UTSA and UTHSCSA joint graduate program in biomedical engineering student Mirunalini Thirugnanasambandam was recently featured in UTSA’s “Meet A Roadrunner” student spotlight.

Thirugnanasambandam was drawn to the BME program because of the opportunities and resources to understand and resolve clinical problems from the perspective of a physician and an engineer.

Now, in her fourth year, Thirugnanasambandam has been awarded a $50k Predoctoral Fellowship by the American Heart Association (AHA) to study abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs).

She decided to study AAAs because she was looking for avenues in research where she could apply her knowledge as a mechanical engineer to real-world problems and find solutions that were relevant in more than just statistics and numbers.

“In studying AAAs, I saw the opportunity to help physicians make critical decisions about operating on patients affected by aneurysms,” she said. “The most interesting part of my research on AAAs is that we use clinical images to derive so much valuable information in terms of biomechanical and geometric indices of a patient’s own AAA.”

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