Biography: Vittorio Cristini, Ph.D., FAAN
Vittorio Cristini (associate professor of Health Information Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Systems Biology, at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, at the University of Texas, Austin, and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center) was formerly on the faculty in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine (2002-2006) and in Applied Mathematics and Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota (2000-2002). He earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering (2000) from Yale University and a Laurea Summa cum Laude in Nuclear Engineering (1994) from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy; he is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Nanomedicine. Dr. Cristini is an expert in the fields of complex fluids, microfluidics, complex (bio)materials, mathematical/computational modeling of cancer and nanomathematics, where he has organized numerous domestic and international conferences and has published 4 book chapters and 50 articles in journals that include the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Physics of Fluids, the Journal of Crystal Growth, the Journal of Rheology, the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, Lab on a Chip, Physical Review Letters, the Journal of Computational Physics, the Journal of Mathematical Biology, the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Tissue Engineering, Biomedical Microdevices, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Expert Review of Anticancer Therapy, NeuroImage. Dr. Cristini is also an editor for four journals in the fields of bioengineering and nanotechnology and a guest editor for NeuroImage.
For important theoretical and computational studies of droplet breakup in laminar and turbulent flows, Dr. Cristini received the prestigious "Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics" (American Physical Society, 2000). His breakthrough paper "Nonlinear simulation of tumor necrosis, neovascularization and tissue invasion via an adaptive finite-element/level-set method" (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 2005) is a New Hot Paper in the field of Mathematics (source: Thomson-Scientific Essential Science Indicators 2006), where it is in the top 0.1 percentile of citations. His article "An integrated computational/experimental model of tumor invasion" (Cancer Research, 2006) was selected to appear in the Cancer Research Highlights, Feb 1 2006: "Simulation model predicts tumor invasion in marginal environmental conditions."
Dr. Cristini has graduated 3 PhD students in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics, and several master and BS students. Four of his students have received honors and awards for their theses. Dr. Cristini's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the State of California, the State of Texas, Orqis Medical, Dekk-Tec, and Merck.
