Ellen Kuhl

Ellen Kuhl is the Walter B. Reinhold Professor in the School of Engineering and Robert Bosch Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, Bioengineering. Kuhl is known for her research on Living Matter Physics, the design of theoretical and computational models to simulate and predict the behavior of living systems including the human brain and the living heart.

Research
Kuhl's research integrates physics-based modeling with machine learning and creates interactive simulation tools to understand, explore, and predict the dynamics of living systems. She has pioneered theories and algorithms for the growth of living systems, and applies these theories to brain development, brain damage, neurodegeneration, Alzheimer's disease, tissue expansion, heart failure, dilated and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her lab was among the first to use data-driven modeling to integrate classical epidemiology modeling and machine learning to infer critical disease parameters, in real time, from reported data to make informed predictions and guide political decision making. This work gained recognition during a legal challenge of the Newfoundland travel ban and in a study of superspreading events on college campuses.

Awards and honors
Kuhl is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2010, was selected as Midwest Mechanics Seminar Speaker in 2014, and received the Humboldt Research Award in 2016 and the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award in 2021.

Personal life
Kuhl is an All American triathlete. She ran the New York City Marathon in 2009, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, the Zurich Marathon in 2011, the San Francisco Marathon in 2013, the Chicago Marathon in 2017, and the Boston Marathon annually since 2018. She competed in three Ironmans and ten 70.3s, including the 2019, 2022, 2023 Ironman World Championship in Kona and the 2021 Ironman 70.3 World Championship and Ironman World Championship in St. George.

Selected publications

 * Alber M, Buganza Tepole A, Cannon W, De S, Dura-Bernal S, Garikipati K, Karniadakis G, Lytton WW, Perdikaris P, Petzold L, Kuhl E. Integrating machine learning and multiscale modeling: Perspectives, challenges, and opportunities in the biological, biomedical, and behavioral sciences. npj Digital Medicine; 2019; 2:115..
 * Baillargeon B, Rebelo N, Fox DD, Taylor RL, Kuhl E. The Living Heart Project: A robust and integrative simulator for human heart function. Eur J Mech A/Solids. 2014;48:38-47.
 * Budday S, Nay R, de Rooij R, Steinmann P, Wyrobek T, Ovaert TC, Kuhl E. Mechanical properties of gray and white matter brain tissue by indentation. J Mech Behavior Biomed Mat. 2015;46:318-330.
 * Budday S, Sommer G, Hayback J, Steinmann P, Holzapfel GA, Kuhl E. Rheological characterization of human brain tissue. Acta Biomat. 2017; 60:315-329.
 * Goriely A, Geers MGD, Holzapfel GA, Jayamohan J, Jerusalem A, Sivaloganathan S, Squier W, van Dommelen JAW, Waters S, Kuhl E. Mechanics of the brain: Perspectives, challenges, and opportunities. Biomech Mod Mechanobio. 2015;14:931-965.
 * Kuhl E. Biophysics: Unfolding the brain. Nature Physics. 2016;12:533-534.
 * Kuhl E. Connectomics of neurodegeneration. Nat Neurosci. 2019; 22:1200–1202.
 * Kuhl E. Computational Epidemiology: Data-Driven Modeling of COVID-19, Springer Nature, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-82889-9.
 * Linka K, Peirlinck M, Sahli Costabal F, Kuhl E. Outbreak dynamics of COVID-19 in Europe and the effect of travel restrictions. Comp Meth Biomech Biomed Eng; 2020; 23:710-717.
 * Linka K, Peirlinck M, Kuhl E. The reproduction number of COVID-19 and its correlation with public health interventions. Comp Mech. 2020; 66:1035-1050.
 * Peirlinck M, Linka K, Sahli Costabal F, Kuhl E. Outbreak dynamics of COVID-19 in China and the United States. Biomech Model Mechanobio; 2020; 19:2179-2193.
 * Peirlinck M, Sahli Costabal F, Yao J, Guccione JM, Tripathy S, Wang Y, Ozturk D, Segars P, Morrison TM, Levine S, Kuhl E. Precision medicine in human heart modeling. Perspectives, challenges and opportunities. Biomech Model Mechanobio. 2021; 20:803-831.
 * Sahli Costabal F, Yang Y, Perdikaris P, Hurtado DE, Kuhl E. Physics-informed neural networks for cardiac activation mapping. Front Phys. 2020; 8:42.
 * Schafer A, Peirlinck M, Linka K, Kuhl E. Bayesian physics-based modeling of tau propagation in Alzheimer's disease. Front Physiology. 2021; 12:702975.