Jonathan Vande Geest, PhD

Professor

409 CNBIO | 300 Technology Drive | Pittsburgh, PA 15219 P: 412-624-6496 C: 412-383-8788

jpv20@pitt.edu http://www.engineering.pitt.edu/stbl/

Principal Investigator Brief Biography

Dr. Jonathan Vande Geest is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and holds affiliate faculty positions in the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Louis J. Fox Center for Vision Restoration, the Vascular Medicine Institute, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science. He received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Iowa in 2000 and his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. Dr. Vande Geest joined University of Pittsburgh in January of 2016.

Dr. Vande Geest is a currently a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Association of Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), the American Heart Association (AHA), the International Society for Applied Cardiovascular Biology (ISACB), and the American Physiological Society (APS). He currently serves as the Chair of the ASME Bioengineering Division Solids Technical Committee and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.

Current Active Projects

• Assessing the role of the extracellular matrix and cell mechanobiology in primary open angle glaucoma • Development of a functional biopolymer-based compliance matched tissue engineered vascular graft using human tropoelastin and blood derived endothelial cells • Assessing the role of aortic compliance in the onset of idiopathic vocal fold paralysis • Experimental and computational optimization of patient specific endovascular medical devices • Experimental, analytical, and computational modeling of the multiphasic and chemo-mechanically driven growth and remodeling of soft tissues • Extracellular matrix remodeling of murine aneurysm

Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory

The primary goal of the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory (STBL) is to develop and utilize novel experimental and computational bioengineering approaches to study the structure function relationships of soft tissues in human growth, remodeling, and disease. These relationships are then used to develop and fabricate the next generation of novel endovascular medical devices and bioactive drug therapies. The STBL achieves this goal by seamlessly bringing together stateof-the-art techniques in tissue characterization, device fabrication, nonlinear optical microscopy, finite element modeling, and cell mechanobiology. This multifaceted approach allows members of the STBL and its interdisciplinary collaborators to expedite the mechanistic understanding and therapeutic treatment of human disease.