Levich Institute Seminar Announcement, 02/25/2020
Tuesday, 02/25/2020
2:00 PM
Steinman Hall, Room #312
(Chemical Engineering Conference Room)
Professor Samaneh Farokhirad
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Mechanical Engineering Department

“Computational Study of Transport and Binding of Deformable Nanoparticles to the Cell Surface Inspired by a Soft Matter Approach”
ABSTRACT
Transport phenomena have been found an extensive range of applications in nearly all aspects of engineering and science fields. This talk will focus on the nanoparticle (NP)-based drug delivery applications. The process of internal transport of NPs in the blood vessel and their adhesion to the targeting desired tissues stumbles upon various mechanical and biochemical factors. Therefore, multiscale computational simulations will provide a valuable means to better understand the complexity of this process as well as to examine interactions between contributing factors in a systematic way. I will talk on new methods and their applications to describe the transport and adhesion of deformable NPs to the host cell membrane. The computational framework accounts for the mechanical properties of the NP as well as the target cell. For the first time, we are able to demonstrate that NP transport and adhesion are sensitive to NP mechanics tuned from very soft NPs to rigid spheres. This sensitivity of NP targeting to NP mechanics arises out of the interplay between enthalpic and entropic terms mediating NP binding to the cell membrane. This new flexibility to use of NPs has translational importance in clinical medicine for early/correct treatment and diagnosis of many progressive and treatable diseases.

BRIEF ACADEMIC/EMPLOYMENT HISTORY:

Dr. Samaneh Farokhirad is currently an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2006 from the Sharif University of Technology and her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2009 from the Iran University of Science and Technology. She then got her Ph.D. in Computational Multiphase Fluid Dynamics Group at the City College of New York, under the supervision of Taehun Lee, where she continued her research as a Postdoctoral Scholar until 2016. From 2016 to 2019, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Institute for Computational Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include studying of complex physical systems that are of great interest in the areas of energy, environment and human health by developing novel physical models and numerical techniques.

MOST RECENT RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Particle-based drug delivery systems, Biofluid dynamics, multiphase flows, Deep learning, Multiscale modeling