I am an applied mathematician and computational scientist whose research focuses on modeling the mechanics and fluid dynamics of the heart and its valves. I create new modeling methods and use them to study heart disease. One primary application is simulation-guided design for cardiac surgery.

I am an Instructor at Stanford University in Cardiothoracic Surgery working with Michael Ma and in the Cardiovascular Biomechanics Computation Laboratory with Alison Marsden. I also collaborate with William Hiesinger, from the Dept. of Cardiothoracic Surgery.

I completed my PhD in Mathematics in 2017 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University working with Charles Peskin. My thesis concerned the mitral valve.

One of my favorite techniques is design-based elasticity. We require that the model valve supports a pressure, find an associated differential equation, then derive valve geometry and material properties from its solution. By altering parameters in these differential equations – specifying just the right math problem – we design the emergent model to match experimental data where the data is good, but produce features like material heterogeneity and a full map of fiber orientations that are very difficult to measure experimentally. These techniques illuminate facts and generate hypotheses about valve anatomy and mechanics, and they make highly effective models to use in fluid-structure interaction simulations for studies of flow and disease.

 

Selected Highlight Publications with Movies:

Kaiser AD, Haidar MA, Choi PS, Sharir A, Marsden AL, Ma MR. Simulation-Based Design of Bicuspidization of the Aortic Valve. The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery 2024. [arxiv] [doi] [movies]

Kaiser AD, Shad R, Schiavone N, Hiesinger W, Marsden AL. Controlled Comparison of Simulated Hemodynamics across Tricuspid and Bicuspid Aortic Valves. Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 2022. [doi] [arxiv] [movies]

Kaiser AD, McQueen DM, Peskin CS. Modeling the Mitral Valve. International Journal of Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 2019. [doi] [arxiv] [movies]