Alberto Aliseda wins NSF CAREER Award
Alberto Aliseda wins NSF CAREER Award to support microbubble research in diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease
Alberto Aliseda, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington, has won the CAREER Award, the National Science Foundation’s highest honor for junior faculty. This award is part of Faculty Early Career Development, which is among NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early career development activities.
The award, $450,000 over five years, will support Dr. Aliseda’s research in the area of microbubble dynamics in the human blood circulation. This work is aimed at improving the clinical use of microbubbles in the diagnostic and treatment of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the developed world. In particular, Aliseda’s group is interested in the possibility of using ultrasound to exert a force on the bubbles, so that they can be non-invasively targeted to specific regions of the body where they are needed.
For example, they can be loaded with blood thinners and directed at an intracranial thrombus, a blood clot in a difficult to reach artery inside the brain, or they can be loaded with a chemotherapy and directed to a tumor while keeping chemotherapy’s side effects to a minimum. But to achieve all this, the physical mechanisms which determine the fate of these microbubbles have to be well understood.
“Winning the CAREER award in my first year at the UW is a great recognition of the potential of my research,” says Aliseda, “and a fantastic push towards achieving that potential. Over the next five years, I will have the necessary support and a high visibility platform to establish a leading program in biomedical fluid mechanics here at the UW.”
The award, which was officially announced on February 15th, will support two Ph.D. theses in mechanical engineering. This represents a welcome push in support of the ME Department’s thrust in the area of Biomechanics. Additionally, it will support outreach activities to middle and high school students, in an effort to attract them towards engineering as a worthwhile career with the potential to make a difference in society’s problem and even save lives.
“I think that changing the attitude towards science and engineering is among the most important tasks we have in front of us as educators. The national economy critically depends on research and innovation, yet we don’t interest young students in basic science at an early age. Physics and mathematics are surrounded by stereotypes that we need to break through in order to attract all sections of society to these beautiful and important areas of science.”
Dr. Aliseda’s expertise is in fluid mechanics, a discipline that is at the core of many traditional and novel mechanical engineering products and processes. “Fluid mechanics is everywhere around us, from the air we breathe to the water we drink. Our car runs on liquid fuels that get mixed with air from the atmosphere and we run on blood that flows through our arteries and veins. A solid understanding of the dynamics of liquids and gases is as fundamental to design clean energy technologies and new medical devices today as it was a hundred years ago to design the first cars and aircrafts. Furthermore, if we want to understand the damage we have done to the environment and clean up after our own mess, we need to have reliable models for the behaviour of the oceans and the atmosphere, two notoriously complex fluid systems”.
Aliseda’s group has also been funded by NSF’s Atmospheric Science award to study the interaction of water droplets with atmospheric turbulence inside clouds and the effect on droplet growth, with the goal of building simplified models that can be implemented in mesoscale weather prediction models as well as global climate models. Additionally, his lab is supported by Pfizer Inc. to research the flow of complex fluids in coaxial atomizers, a significant problem in the design of several processes of pharmaceutical interest. He also collaborates with researchers at the UW’s Vascular Surgery Section and Applied Physics Lab in the investigation of the effect of hemodynamics in the origin and progression of cardiovascular disease.
Alberto Aliseda graduated from the School of Aeronautics, Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) with a BS/MS degree in 1998. After serving as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Spanish military for one year, he joined the University of California, San Diego where he received his Ph.D. degree in 2004. He stayed in La Jolla as a postdoctoral researcher until 2006, when he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington as an assistant professor.
