ESR 2: Preso Davide Bernardo / École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Davide was born in Brindisi (Italy) in 1994. In 2016 he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Bologna. He continued with Master’s studies in Chemical and Process Engineering at the same university and defended his thesis at ETH Zurich in 2019. After graduation, he spent six months at ETH Zurich as a scientific assistant working also in collaboration with a multinational swiss company for the development of an innovative process. In September 2019 he was recruited by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as an Early Stage Researcher to pursue his studies as a PhD candidate.
Project Title: Sonochemistry and bubble dynamics
Objectives: (1) Development of an experimental device to quantify thermo-chemical effects in collapsing bubbles; (2) Investigate temperature evolution, species concentration and reaction mechanisms in collapsing bubbles.
ESR 3: Ryan Holman / Hôpitaux Université de Genève (Unige)
After a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering Ryan completed Master’s studies in Nanoengineering (University of California at San Diego) and in Biomedical Engineering (University of California at Los Angeles). His is now pursuing a doctorate degree at Geneva University Hospital as an Early Stage Researcher of the UCOM project. His current research work involves investigating the mechanism of thermal enhancement by a new type of pharmaceutical for tumor ablation using magnetic resonance-guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MRgHIFU).
Project Title: Investigation of performance enhancement by fluorosurfactant perfluorocarbon emulsions in MRgHIFU tumor ablation.
Objectives: (1) To compose an investigation on the influence of various parameters on properties of fluorosurfactant emulsions and evaluation of heating phenomenon; (2) To develop a mathematical model of the interaction between HIFU and liquid core micelles and report its validation.
ESR4: Mandeep Saini / Sorbonne Université (SU)
Mandeep was born and raised in a town of the Himachal Pradesh state of India. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh. During his Master’s studies on Aerodynamics and Propulsion, he developed a pressure-based numerical solver for compressible Euler equations. He is now pursuing his PhD at Sorbonne Université (SU), as a member of the “Institut Jean Le Rond d’Alembert” under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Fuster and Prof. Stephane Zaleski.
Project title: DNS of bubble nucleation process
Objectives: (1) Development of subgrid models for nucleation and nucleation criteria; (2) Development of interface capturing algorithm for cavitation nucleation.
ESR5: Saeed Bidi / CITY, University of London (CITY)
Saeed earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of Technology and from the Sharif University of Technology respectively. During his Master’s studies he wrote in-house codes with Fortran and programmed different codes including finite difference compressible flow solver and advancing front mesh generator. For his Master’s thesis he had to implement appropriate numerical filters in Lattice Boltzmann Method for solving high density ratio flows. As a PhD student, he focuses on the temperature prediction and thermal effects emerge during cavitation with different ultrasound intensities in biofluid flow with the goals of tissue treatment and cleaning.
Project title: Thermo-chemical effects of collapsing bubbles
Objectives: (1) To develop an algorithm capable of resolving the thermo-chemical effects; (2) Validate the solver against published and newly obtained data; (3) Development of a thermo-chemical model for practical, macroscopic ultrasound applications.
ESR 6: Saber Izak Ghasemian/ Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU)
Izak was born in Ramsar, Iran. He got his Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (SUT) and his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 2014 and 2017 respectively. During his master’s studies, he focused on designing underwater ultrasound transducers. After graduation, he started working as a research fellow at the hydrodynamics laboratory of IUST with the main responsibilities of designing ultrasound flow meters and a specific cavitation tunnel. After 18 months, he started working at the MEMS laboratory of IUST as a research fellow on designing high power and low-frequency piezoelectric energy harvesters for biomedical applications. Since April 2020 he is a research fellow at the Ohllab at OVGU, working as an ESR in the framework of the UCOM project under the supervision of Prof. Claus-Dieter Ohl. His current research work involves developing techniques for ultrafast ultrasound imaging, capturing the dynamics of a single bubble interacting with elastic solids and measurement of the stress and strain field from non-spherical bubble dynamics interaction with soft matter.
