Alison Marsden

Alison Marsden is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases at Stanford University, with joint appointments in Pediatrics (Cardiology) and Bioengineering, and a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering. She previously held faculty positions at UC San Diego (2007–2015) and completed her postdoctoral training in Bioengineering and Pediatric Cardiology at Stanford (2005–2007). Her research integrates computational modeling, medical device design, and clinical translation to address congenital heart disease and cardiovascular hemodynamics.

Education:

• BSE in Mechanical Engineering, Princeton University (1998)
• MSE in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University (2000)
• PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University (2005)

Research focuses on numerical methods for cardiovascular blood flow simulation, optimization of medical devices, and mechanobiological processes in congenital heart defects. Her lab develops open-source software like SimVascular and collaborates on clinical trials for pediatric heart surgery. Recent work includes bioprinted vascular grafts, hemodynamic predictors of aneurysm growth, and computational tools for arrhythmia prediction.

Key awards include the NSF CAREER Award (2011), Van C. Mow Medal (2023), and multiple teaching/mentorship recognitions. She serves on editorial boards for leading journals in biomechanics and chairs the Fontan Outcome Registry using CMR Examinations (FORCE) initiative.

Advising and grants: Supervises graduate students in bioengineering and mechanical engineering; secures funding from NSF, NIH, and private foundations. Over 160 peer-reviewed publications demonstrate her leadership in cardiovascular computational modeling.

Labs/Teams: Director of the Cardiovascular Biomechanics Computation Lab, co-founder of the SimVascular open-source project, and collaborator on interdisciplinary teams in pediatric cardiology and biomedical engineering.