About
Dr. Fafalis has joined the Drexel faculty in 2020 after a postdoctoral fellowship in Mechanical Engineering with Professor Jeffrey Kysar at Columbia University. As a postdoctoral research scientist, Dr. Fafalis worked on a biomedical engineering project to design high precision micro-needles for the diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss disorders. Specifically, he worked on the mechanical characterization of the round window membrane tissue and its constitutive modeling. He also developed numerical models and computer simulations of the diffusion of therapeutic agents delivered by microneedles into the cochlea through the round window membrane. Dr. Fafalis completed his doctoral studies in Computational Mechanics under the supervision of Professor Jacob Fish at Columbia University in 2017. As part of that team, Dr. Fafalis pioneered a multiscale mathematical and computational model that predicts the behavior and performance of synthetic materials under extreme stress conditions.