Gerhard A. Holzapfel

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Gerhard A. Holzapfel
Gerhard A Holzapfel 300dpi.jpg
BornMay 22, 1961
NationalityAustrian
Alma mater Graz University of Technology (PhD)
Known forConstitutive and computational modeling of fiber-reinforced materials, soft biological tissues including blood vessels in health and disease
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Nonlinear Solid Mechanics, Biomechanics, Mechanobiology
Institutions

Gerhard Alfred Holzapfel (born May 22, 1961) is an Austrian scientist, (bio)mechanician. He is currently a professor of Biomechanics and Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology, Austria, since 2007. [1] [2] He is also the International Chair of Biomechanics (adjunct professorship) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), [3] and a visiting professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, Scotland. [4] He was a professor of biomechanics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 9 years (7 years as an adjunct professor) until 2013. He is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the international scientific journal Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology by Springer Nature since the first issue published in June 2002. [5]

Contents

Holzapfel is widely known for his contributions to the fields of nonlinear solid mechanics, constitutive and computational modeling of fiber-reinforced materials and soft biological tissues including blood vessels in health and disease. He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering selected by ISI Web of Science, Thomson Reuters and listed as "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014". [6] His graduate textbook, Nonlinear Solid Mechanics: A Continuum Approach for Engineering [7] published in 2000, has become a standard reference in the area of solid mechanics.

Education and training

Gerhard A. Holzapfel received his M.S. degree in Civil Engineering and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Graz University of Technology in 1985 and 1990, respectively. In 1991, he traveled to Shenyang in the Northeast of P.R. China to work as a visiting scholar at an institution currently part of the Shenyang University. Then, he received a Schrödinger Scholarship from the Austrian Science Fund (Wissenschaftsfonds FWF) to work as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Division of Applied Mechanics, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, CA, USA, with the late Professor Juan C. Simo from 1993 to 1995. [8] He received his Habilitation in Mechanics from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, in 1996. From May 1987 to November 2004, he was an Assistant at the Institute of Strength of Materials and then an associate professor at the Institute of Structural Analysis, Graz University of Technology, Austria.

Research

Holzapfel's research has mainly focused on nonlinear continuum mechanics, multi-scale constitutive modeling of solids at finite strains including fiber reinforcement, computational methods, fracture, and material failure. He has made seminal contributions to biomechanics, embracing experiments, continuum mechanics modeling and finite element implementations for a variety of soft biological tissues including artery walls, heart tissue, and brain tissues.

In recent years, he has increasingly directed his attention towards the biomechanics and mechanobiology of soft biological tissues, the cardiovascular system including blood vessels in health and diseases such as aneurysm and aortic dissection, therapeutic interventions such as balloon angioplasty and stent implantation.

He has also made contributions in experimental biomechanics addressing phenomena at the nano, micro, or macrolevels. He used polarized light microscopy, second-harmonic imaging, and two-photon excitation microscopy together with medical image processing to visualize the nanostructure of soft tissues.

Besides his well-known textbook Nonlinear Solid Mechanics: A Continuum Approach for Engineering, [7] two of the constitutive models proposed by his group and longtime collaborator Professor Ray Ogden are now referred to as the hgo [9] and goh [10] models which have been implemented in commercial software such as Simulia Abaqus [11]

Awards and honors

Holzapfel has received many awards and honors including the following:

Selected publications

Holzapfel has authored a graduate textbook and co-edited seven books. He contributed chapters to 20+ other books, and published 220+ peer-reviewed journal articles. Some of his most influential publications include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biomechanics</span> Study of the mechanics of biological systems

Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch of biophysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soft tissue</span> Tissue in the body that is not hardened by ossification

Soft tissue is all the tissue in the body that is not hardened by the processes of ossification or calcification such as bones and teeth. Soft tissue connects, surrounds or supports internal organs and bones, and includes muscle, tendons, ligaments, fat, fibrous tissue, lymph and blood vessels, fasciae, and synovial membranes. 

Solid mechanics is the branch of continuum mechanics that studies the behavior of solid materials, especially their motion and deformation under the action of forces, temperature changes, phase changes, and other external or internal agents.

Yuan-Cheng "Bert" Fung was a Chinese-American bioengineer and writer. He is regarded as a founding figure of bioengineering, tissue engineering, and the "Founder of Modern Biomechanics".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biological engineering</span> Application of biology and engineering to create useful products

Biological engineering or bioengineering is the application of principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable, tangible, economically viable products. Biological engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number of pure and applied sciences, such as mass and heat transfer, kinetics, biocatalysts, biomechanics, bioinformatics, separation and purification processes, bioreactor design, surface science, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and polymer science. It is used in the design of medical devices, diagnostic equipment, biocompatible materials, renewable energy, ecological engineering, agricultural engineering, process engineering and catalysis, and other areas that improve the living standards of societies.

This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM). For a broad overview of engineering, please see Engineering. For biographies please see List of engineers and Mechanicians.

Biomechanical engineering, also considered a subfield of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, combines principles of physics, biology, and engineering. Topics of interest in this field include biomechanics, computational mechanics, continuum mechanics, bioinstrumentation, design of implants and prostheses, etc. This is a highly multidisciplinary field, and engineers with such a background may enter related niche careers, e.g., as an ergonomics consultant, rehabilitation engineer, biomechanics researcher, and biomedical device engineer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth L. Johnson</span> British engineer

Kenneth Langstreth Johnson FRS FREng was a British engineer, Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 1977 to 1992 and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Most of his research was in the areas of tribology and contact mechanics.

