Congratulations to Atieh Moridi on being selected as the 2022 Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Scholars Award winner for the Manufacturing Category.
Atieh Moridi earned her Ph.D. (cum laude) in Mechanical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2015; served as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering Departments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2015 and 2018; and has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University since 2019. Dr. Moridi’s proposal addresses a number of the challenges to personalized medicine, in which treatments can be tailored to the individual needs of each patient. In particular, in a customized-materials–reliant field like orthopedics, which has stringent regulatory oversight and requires high-quality, defect-free parts, these challenges include the inability for current implants to mimic the structure and mechanical properties of the bone, inaccurate anatomical fitting that adversely affects surgical placement of the devices, and limited restoration of the biological function of the remaining bone surrounding the implant. One field that is expected to play a growing role in the evolution of materials that will enable more personalized medical treatment is Additive Manufacturing (AM). The ease of design customization and the achievable structural complexity via AM could present the solution to unanswered materials issues in orthopedics. Unlocking the full potential of AM requires addressing a number of fundamental challenges including process stability, part quality and reproducibility. Dr. Moridi’s research aims to improve the quality of AM by developing a new paradigm for real-time detection of process anomalies by “listening” and “watching” the AM process using acoustic emissions and synchrotron X-ray imaging. She proposes to use machine learning to correlate physics-based insights from sophisticated X-ray imaging experiments to simpler, low-cost, and scalable acoustic emission signals. Having such a reliable technology for qualification of parts as they are printed is critical for one-off printing of patient-specific implants and provides a new paradigm for affordable, personalized healthcare. Through her collaboration with the Center for Advanced Materials and Engineering in Orthopedics (CAMEO) at the Hospital for Special Surgery, her research discoveries promise to be translated into clinically relevant applications, ultimately impacting real patients.
She has an excellent publication record for someone at this stage of her career, with 13 peer-reviewed journal articles (first author on 6 of these papers) and a sole-authored book. Her record shows an impressive citation count of 1345 and a Field Weighted Citation Index of over 2.5. She is Principal Investigator or Faculty Adviser on current grants totaling over $1,000,000.