Ph.D. Candidate Arian Aghilinejad Awarded the American Heart Association Fellowship

Arian Aghilinejad, a Ph.D. student in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, has been working on the conditions of heart failure patients.Recently he received the American Hearth Association Fellowship. The American Heart Association Fellowship is designed to enhance the integrated research and clinical training of promising students with potential to pursue careers as scientists, physician-scientists or other clinician-scientists in the research area of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and brain health. Aghilinejad’s project, titled “Hemodynamic effects of ascending aortic longitudinal stretch on ventricular-arterial coupling in heart failure patients,” won the award amount of $64,072 for two years. Aghilinejad is the second student at USC Viterbi and the sixth student at USC who received this award during the past decade (since 2012).

Niema Pahlevan, an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, advised Aghilinejad as he worked on his project, and believes Aghilinejad won due to the importance of his work on heart failure patients.

The project focusing on a specific type of pumping phenomena that could offer support to heart failure patients. Interactions between the heart and the aorta are optimized in healthy conditions to guarantee adequate blood delivery to the body with modest workload on the heart. Recent clinical studies showed that left ventricle (LV) contraction displaces the aortic annulus and produces a considerable longitudinal stretch in the ascending aorta (AA). There is a gap in current knowledge as to whether the stretch-related aortic dynamic mode can result in a wave pumping effect in the aorta, hence it offers the heart a supplementary pumping mechanism. This wave pumping can be substantial, particularly in heart failure patients. Aghilinejad will be studying this phenomena further.