The human circulatory system is a marvel of nature, comprised of 60,000 miles of veins, arteries and capillaries that carry food, oxygen, hormones and other important chemicals throughout our bodies every minute of every day of our lives. Yet, we know relatively little about how that system operates.
Jifu Tan
To help bridge those knowledge gaps, the National Science Foundation has awarded a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant of $507,000 to NIU Assistant Professor Jifu Tan, who has taught in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at NIU since 2017.
The CAREER grant is NSF’s highest honor in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
“We are very proud of Dr. Tan’s hard work and accomplishments,” said David Grewell, dean of the NIU College of Engineering and Engineering Technology. “This award speaks volumes about his passion for research and his students.”
Over the next five years, Tan plans to use the grant to study blood clotting. Clotting, while important to healing cuts and ruptures, can also obstruct blood flow in vessels, leading to cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, heart attack and stroke. In fact, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.
Tan’s research will strive to develop models – both physical and virtual – that advance the understanding of clot formation and rupture (embolism). He will create multi-scale modeling tools that use powerful computers and artificial intelligence to better predict clot growth and its response to the pulsation of blood flow, collisions from blood cells and vessel dilation. He will then attempt to validate those findings using a 3D-printed, silicon-based replica of the vascular system, which he will create as part of the project.
“There have been similar studies, but they looked at either the very small-scale with simplified models or the large-scale, one-dimensional model without the help from artificial intelligence,” Tan said. “What makes this unique is that this combines both the more realistic, microscale model and the machine-learning-assisted macroscale model as well as experimental validations.”
As part of the project, Tan will also develop a teaching tool called ACCENT (Advanced Computing and Communication Engineering Notebooks for Teaching). The tool is designed to improve students’ computational thinking skills and systematic problem-solving skills.
ACCENT is a Jupyter notebook, a free open-source, web-based program for interactive computing across programming languages. It provides interactive and literate computing with unique features, including hand-calculation rendering, automatic unit conversion and the ability to generate neat engineering design reports with auto-numbered equations and citations.
By completing the homework and projects in ACCENT, students will reinforce their skills in mathematics, mechanical engineering and programming through communication. The notebooks also help instructors organize lecture notes, homework assignments and other aspects of classes that rely on a lot of math or programming.
“I want students to understand that it isn’t just about plugging numbers into a formula. You have to be able to communicate what the numbers mean,” said Tan, who used an NIU Curriculum Innovation Grant to integrate ACCENT notebooks into his classes on fluid mechanics and numerical programming. “It helps students grow intellectually and then build on that knowledge so that they can innovate.”
As exciting as the research into the circulatory system is, Tan is equally enthusiastic about the ACCENT notebooks. “Both have their merits,” he said. “That is the beauty of being a professor at a university. On the one hand, I get to engage in research that is advancing scientific knowledge and improving human health. On the other hand, as an educator, I get to find ways to improve the student education experience.”
That dedication to students is evident throughout all of Tan’s work, said Professor Tariq Shamim, chair of Mechanical Engineering.
“He is a very innovative teacher who is comfortable integrating new tools into his teaching,” Shamim said. “He effectively uses that technology to transmit his energy and enthusiasm to his students, to high school students who come to our open houses and even to younger generations of students who participate in our STEAM events during the summer. We are excited and proud to see his research recognized with this prestigious grant.”
Tan hopes that, by the end of the five-year life of the grant, he will be able to start working with clinicians to evaluate the predictive power of the model. Perfecting that process could take much longer, however. “If you want to create an accurate digital twin cardiovascular model for patients, that could take years, or even decades, because all bodies are different,” Tan said.
While his research into blood clotting will be his primary focus over the next several years, Tan also has other lines of research in additive manufacturing, high-performance computing, drug delivery and tumor detection.
Tan, who came to NIU in 2017, credits many others for helping him earn this award while indulging his passion for both research and teaching.
Tan said, he appreciates help from Joseph A. Insley, an associate professor in the NIU School of Art and Design and the team leader in scientific visualization at Argonne National Laboratory, who has created images that make it easier to contextualize the simulation data.
“I am grateful for the excellent support I received from all levels on campus, especially the Department of Mechanical Engineering – the newly established Ph.D. program in particular – and from CEET,” Tan said. “I appreciate all of the assistance I have received from colleagues and administrators throughout the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology including NIU STEAM.”
In particular, Tan said, he appreciates help from Joseph A. Insley, an associate professor in the NIU School of Art and Design and the team leader in scientific visualization at Argonne National Laboratory, who has created images that make it easier to contextualize the simulation data.
Other factors that are key to his work, and the success of the project going forward, he said, are the resources available through the NIU Center for Research Computing and Data and the college’s partnerships with Fermi Lab and Argonne National Laboratory.
“All of this support and these resources were instrumental in helping me receive this grant and will be important to the success of the project going forward,” Tan said.
