Question: What would you consider to be your greatest success in using your skills to solve an engineering problem?

Fiona Malone answered on 2 Mar 2020:

My greatest success is probably my PhD. I studied strokes for my PhD. A stroke happens when not enough oxygen gets to the brain. A lot of the time, strokes can be caused by blood clots, but doctors and surgeons don’t know why some clots cause strokes and some don’t. I used 3D printing to build real life models of blood vessels that travel from a patient’s heart to their head. I then released man-made blood clots into the vessels to track where they go. My work showed doctors that smaller clots were more likely to cause a stroke than larger ones. My work also showed that having an irregular heartbeat like atrial fibrillation or heart palpitations increases your risk of having a stroke by 25%, which is huge!! I was also able to show doctors and surgeons that deal with strokes everyday how the clot moves around in a patient, which was really cool!