Assistant Professor
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Biography

Dr. Esmaily joined the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty in January 2018. He received his Ph.D. from UCSD, where he developed computational methods for surgical design in pediatric cardiology, focusing on improving surgical interventions for single ventricle heart patients, a population with a high mortality rate and complex physiology. He recently proposed a novel surgical design that could potentially avoid the dangerous physiology of current surgical methods and reduce the number of open-heart surgeries. After completing his Ph.D., he moved to the Center for Turbulence Research that is jointly operated by Stanford University and NASA, Ames. In a joint effort with a large group of researchers in Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program, he studied the effect of radiation on particle-laden turbulent flow. Over the years, he has developed a finite-element solver, a direct numerical solver, and a parallel sparse linear solver that are used as a replacement for commercial packages in several academic labs and industry.

Research Interests

Dr. Esmaily’s research interest’s center around the study of emerging applications in cardiovascular mechanics and biological flows and, development of computational techniques for such problems. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States with a projected cost of a trillion dollars by 2030, underscoring the importance of innovative solutions in this field. Capturing the complex interaction between fluids and solids is a milestone toward accurate modeling of the cardiovascular system, leading to an emerging area of research in computational mechanics. The overarching goal of Dr. Esmaily’s lab is to build high-fidelity predictive tools that can be applied to the study of cardiovascular diseases and contribute toward improving current treatment methods and surgical techniques. Within this scope, two areas of interest are simulation and optimization of an artificial heart and the multi-scale modeling of red blood cells. The outcomes of these studies have the potential to reduce the risk of cardiac failure, arterial fibrillation, coronary occlusion, and stroke among others.

• Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics
• Bioengineering
• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Multiphase and Granular Flows
• Scientific Computing