Team

Pegah Asgari 

Opical imaging of biological tissue for structural characterization 

Aikaterini Tziotziou

Katerina’s project is on the effect of plaque structural stress on human coronary and carotid atherosclerotic plaque progression and the impact of detailed plaque morphometric analyses over time on plaque growth. Patient-specific plaque geometries are computationally analyzed to unravel insights for plaque growth mechanisms and possible patient-specific plaque progression predictive models.

Brian Berghout

Brian is a physician-researcher and PhD candidate working for the Rotterdam Study, a large prospective, community-based, observational cohort study among 20.000 adult participants. His PhD focuses primarily on epidemiological facets of stroke, transient ischemic attack, and recurrent stroke. Next to these clinical outcomes he also works on biomechanical subjects relating to arteriosclerosis and how aspects such as common carotid shear stress and geometry of intracranial arteries affect stroke risk. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5101-0132

Hanneke Crielaard

Hanneke is dissecting atherosclerotic cap composition in relation to mechanical properties and cap failure mode. She makes use of tissue-engineered constructs to mimic the composition and mechanical behavior of human caps. Specifically, she focuses on the role of (local) strain in atherosclerotic cap rupture.

Federica Fontana

Federica’s research project focuses on the computational modeling of intracranial vascular calcification, with the aim to unravel the biomechanical mechanisms involved in calcium deposition and their link to clinical events such as stroke and cognitive function impairment. To address this question, she uses a combination of various modeling and image-processing techniques, among which Fluid-Structure Interaction simulations.

Silke Dreesen

Structural and mechanical characerization of vascular tissue in health and disease

Sanne van Kuijk

Computational modeling of carotid circulation for understanding the link to degenerative cerebrovascular diseases

Yanjing Liu

Computational modeling material and fracture behavior of atherosclerotic plaque tissue

Dr. Su Guvenir Torun (PhD obtained in 2024)

PhD thesis: Mechanical and structural characterization of atherosclerotic plaques

Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Su-Guvenir-Torun