Education:

• Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 2021
• M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 2019
• B.E., Mechanical Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, 2015

Background:

Karthik Menon is an Assistant Professor (starting January 2025) with a joint appointment in the Woodruff School and the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Menon graduated with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where his doctoral work focused on the flow physics of fluid-structure interactions and vortex-dominated flows. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Pediatrics and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. At Stanford, he worked on computational methods for accurate patient-specific cardio­vascular blood flow simulations and uncertainty quantification.

Research:

Menon’s broad research interests include fluid mechanics, computational modeling, and data-driven methods. His research aims to advance interdisciplinary technology in a wide range of healthcare, engineering and energy applications. Fluid dynamics is central to some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in these domains – such as personalized treatments for cardiovascular disease, extracting renewable energy from flowing water and wind, and developing bio-mimetic flying and swimming robots. Menon’s work tackles these challenges by uncovering new physics and combining high-performance computing with data-enabled techniques.

Cardiovascular flows: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death amongst men and women globally. In 2022, 1 person died roughly every 33 seconds from heart disease. Menon’s research focuses on improving the clinical management of cardiovascular disease by developing personalized computational simulation techniques for blood flow and biomechanics informed by patient-specific clinical measurements and imaging. In collaboration with cardiologists and surgeons, this research combines engineering principles with clinical expertise to develop novel and interdisciplinary solutions to clinical challenges and medical device design. Menon’s research fuses high-fidelity and reduced-order computational modeling with multi-modal clinical data and uncertainty quantification. He aims to develop accurate and predictive cardiovascular digital twins that will improve clinical outcomes by enabling us to non-invasively estimate clinical risk, plan personalized and optimal treatments, and predict disease progression.

Fluid-structure interactions: Fluid flows interact with flexible and moving bodies in a wide range of biological and engineering applications – from heart valves to bird flight. These applications feature complex physics, due to the interaction of vortices and the forces/pressure they induce on surfaces within the flow,  which play a key role in the dynamics. For example, fish leverage these interactions to form schools with hundreds of members, to enhance their swimming performance, and to sense their environment via pressure fluctuations. In the biomedical domain, native and prosthetic heart valves, which beat billions of times in the average lifetime, are strongly affected by vortices interacting with their leaflets and sinus walls. Menon’s research focuses on developing physics-based and data-enabled computational methods to dissect the physics of these problems. This research aims to advance sustainable and efficient aerospace and underwater technology, biomedical device design, and renewable energy.