Rahul Sathish Vellaparambil

Early Stage Researcher 08

I am an Indian citizen, brought up in Dubai and have completed my master’s in biomedical engineering at NUI, Galway, Ireland in 2018, following which I spent two years as a new product introduction (NPI) engineer in the medical device manufacturing industry. During my masters, I investigated the mechanics of braided stents using finite element techniques and with a professional experience in manufacturing cardiovascular medical devices, I decided to pursue a research direction that combines 3D printing and computational modelling of cardiovascular diseases. Considering the emerging applications of medical 3D printing and my passion for computational mechanics, I was fortunate to find this current position in the Meditate project. Apart from my hobbies of gaming, amateur coding & football, I cherish the chance to live & work in Italy & France.

I am enrolled in the PhD programme of University of Lyon at Mines Saint-Etienne, France on September 2020 and the phD thesis will be conducted at two different places, the first being at HSL S.R.L, Trento, Italy where I am currently based until March 2022 and the second being at Centre Ingenierie et Sante (CIS) department at Mines Saint-Etienne, France until September 2023. At HSL, an investigation was conducted to establish a 3D printing methodology with silicone moulding techniques to develop endovascular aortic phantoms/mock-ups for surgical planning and training applications. Simultaneously, an exploration into stent-graft design using auxetic unit cells was developed using a finite element based computational modelling approach to test different auxetic designs and evaluate their mechanical properties. In my next stage at Saint-Etienne, selected stent designs from the previous exploration will be analyzed using custom stent-delivery models (at CIS) to simulate their delivery into idealized aortic aneurysms and later customized to suit patient-specific aortic aneurysms.