Craven Enhances Baylor’s Biomedical Engineering Research

For a mechanical engineer, Brent Craven, Ph.D., sounds an awful lot like a medical professional (or even a cardiovascular surgeon). For this new Baylor professor whose research is focused on biomedical engineering, words like vasculature, hepatic flow distribution, and hemolysis are as common in his parlance as computational modeling and validation.  

Craven hit the ground running in his first semester as a professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science's Department of Mechanical Engineering. He’s currently juggling a Numerical Methods for Engineers class with a number of collaborative research projects with universities and hospitals around the country. In January 2026, he also was named director of biomedical engineering for ECS.

Many of these projects were initiated during his time working for the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). During his tenure there, Craven was focused on developing computational models for simulating the function of cardiovascular devices such as stents, heart valves, and ventricular assist devices. Companies seeking FDA approval for their devices would submit model simulations, and Craven's team was responsible for ensuring those models were actually credible.

But after more than ten years at the FDA, Craven felt drawn to make more of a clinical impact with his research. 

“That was what interested me in moving back to academia,” Craven said. Baylor’s Christian mission and its status as a growing R1 research university sealed the deal when figuring out where to land. Plus, he says, Baylor’s plans for growing biomedical engineering “closely aligned with my areas of interest. It’s a really good fit.”  

Heart-Centered Research

One of the things that drew Craven to biomedical engineering in the first place was the potential for helping patients like his nephew, who was born with a congenital heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. 

Because part of these patients’ hearts are non-functional, Craven said, as infants they must undergo multiple surgeries to change the blood flow around the heart. In the final surgery, called the Fontan procedure, “it's often not very clear how the blood needs to be rerouted in order to give them the best outcome,” Craven said. 

But cardiac surgeons are starting to show that they get better outcomes using computational modeling ahead of the surgery. These models can help them predict how to best reconfigure the vasculature around the heart to improve the efficiency of blood flow. 

That’s where Craven comes in. He is collaborating with a team at Boston Children's Hospital that has pioneered the use of computational modeling to plan surgeries for patients with congenital heart defects, including the use of computational fluid dynamics to plan Fontan procedures. 

For computational modeling to be trusted to inform clinical decisions, however, the simulations have to be accurate. Craven is using his expertise to help Boston’s team validate their simulations so they can be very confident that the results can be trusted.

While Craven’s nephew has already undergone the three required surgeries for his heart defect, Craven knows that this type of computational modeling could be very beneficial should his nephew ever need a “revision” surgery to correct any complications from the initial Fontan procedure. 

Additional Projects

Craven’s work with Boston Children’s Hospital is just one piece of his research puzzle. He is also continuing to work on better ways to verify and validate computational modeling — work that he began at the FDA — to ensure that simulations of medical devices (such as stents, heart valves, and artificial hearts) are trustworthy. 

“There’s still more work to be done in that area, and it’s very challenging,” said Craven, who serves as an associate editor for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Journal of Verification, Validation and Uncertainty Quantification.

He’s also currently winding down a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where he and colleagues from Penn State have been working to better understand acute ischemic stroke (which occurs when a blood clot becomes lodged in the brain). 

“We’re using computational modeling to try to understand how blood clots become lodged and how they can be removed more easily,” Craven said. 

He and his team are in the process of applying for a renewal of this grant so they can continue to make advances for stroke patients.

In another project, Craven is working with a Baylor engineering graduate student to develop a computational model to predict whether a cardiovascular device might damage blood. “Any time blood flows through a medical device, like a heart valve, an artificial heart, or a blood pump, red blood cells can be damaged,” Craven said. That damage can lead to the release of toxic hemoglobin into the bloodstream (a process called hemolysis). 

As a result, device developers need better computational tools to design cardiovascular devices that do not damage blood. 

“Right now, a lot of computational models that are used for predicting blood damage are not great,” Craven said. “But if we can more accurately predict hemolysis, we can reduce the number of laboratory experiments needed, and more quickly design safer devices.” 

In Silico Clinical Trials

One last research focus area is related to in silico clinical trials (i.e., in “silicon” computer chips) — or computational models that could replace human subjects in a real clinical trial for a new medical device. 

“This is still an emerging area, but it has a lot of interest and promise because of its potential impact,” Craven said. 

That impact could be reducing how many patients are potentially exposed to a therapy, or reducing the cost of very expensive trials for companies. 

But, of course, those in silico clinical trials have to be credible. “If you're going to replace patients in a trial with computational simulations, you need to make sure the simulations are accurate and you can get the same information that you would from a real clinical trial,” Craven said. He and his colleagues are working to ensure that’s the case. “We've developed a framework for how to perform an in silico clinical trial and how to validate the results,” Craven said (learn more about the approach in their 2024 Frontiers in Medicine article).  

The next step is to apply their framework to impact a real clinical trial. Craven is now working on a collaborative proposal to do just that for a cardiovascular medical device. “There's a huge potential payoff, if we can figure out how to do this,” he said.
That human-focused payoff seems to be a central theme in just about every project Craven’s working on. “The possibility of helping patients, and potentially family members, is really a motivating factor,” Craven said. And at Baylor, he’ll be able to continue to advance this work with the support of a major research university.