My name is Silvia Budday and I'm a professor for Continuum Mechanics and Biomechanics at

FAU.

It's really exciting to use tools from mechanical engineering to then explore what's happening

in the human body for example or advance 3D bioprinting for tissue engineering approaches

to print artificial organs.

So you can really understand processes that from a biological or medical researchers point

of view are not so obvious but then using the equations of modeling and simulation we

can understand the mechanisms underlying certain processes.

I work in the field of experimental and computational biomechanics with special focus on really

soft materials like the brain or hydrogels and for the brain mechanics plays actually

a more important role that you would think at first sight.

So not only when you have an impact to the head during a traumatic brain injury but also

intrinsic processes for example brain folding because during development the brain is first

smooth and then mechanical forces seem to drive the folding process and also the cells

in our brain sense their mechanical environment,the forces or mechanical properties like stiffness

so there again mechanics can control certain processes and with our models and simulations

we can on the one hand understand those fundamental processes but then hopefully also develop

computer models to earlier diagnose or treat diseases in close collaboration with the clinicians.

FIU is a really unique place to be for my research which is so interdisciplinary so FIU

is a full university and we have the close contact with the medical faculty but also

the university hospitals so we have the chance to get access to human tissue which is really

rare so I could not think about another place where I could do the research I currently

do.