Our May 23, 2024 webinar was "Histotripsy of Collagenous Tissues" featuring Julianna Simon, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Acoustics and Biomedical Engineering from Penn State.
This session was moderated by Eli Vlaisavljevich, Ph.D., from Virginia Tech.
About the Professors
Dr. Julianna Simon is an Associate Professor in Acoustics at The Pennsylvania State University and the Principal Investigator of the Biomedical Acoustics Simon Lab or BASiL. Dr. Simon received her BS in Bioengineering from Washington State University in 2009 and her PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Washington in 2013. Her dissertation was on the mechanisms and thresholds of tissue injury by focused ultrasound. She then completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship through the National Space Biomedical Research Institute evaluating the twinkling artifact to detect kidney stones in space analog environments. Dr. Simon joined the Graduate Program in Acoustics at The Pennsylvania State University in January 2017. The goal of her lab, BASiL, is to apply the fundamentals of acoustics to develop novel ultrasound diagnostics and therapeutics. Some of her current projects include understanding the role of bubble nuclei in pathological biomineralizations, developing ultrasound to treat tendinopathies and other collagenous tissues, diagnosing and treating heterotopic ossification, triggering drug delivery from loaded hydrogels, and activating and imaging phase-change contrast agents. She has published almost 40 peer-reviewed articles in more than 10 journals and has participated in presenting more than 200 abstracts at scientific conferences. Dr. Simon is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER grant and the 2023 R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America.
Dr. Eli Vlaisavljevich is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include focused ultrasound, non-invasive tissue ablation (HIFU, histotripsy), cavitation physics, nanoparticle-mediated histotripsy (NMH), biomaterials, tissue regeneration, cancer, non-invasive neuromodulation, and clinical translation. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Vlaisavljevich conducted his graduate degrees in the Histotripsy Lab at the University of Michigan (2010-2015) and then spent two years working at HistoSonics (2015-2017) on the development of histotripsy for the treatment of liver cancer.