The next webinar of the VPHi Keynote Webinar Series takes place on 30 September 2021 featuring Prof. Gerard Ateshian from Columbia University.
Abstract: Articular cartilage is the bearing material of diarthrodial joints. It supports contact stresses of up to 12 MPa while exhibiting a friction coefficient as low as 0.002. Cartilage degeneration is a hallmark of osteoarthritis, a debilitating degenerative joint disease that afflicts 30 million Americans. As there is no cure for osteoarthritis, significant focus has been placed on repair strategies such as tissue engineering. Though much progress has been made from empirical approaches in the field of cartilage tissue engineering, we believe that culture conditions that help reproduce functional properties in cartilage constructs may be optimized using suitable theories of growth mechanics based on reactive mixture theory. In this webinar, it will be discussed how advances in theoretical and computational growth mechanics have been applied to enhance nutrient supply to constructs and engineer constructs having the size of entire articular layers. It will also be presented intriguing results that growth of tissue constructs may be accompanied by damage of the freshly synthesized collagen matrix. Strategies for countering this damage will be addressed. Don't miss the upcoming VPHi's student committee webinar featuring Prof. Gerard Ateshian from Columbia University
SPEAKER'S BIO
Gerard Ateshian performs research in the field of soft tissue mechanics, with an emphasis on cartilage mechanics, lubrication, and tissue engineering, and the formulation of growth theories for biological tissues. A major component of his research focuses on understanding and treating osteoarthritis.
Ateshian is particularly interested in formulating continuum mechanics theories that accommodate the complexities encountered in living biological tissues and cells, including mass transport, osmotic effects, and reactive mechanics in solid mixtures, needed to describe tissue growth and remodeling. Ateshian has used and extended the framework of mixture theory to explicitly account for mass exchanges among reactants and products, incorporating evolving mass content as state variables in functions of state, such as internal energy, entropy, stress, and mass supplies. His theoretical work also addresses the equivalence between classical passive and active membrane transport theories in biophysics and the framework of reactive mixtures.
Ateshian received all his degrees in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers.
You can register HERE