Academic Biography

I am a Tenure-Track Professor at the Institute of Healthcare Engineering at the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) in Austria, where I lead the Soft Robotic Medical Devices and Implants group. We focus on combining soft robotics, 3D printing, biosensing, and computational tools to build advanced physical and digital biomechanical models of disease.

Before moving to Austria, I trained and worked in the US for 10 years. Most recently, I was an Assistant Professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, USA. I was also a core faculty member and Director of Biomechanics at the Cleveland Clinic's Cardiovascular Innovation Research Center.

Prior to this, I had a short stint as a Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology.

I received my postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I worked in the lab of Prof. Ellen Roche at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), on the development of a variety of soft robotic implantable devices.

Earlier, I earned my Ph.D. at Purdue University, School of Industrial Engineering, from the group of Prof. Ramses V. Martinez. During this time, I published on soft robotics, flexible electronics, 3D printing, biomedical sensing, metamaterials, and scalable nanofabrication.

Before coming to Purdue, I received my Bachelor's degree in Production Engineering from Jadavpur University, India. While still an undergrad, I spent a year as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany, where I worked at the Bremen Institute for Production and Logistics (BIBA) funded by an Erasmus Mundus fellowship.