s related disorders, and PSP. Caleb won first place in the Student Research Competition of the 2020 ME Summer Undergraduate Research Program
Alfonsina Santiago – Alfonsina is an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering. She is currently part of the Stevens Mechanical Engineering Summer Research Program for the summer, and is researching and working on the gyrification index of brains affected by Alzheimer’s Disease. Alfonsina won third place in the Student Research Competition of the 2020 ME Summer Undergraduate Research Program
Christopher Cimicata – Chris is an undergraduate student studying Mechanical Engineering. While robotics is his primary area of focus, he is excited to dive into a new area of research and develop his skills in the area of soft matter mechanics. In this lab he will be working on post processing videos from triaxial loadings experiments using the Ultrasonics program, developed by Stevens students to calculate strain from video recordings.
Nicolas Re – Nicolas is an undergraduate student studying Mechanical Engineering. In the WLab, he will be feeding his fascination for the biomechanics of the brain by modeling the changes of mechanical behavior and morphology during the brain life cycle.
Ryan Rhew – Ryan is a student from Ridgewood High School and worked with us during the summer 2019. He studied the impact of drug addiction on the mechanical properties of the brain. Ryan is now an undergraduate student at Brown University
Amelie Ocampo – Amelia is a student from Brooklyn Tech High School and visited the lab during the summer 2019. She studied structural brain shape changes in Alzheimer’s disease.
Manting Yu – Manting is a student from Brooklyn Tech High School and joined the lab for the summer 2019. She created multiple brain models from longitudinal Alzheimer’s disease patient brain.
Lauren Sciano – Lauren is a Mechanical Engineering undergrad at Stevens and worked with us during the spring semester 2019. She studied the impact of oligodendrocytes and myelin on the mechanical properties of cerebral white matter.
Mark Anthony Demetillo – Mark Anthony is a Mechanical Engineering student in the Stevens’ Pinnacle Scholar Program and worked with us during the summer 2018 and contributed to our growing brain mesh library.