Boyce Griffith
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
When blood pushes a heart valve open, the moving leaflets in turn reshape the flow around them. This two-way coupling between fluids and structures, called fluid-structure interaction (FSI), is central to heart function, swimming and flight, and many engineered devices, and it is hard to simulate accurately.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
- Topics
fluid-structure interaction
immersed boundary method
B-splines
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Develop grid-adapted quadrature rules matched to composite B-spline coupling functions so that immersed boundary simulations transfer forces and velocities between fluid and structure more accurately in 2D and 3D.
- Design and analyze stabilization strategies, including surface regularization and splitting forces into normal and tangential parts, to get smooth surface forces while measuring energy conservation, volume conservation and spurious currents.
- Extend mimetic immersed boundary coupling to volumetric structures and implement all methods in the open-source IBAMR library, testing them on thin-interface and volumetric benchmark problems.
- Improve the speed and scalability of the CARDINAL cardiac simulation platform by enhancing core modules and adding performance portability libraries so it runs efficiently on varied hardware.
- Make CARDINAL easy to deploy and adopt by packaging it in containers, providing pre-compiled binaries, and creating documentation, tutorials, example projects and support channels.
- Validate patient-specific fluid-structure interaction models of bioprosthetic aortic valves against experiments, and use them with clotting biochemistry models to test whether flow stasis or crimp injury drives leaflet thrombosis.
- Test the models against clinical data from patients receiving TAVR or SAVR to predict subclinical leaflet thrombosis risk and inform valve selection.
More about the research
The grants combine three efforts: building more reliable mathematical methods for FSI simulation, turning cardiac simulation into sustainable open-source software, and applying these models to a specific clinical problem, blood clots forming on replacement aortic valves.
Why it matters
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of aortic valve replacements are performed each year. Validated models could help doctors predict which valve patients are likely to develop leaflet clots and choose a better device for them. Open-source tools such as CARDINAL and IBAMR could let more researchers build personalized heart models. More reliable flow simulations could also aid the design of medical devices, energy systems and aircraft.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Mimetic Immersed Boundary Methods for Fluid-Structure Interaction
NSF · Jul 2026 – Jun 2029
Sustainable Open-Source Software Tools for Simulating Cardiac Dynamics
NIH · Aug 2025 – Jul 2027
Computational and Experimental Modeling of Subclinical Leaflet Thrombosis in Bioprosthetic Aortic Valves
NIH · Jan 2022 – Dec 2026
Closest labs
Laura Miller
University of Arizona, AZ·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop a Method of Regularized Oseenlets, a gridless numerical method, to compute flow through bristled filtering structures at Reynolds numbers near one, where viscous and inertial forces are balanced.
Lin Mu
University of Georgia, GA·Mathematics & Statistics
Design a finite element scheme for incompressible flow that achieves pressure robustness and exact mass conservation at once, using a divergence-preserving discretization rather than the trade-off made by traditional solvers.
Robert Guy
University of California-Davis, CA·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure flow patterns and forces on dynamically similar remotely operated vehicles to test how metachronal rowing, a back-to-front wave of paddle strokes, generates thrust and lift across paddle Reynolds numbers from 0.01 to 10,000.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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