Abdul Barakat, Hydrodynamics Laboratory, Palaiseau

Abdul Barakat, PhD, CNRS Director of Research
Hydrodynamics Laboratory (LadHyX)
AXA Professor of Mechanics and Biology
Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

Vascular diseases are among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. For instance, diseases of medium and large arteries lead to heart attacks and strokes, while microvascular disease is associated with hypertension, thrombosis, and neurodegenerative pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease. Although it is now well recognized that mechanical factors play a critical role in the development and progression of both macrovascular and microvascular diseases, the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Therefore, the development of physiologically relevant platforms within which the mechanical environment can be finely controlled and cellular events monitored with high spatial and temporal resolution is of great interest. This talk will describe our efforts aimed at engineering large and small blood vessel mimics that can be used to study important events in vascular physiology and disease development. The presentation will also describe how the vascular mechanical environment impacts various aspects of vascular cell structure and function.

Biography

Abdul Barakat is CNRS Director of Research at the Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique de l’Ecole Polytechnique (LadHyX) and the AXA Professor of Mechanics and Biology at Ecole Polytechnique. He is also co-director of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris Engineering for Health (E4H) Interdisciplinary Research Center and an adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. Abdul Barakat obtained a Ph.D. in biofluid mechanics from MIT in 1994. He subsequently spent a year as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 1995, he was recruited as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and to Full Professor in 2006. He relocated to France in 2010. In 2014, Abdul Barakat co-founded the startup company Sensome, which develops state-of-the-art sensor technologies to equip medical devices. His research interests are in vascular biomechanics and bioengineering, cellular mechanobiology, and endovascular devices.