Project Title: Elasticity, bubbles dynamics and resulting stress and strain fields
Objectives: Reveal the effects of elasticity on single cavitation bubbles dynamics and the resulting stress and strain fields
ESR7: Lisa Braunstein / Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)
Lisa studied Biomedical Engineering at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences with a focus on cardiac sciences and medical imaging techniques. She got an internship at the Medtronic Bakken Research Center in Maastricht to work on a feasibility study in order to prepare, gather and process different in vivo data. She pursued her Master’s thesis at the Bakken Research Center working on a project with the title “Effect of thoracic nerve stimulation on Periodic Repolarization Dynamics (PRD)”: she analysed and evaluated in vivo ECG data using MatLab and worked with ECG detecting algorithms. Additionally, she mentored Bachelor students as a student assistant in the laboratory for Cardiovascular Systems. Since her recruitment as a PhD student within the UCOM project, Lisa has been working on the characterisation and development of clinically relevant acousto-thermal tissue mimics
Project Title: Characterisation of tissue / tissue mimicking materials
Objectives: (1) To characterise and derive mathematical formulations of the main properties of main tissue types, e.g. adipose tissue, kidney tissue, blood vessels etc.; (2) To develop and characterise tissue mimicking materials, to be used for experiments and in numerical simulations by other ESRs within the UCOM network.
ESR8: Amanda Zebedee / Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)
Amanda received her Bachelor’s degree in Astrophysics at Queen Mary College, University of London in 1994. Following this, she worked for GEC-Marconi in Edinburgh as a systems engineer, modelling the radar tracking system for the Eurofighter project. After a career break, she began working in the Medical Physics and Bioengineering Department at the Royal Free Hospital, London. During the 6 years she worked there as a Biomedical Engineer, she gained a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Imaging at University College London. In March 2019 she began her Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at ICR.
Project title: Cavitation characterisation in tissue mimicking materials (TMMs)
Objectives: (1) Characterization of nucleation of tissue mimicking materials (TMMs); (2) derivation of nucleation models (3) Derivation of material damage/failure models.
ESR9: Youssef Saadeh / University of Twente (UT)
Youssef obtained his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 2016 from the University of Balamand in Lebanon, which is his town of origin. In 2018 he earned his Master’s degree in Fluid Mechanics from Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. During his studies at Institut Jean le Rond ∂’Alembert (SU) Youssef conducted research a) on numerical simulations of turbulent jets in favor of the steel and mining company ArcelorMittal and b) on contact line dynamics – theoretically and numerically- in collaboration with the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is now pursuing his PhD in the Physics of Fluids Group at the University of Twente performing numerical simulations for cavitation phenomena.
Project title: DNS of cavitation with Volume of Fluid methods
Objectives: (1) Model soft matter with viscoelastic/viscoplastic phases in interaction with cavitating bubbles, (2) Implementation of mass transfer effects.
ESR10: Armand Shams / CITY, University of London (CITY)
Armand earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sorbonne Université and his Master’s Degree in Fluid Mechanics from Sorbonne Université and École Polytechnique. He has research experience in the numerical study a) of flow-focusing microfluidic devices (Baylor University) and b) of the Marangoni effect in flow-focusing microfluidic devices with applications for controlled generation of droplets (Institut Jean Le-Rond d’ Alembert). His Master’s thesis was conducted at the Office National des Études et de la Recherche Aérospatial (ONERA): Large Eddy Simulations of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Flows using spectral methods. Armand is now pursuing his PhD at CITY, focusing on the dynamic interactions between bubbles and surrounding soft biological tissues relevant to clinical applications such as sonoporation or histotripsy.
Project Title: Material deformation due to collapsing bubbles
Objectives: (1) To implement a high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction solver coupling a density-based fluid solver with a finite-element solid solver capable of simulating bubble-soft tissue interactions; (2) To derive a model that can predict soft tissue damage.
ESR11: Dawid Surdeko / University of Twente (UT)
Dawid obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Sound Engineering (2016) and a Master’s degree in Acoustics (2019) from the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań, Poland. His Master’s thesis was a study on the application of synergistic interaction of electric and ultrasonic fields for manipulation of particles inside droplets and was part of the grant project financed by the National Science Center. Dawid joined the UCOM project at the University of Twente following his graduation from AMU.
Project title: Surface manipulation and volume control of cavitation
Objectives: (1) To develop an experiment for heterogeneous cavitation nucleation studies on various surface types at microscale level, examining micro-pit arrangements of various shapes and sizes, coatings etc.; (2) To investigate bubble nucleation and transport formed at these surfaces, under the influence of ultrasound excitation. To investigate free radical transport mechanisms using chemiluminescence (e.g. luminol light emission) and propose relevant models to be used in macroscopic simulations.
