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We Study

  1. The biomechanics of traumatic brain injury. 
  2. Why brain cells die after a traumatic brain injury.

With the knowledge that we gain, we hope to develop better protection strategies to prevent head injuries, to develop new therapies for treating head injuries, and to develop strategies to help repair the damage that does occur. Please, use these pages to learn more about what we do.

Active Research Projects

Activities to improve prevention strategies for TBI

Designing improved protection strategies to reduce the incidence of TBI requires engineering data specific for brain tissue which has not been available.  One critical knowledge gap is the lack of injury tolerance criteria for different regions of the brain.  Development of tolerance criteria is exceedingly challenging since the brain tissue must be living at the time of injury, the injury must be a precisely controlled mechanical stimulus, and the culture must remain sterile as the injury is a biological process which unfolds over days.  This failure process is fundamentally different than

Recent Publication

Region-Dependent Viscoelastic Properties of Human Brain Tissue Under Large Deformations

Sowmya N Sundaresh
John D Finan
Benjamin S Elkin
Andrew V Basilio
Guy M McKhann
Barclay Morrison III
Columbia Affiliations
Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences