Walter Reed Army Institute for Research

Fred Pearce is Chief of the Department of Resuscitative Medicine within the Division of Military Casualty Care Research. His primary responsibility is direction of the research in this department, with emphasis on basic science and instrumentation issues relevant to improving the care of the battlefield casualty. He holds recent patents as co-inventor of a "High Efficiency Balanced Oscillating Shuttle Pump" and also for a "Transportable Life Support System." He has had a long-term research interest in metabolic and other effects of hemorrhage and in hemorrhagic shock.

Boston University

Keneth R. Lutchen is primarily interested in relating the structural properties of the airways and tissues to overall lung mechanical properties and function. His overall research goals are to better understand the relation between changes in the airway and tissue systems during asthma, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His specialty is the use of linear and nonlinear systems identification techniques and computational morphometric models to detect, categorize, and track changes in lung structure from clinically available measurements. To this end he has been interested in designing noval ventilator waveform modalities that are clinically and diagnostically advantageous. Dr. Lutchen is also interested in statistical signal processing for classifying heart rate variability and the physiological contributors to heart rate control. His work has emphasized advances in sensitivity analyses and optimal experimental designs for nonlinear biological systems.

Medical College of Ohio

Dan Olson is the chief of the Pulmonary Division of the Department of Medicine and a professor in the Engineering School at the University of Toledo. He has conducted extensive research related to airflow in the airways of the lung; including aerosol propagation, sound generation, interaction of airway walls to flow, and bronchial epithelial cell responses to dosimetry of inhaled materials. He has evaluated the relation of aerodynamics to clinical airway function and Pulmonary Function Tests. He is interested also in the physics of mucus flow in the airways and the geometry of the airways as related to aerodynamics and function. His interests extend to the microvascular blood fluid mechanics and interaction with endothelial cells and vasoreactivity. He has pursued the basic fluid mechanics of internal flows with high degree of secondary flow (i.e., flow at entrance to curves, flow in bifurcations).

Jeffrey Hammersley is a lung specialist who, like Dan Olson, combines his medical knowledge with engineering training in fluid dynamics. Using the CRAY C90 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and resources at the Mississippi State ERC, he has begun to create a computational model of airflow in the lungs. He collaborates with colleagues at several institutions to apply computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques used in the design of cars, airplanes, and aerospace vehicles for use in studying the effect of the complex branching geometry of the lung's small airways on air flow and aerosol propagation and deposition. His goal in this work is in improving and extending delivery of therapeutic agents by inhalation. He is also interested in mucus flow in the airways and improving the quantitative description of human small airway branching. His interests extend also to microvascular blood flow mechanics and interaction with endothelial cells and vasoreactivity.

University of Tennessee-Knoxville

The Virtual Human Project is collaborating with the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) of the Computer Science Department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the development of a problem solving environment. The Director of ICL is Jack Dongarra. The Virtual Human PSE will use NetSolve, an RPC based client/agent/server system that allows users to remotely access both hardware and software components. Various front-end software will be used for the Virtual Human PSE; in particular, the present design intends to incorporate the University of Utah SCIRun visual programming interface. The director of the SCIRun Project is Chris Johnson.

Vanderbilt University

The Virtual Human Project is collaborating with Robert Roselli, Thomas Harris and Jerry Collins of the Biomedical Engineering Department of Vanderbilt University. With specific expertise in respiratory system modeling, Vanderbilt is one of the premier biomedical engineering research institutions in the nation. Other research areas include: biomedical signal analysis, biomedical optics, biomedical instrumentation and computing, cardiovascular imaging, medical imaging and instrumentation, and intracellular engineering. The Biomedical Engineering Department has close ties to Vanderbilt University Medical School, and in particular to its Center for Lung Research. This will make it possible for the Virtual Human Project to be developed in close collaboration with medical researchers at the forefront of pulmonary medicine. The contact for the Vanderbilt Biomedical Engineering Department is Chairman, Thomas R. Harris.

North Carolina State University

Kumar Mahinthakumar is an assistant professor in the Civil Engineering Department at N.C. State. His research interests are in parallel numerical algorithms, groundwater transport and remediation, parallel and distributed computing, and parallel sparse matrix solvers. He will be involved in computer-aided engineering, high performance computing, and parallel processing at the University. While at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he was a member of the Virtual Human Initiative team, and was involved with developing an approach to computational fluid dynamics modeling of air flow in the lungs.

University of Washington

James Bassingthwaighte is Professor of Bioengineering, Biomathematics and Radiology at the University of Washington, and is currently the Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering and Chairman of the Commission on Bioengineering in Physiology, International Union of Physiological Sciences. His current research is centered on the mechanisms of flow, transport, and metabolism of substrates and hormones in the heart and throughout the body. The work emphasizes the use of quantitative mathematical models for integrative systems analysis in physiology and in image analysis; he serves as Director of the National Simulation Resource for Circulatory Mass Transport and Exchange at the University of Washington.

University of Utah

Chris Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests are in the area of scientific computing. Particular interests include inverse and imaging problems, adaptive methods for partial differential equations, automatic mesh generation, numerical analysis, large scale computational problems in medicine, and scientific visualization. He directs the Center for Scientific Computing and Imaging and also the Center for Bioelectric Field Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization (NIH NCRR). He is Co-Director of the Computational Engineering and Science (CES) Program.

ntara, Inc.

ntara, Inc. creates and markets its unique visual experience using both artistic and technological expertise in animation, interactive simuation, and multimedia. For the Virtual Human project they have produced an excellent introductory video. In the future, Virtual Human and ntara will work together to create multimedia presentations incorporating the Virtual Human simulation capability. ntara, Inc. is located in Johnson City,Tennessee and can be contacted through Jerry Brock, President.

Dynoverse Corp.

Dynoverse develops interactive simulations of the human body with precise structural and functional features for the aerospace, healthcare, education and consumer products markets. Specific activities include the Somatic Sciences Simulation (S3) Project with NASA which entails: Virtual prototyping of advanced spacesuits and related support systems; upgrading and customizing the suit currently used for extravehicular activity; developing a virtual testbed for assessment of effective countermeasures to microgravity; and enhancement of human factors and anthropometric analyses of mission training/performance. Dynoverse and the Virtual Human Project intend to collaborate in the near future on the integration of cardiopulmonary modeling with neuromusculoskeletal modeling of the thorax to create an anatomically complete Virtual Human simulation environment. The CEO of Dynoverse Corp. is Robert W. Rice, Ph.D., who can be contacted at rrice@harc.edu or through the Dynoverse Web site.