Events

Date: 11 November 2026   Time: 15:00 - 16:00     

Location: SEMS Seminar Room, 3rd floor, Engineering Building

Title:

Validation of Multiphysics Brain Aging Models Against Population-Level Imaging Data

Abstract:

The brain is our most complex organ and provides many scientific opportunities for engineering disciplines; yet, despite the obvious role of mechanics across scales, neuromechanics remains understudied. In this talk, I will discuss our approaches to integrating cross-sectional imaging data from the UK Biobank and constitutive modeling to study the mechanobiological behavior of the human brain, with a particular interest in structural changes and tissue damage associated with aging and dementia. Given the decades-long observation periods of our modeling, subject-specific experimental data does not exist; instead, we use cross-sectional data to calibrate and validate our models. Our work has provided fundamental new insight into brain behavior for several different medically relevant applications including reproducing hallmark features of cerebral atrophy during aging, the spatiotemporal progression patterns of biomarkers in neurodegenerative diseases, and the onset locations of white matter lesions due to mechanical overloading of the lateral ventricular wall.

About the speaker:

Professor Johannes Weickenmeier is an Associate Professor of Brain Health in the Department of Engineering Science and a Fellow of St. Cross College since 2024. He is part of the Podium Institute and leads the efforts on Brain Health. He obtained his PhD from the ETH Zurich in 2015 and trained as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University for three years. He then joined Stevens Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering from 2018-2024. His area of expertise is the design of theoretical and computational models to simulate and predict the multiphysics behaviour of living systems with a particular focus on the brain.