Lucrezia Lorenzon

- Design and development of a soft robotic artificial ventricle - My research focused on the development of a soft robotic artificial ventricle. The pumping mechanism is based on the deformation of a blood-containing chamber, driven by pneumatic artificial muscles.

I worked as research assistant in the framework of HybridHeart (www.hybridheart.e), a Horizon 2020 project whose goal is the development of a biocompatible and fully implantable total artificial heart. My tasks were the modeling of an artificial heart ventricle and the experimental validation of the models.

The visiting period focused on the characterization and testing of a soft robotic artificial ventricle in a cardiovascular simulator that emulates the physiological conditions of pressure and flow of human circulation.

With my master's thesis at Imperial College London, I studied the natural selection traces in the human genome using deep learning techniques. I developed a computational pipeline that was tested on the human genes that are responsible for the Long QT Syndrome, a cardiovascular disease with genetic bases.

Thesis: "Convolutional Neural Networks for the identification of natural selection signals and functional mutations in the human genome"

Thesis: "Anthropometric study of humanoid robots and skin-like coating development"