We are pleased to welcome Adrian Buganza Tepole, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University.

About the seminar:
Skin is the largest organ in our body and it serves essential roles including protection against outside harm, thermoregulation, and regulating transport with the outside environment. Skin, like most living tissue, adapts to mechanical cues, such as after wound healing, reconstructive surgery, or in tissue expansion. We have created computational models that combine biomechanics and mechanobiology to describe the deformation, growth, and remodeling of skin, and applied these models to clinically relevant scenarios. This talk will showcase computational models of skin mechanics aided by data-driven tools to understand the multiscale mechanics of this tissue, and its adaptation to injury and treatment. One application of interest is skin growth in tissue expansion, a popular reconstructive surgery technique that grows new skin in response to sustained supra-physiological loading. We have created computational models that combine mechanics and mechanobiology to describe the deformation and growth of expanded skin. Together with experiments on a porcine model, and leveraging tools such as multi-fidelity Gaussian processes, we have performed Bayesian inference to learn mechanistically how skin grows in response to stretch. A similar approach has allowed us to capture the coupled mechanobiology processes leading to scar formation in wound healing. One central aspect in creating these multi-scale, multi-field computational models is the consideration of uncertainty in mechanics and biology of tissues. Importantly, we leverage information across species, from mouse, to porcine and human data in order to increase our fundamental understanding of skin mechanics and ultimately result in skin digital twins toward better healthcare outcomes.

About the speaker:
Dr. Buganza-Tepole is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering (courtesy) at Purdue University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University before joining Purdue as a faculty member in 2016. He was also a Miller Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley during Spring 2022. He is currently a Harrington Faculty Fellow at UT Austin during the 2024-2025 year. His group studies the interplay between mechanics and mechanobiology of soft tissue, with skin as a model system. Using computational simulation, machine learning, and experimentation, his group seeks to characterize the multi-scale mechanics of tissues to understand the fundamental mechanisms of tissue’s mechano-adaptation in order to improve clinical diagnostics and interventional tools.