ESR12: Ali Rezaei / University of Twente (UT)
Ali was born in 1994 in Tehran, Iran. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), and then he obtained his Master’s degree in Photonics from Shahid Beheshti University (SBU), Iran. His Master’s thesis was about photoacoustic microscopy imaging setup and image reconstruction and reflected Ali’s research interest in Laser applications and optical imaging methods. He currently works as a PhD researcher in the Physics of Fluids (POF) group at the University of Twente.
Project title: Controllable bubble acoustic excitation and soft matter interaction
Objectives: (1) Development of a microfluidic system for the production of monodisperse microbubble suspensions of tunable characteristics; (2) studying selective excitation of bubbles at controlled ultrasound frequencies with soft material
ESR13: Jingyu Wang / Technische Universitat München (TUM)
Jingyu earned his Bachelor’s degree in Aircraft Design and Engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) in 2016. Then he completed the program of study in the field of Aircraft Structures and Airworthiness at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU). His Master’s thesis is titled: “Construction of SPH numerical wave tank and its application in the sliding simulation of fuselage structure”. In 2019 he was recruited by TUM to work for the UCOM project.
Project title: Cell/tissue damage models with coupled FV/SPH
Objectives: (1) To implement/validate hybrid FV/SPH solver for material damage, cell deformation and sonoporation; (2) To derive a model for cell sonoporation.
ESR14: Evangelos Koukas / CITY, University of London (CITY)
Evangelos studied Mechanical Engineering in the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and graduated in 2019. Being keen on fluid dynamics and computational methods, he specialized in Air and Ground Transport Vehicles and conducted his diploma thesis in the field of aeroelasticity (Aeroelastic analysis of wing using high fidelity aerodynamic model) at the laboratory of Aerodynamics (NTUA). During his studies, his was a member of Euroavia Athens and worked on the aerodynamic analysis and design of two unmanned aerial vehicles, Hermes III and IV, for the inter-university competition Air Cargo Challenge (2017/2019). He is now pursuing his PhD in the department of Mechanical Engineering & Aeronautics at CITY as an Early Stage Researcher.
Project Title: Cavitation cloud and tissue interaction
Objectives: (1) To implement/validate models for predicting cavitation cloud behaviour in tissues; (2) To employ the developed methodology for prediction of histotripsy and shock wave device performance.
ESR15: Ahmed Basil Kottilingal / Sorbonne Université (SU)
Ahmed Basil earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK, India, 2016) and from Indian Institute of Science (IISc, India, 2018) respectively. During his Master’s studies, Ahmed Basil worked on the computational modelling of multiphase flows. His Master’s thesis is titled “A Block Adaptive Mesh Refinement (BAMR) based Multiphase Flow Solver “ and was supervised by Dr. Gaurav Tomar. He is now pursuing his PhD as an Early Stage Researcher at Institut Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (SU).
Project Title: Cavitation in blood vessel and drug delivery
Objectives: 1) Development of simulation tool for the prediction of cavitation inside blood vessels, taking into account deformable tissues and sonoporation; 2)Application in drug delivery.
ESR16: Anna Borich/ Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU)
After graduating at MIPT in the domain of Aerophysics and Space Research Anna worked several years in the industry and then she decided to come back to the field of academic research. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD at the Soft Matter group at OVGU University, focusing on the interaction of the bubble and droplets with the shock waves and its relevance to biomedical aspects.
Project Title: Experimental investigation of bubble interaction with pressure waves
Objective: To develop an experimental device for studying bubble interaction with pressure waves, based on previous experience of the institution
ESR17: Mingyuan Nie / Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU)
Mingyuan earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Beihang University, Beijing, China in 2018 and 2021 respectively. During his master’s studies, he focused on measuring velocities in small region and developed an algorithm for particle tracking velocimetry (PTV). In addition, he has a one-year experience at University of Waterloo on pressure reconstruction with PTV data. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg (OvGU).
Project Title: Experimental investigation of bubble interaction with pressure waves
Objective: To investigate the interaction of bubbles with shock wave for gaining a fundamental understanding of bubble dynamics and validation data for numerical simulations.