Welcome John Harvey and Andrew Tubelli

Among Dolores' and my attempts to bring more art into the science of blood flow visualization, about two years ago we began a collaboration with Peter Coppin at OCADU, which grew to include OCADU's Bill Leeming. Now, with some seed funding from The Centre for Innovation in Information Visualization and Data Driven Design (CIV-DDD), we have added some part-time assistance from two talented graduate students, biomedical illustrators John Harvey (OCADU) and Andrew Tubelli (UofT).  Cool things are happening, will keep you posted.

Congratulations to Luis Aguilar, PhD

Felicitaciones to Luis Aguilar, who today successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Towards Real-Time Simulation of Ultrasound Systems". Many thanks to co-supervisor Richard Cobbold, and to examiners Guy Cloutier, David Goertz and Wayne Johnston for giving Luis his money's worth!

Congratulations to Kristian Valen-Sendstad

Congratulations to BSL postdoc Kristian Valen-Sendstad, who has been awarded a Government of Canada Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for his studies of "turbulence" in cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics.

Kristian is also just back from an international vascular biomechanics conference in Atlanta, where his talk, "Is CFD Misleading Us About the Nature of Wall Shear Stresses in Cerebral Aneurysms?" generated a lot of interest and discussion, as well as lots of ideas for us to pursue here at the BSL.

Comings and Goings

Some recent personnel changes at the BSL, celebrated as shown to the left:

Kristian Valen-Sendstad, who joins the BSL as a postdoc from Simula Research Labs in Norway, to continue his work on cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics.

Muhammad Owais Khan, who joins the BSL as a Master's student, investigating the role of curvature on arterial flow patterns.

And, finally, Yiemeng Hoi, who leaves the BSL for bigger and better (or at least more lucrative :-) things at Toshiba.

Welcome to Diego Gallo

The BSL welcomes Diego Gallo, PhD student from the group of Morbiducci and Montevecchi at the Politecnico di Torino, who will be spending the next six months at the BSL. (Sorry about the extreme cold alert, Diego! :-)

Congratulations to Amir Manbachi

My bad for being a couple of months late is posting this: Congratulations to Amir Manbachi on the successful defense of his Master's thesis, "Characterization of common carotid artery geometry and its impact on velocity profile shape". Amir is now doing a PhD on the topic of ultrasound-guided therapy, and is also patiently waiting for me to get my act together so we can submit a paper on his Master's work!

Welcome to Alex Martinez

The BSL welcomes Alejandro (Alex) Martinez, from UofT's MIE undergraduate program, who will be starting Master's degree research this month. Alex's thesis project will focus on the further development (and, eventually, deployment) of an open-source MRI simulation environment that Luca Antiga and I have been working on (and off) for a few years.