We are motivated by the palpable hope (and fear) that parents impart when they entrust their child with complex heart disease to our care. Historically, the surgical management of these patients has been pioneered via human experimentation through half a century of very risky treatment strategies born of desperation and an alternative marked by certain mortality.

In this era, the burden of optimizing current and developing new surgical therapies can no longer fall to patients. Just as engineers utilize virtual computer-based simulation, prototyping, and failure analysis to deliver innovation in other disciplines, our lab studies congenital heart disease and its surgical therapies using computational fluid dynamics and ex-vivo biomechanical simulations to inform large animal experiments that can lead to clinically meaningful discoveries for our patients. Ongoing retro and prospective assessment of outcomes improve this design process in an iterative fashion.