Director of the Mechano-X Institute and Xinghua University Professor at Tsinghua University
Brief Biography
Huajian Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Science from Harvard in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford from 1988-2002, as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research from 2001-2006 and as Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown from 2006-2019. After becoming the Walter H. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Brown in 2019, he went on to serve as one of the Distinguished University Professors at Nanyang Technological University and Scientific Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore until 2024. At present, he is a Xinghua University Professor in the Department of Engineering Mechanics of Tsinghua University.
Professor Gao’s research has been focused on the understanding of basic principles that control mechanical properties and behaviors of materials in both engineering and biological systems. His list of honors includes elections as Member of National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and Foreign Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea, as well as numerous academic awards including the Timoshenko Medal, Rodney Hill Prize and ASME Medal, the three highest lifetime achievement awards in his field.
Mechanobiomaterials studies on brain diseases and neuromodulation
Huajian Gao
Mechano-X Institute, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Mechanomaterials represent an emerging paradigm that proactively programs the functionality of materials through the manipulation of force–geometry–property interrelations. Here, we introduce a project utilizing the mechanomaterials approach for addressing brain disorders and enhancing neuromodulation, set to launch at this year's end. This endeavor, which focuses on Parkinson’s disease and deep brain stimulation, correlates "brain degeneration" with "material fatigue degradation" and reevaluates the human brain from biomechanics and materials science viewpoints. Our goal is to elucidate the effects of neuromodulation at the cellular, neural network, functional nuclei, and entire brain levels, while also revealing structural attributes of brain tissue, and the relationships between electromechanical coupling behaviors and physiological functions in 3T/5T magnetic resonance environments under various neuromodulation settings. Moreover, we aim to develop innovative detection methods, such as mechanical imaging of brain tissues, to facilitate the diagnosis and characterization of Parkinson’s disease's onset and progression.