<i>Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology</i> Academic journal

Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology (BMMB) is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal was established in June 2002 and is currently edited by Gerhard A. Holzapfel and David Nordsletten. It publishes research articles about theoretical, computational, and experimental studies in the fields of biomedical engineering, biomechanics, and mechanobiology.

FEBio(Finite Elements for Biomechanics) is a software package for finite element analysis and was specifically designed for applications in biomechanics and bioengineering. It was developed in collaboration with research groups from the University of Utah (MRL, SCI) and Columbia University (MBL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Miodownik</span> British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster and writer

Mark Andrew Miodownik is a British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster and writer at University College London. Previously, he was the head of the Materials Research Group at King's College London, and a co-founder of Materials Library.

Mechanobiology is an emerging field of science at the interface of biology, engineering, chemistry and physics. It focuses on how physical forces and changes in the mechanical properties of cells and tissues contribute to development, cell differentiation, physiology, and disease. Mechanical forces are experienced and may be interpreted to give biological responses in cells. The movement of joints, compressive loads on the cartilage and bone during exercise, and shear pressure on the blood vessel during blood circulation are all examples of mechanical forces in human tissues. A major challenge in the field is understanding mechanotransduction—the molecular mechanisms by which cells sense and respond to mechanical signals. While medicine has typically looked for the genetic and biochemical basis of disease, advances in mechanobiology suggest that changes in cell mechanics, extracellular matrix structure, or mechanotransduction may contribute to the development of many diseases, including atherosclerosis, fibrosis, asthma, osteoporosis, heart failure, and cancer. There is also a strong mechanical basis for many generalized medical disabilities, such as lower back pain, foot and postural injury, deformity, and irritable bowel syndrome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marco Amabili</span> Italian-Canadian university professor and researcher

Marco Amabili is a professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in Vibrations and Fluid-Structure Interaction, Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada.

The William Prager Medal is an award given annually by the Society of Engineering Science (SES) to an individual for "outstanding research contributions in either theoretical or experimental Solid Mechanics or both". This medal was established in 1983. The actual award is a medal with William Prager's likeness on one side and an honorarium of US$2000.

Raymond William Ogden is a British applied mathematician. He is the George Sinclair Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Glasgow.

Caitríona Lally is a professor of Bioengineering in Trinity College, Dublin. She has been a qualified mechanical engineer since 1997. She did a PhD in cardiovascular biomechanics.

A number of processes of surface growth in areas ranging from mechanics of growing gravitational bodies through propagating fronts of phase transitions, epitaxial growth of nanostructures and 3D printing, growth of plants, and cell mobility require non-Euclidean description because of incompatibility of boundary conditions and different mechanisms of developing stresses at interfaces. Indeed, these mechanisms result in the curving of initially flat elements of the body and changing separation between different elements of it. Gradual accumulation of deformations under the influx of accumulating mass results in the memory-conscious grows of the body and makes strains the subject of long-range forces. As a result of all above factors, generic non-Euclidean growth is described in terms of Riemannian geometry with a space- and time-dependent curvature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alain Goriely</span> Belgian mathematician

Alain Goriely is a Belgian mathematician, currently holding the statutory professorship (chair) of mathematical modelling at the University of Oxford, Mathematical Institute. He is director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial Mathematics (OCIAM), of the International Brain and Mechanics Lab (IBMTL) and Professorial Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford. At the Mathematical Institute, he was the director of external relations and public engagement, from 2013 until 2022, initiating the Oxford Mathematics series of public lectures. In 2022, he was elected to the Royal Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vikram Deshpande</span> Indian engineer

Vikram Sudhir Deshpande,, is an Indian-born British engineer and materials scientist, currently Professor of Materials Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Andrew Biewener is the Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Faculty Director of the Concord Field Station. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

References

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  2. "List of Institute Heads at TU Graz in December 2007" . Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  3. "Holzapfel profile at Norwegian University of Science and Technology" . Retrieved 26 December 2020.
  4. "Holzapfel profile at University of Glasgow" . Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  5. "Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology website". Springer Nature. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  6. "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014. Thomson Reuters has launched "Highly Cited Researchers", a compilation of influential names in science". Thomson Reuters. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  7. 1 2 "Nonlinear Solid Mechanics". John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  8. 1 2 "Austrian Science Fund (Der Wissenschaftsfonds FWF) Webpage on the Schröderinger Scholarship Award for Gerhard A. Holzapfel" . Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  9. Holzapfel, Gerhard A.; Gasser, Thomas C.; Ogden, Ray W. (2000). "A new constitutive framework for arterial wall mechanics and a comparative study of material models". Journal of Elasticity and the Physical Science of Solids. 61 (1–3): 1–48. doi:10.1023/A:1010835316564. S2CID   9214560 . Retrieved 26 December 2020.
  10. Gasser, Thomas C.; Ogden, Ray W.; Holzapfel, Gerhard A. (2006). "Hyperelastic modelling of arterial layers with distributed collagen fibre orientations". Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 3 (6): 15–35. doi:10.1098/rsif.2005.0073. PMC   1618483 . PMID   16849214.
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