Martin Pfaller

Dr. Pfaller specializes in the computational modeling of the heart and cardiovascular system. He develops numerical methods for simulating the mechanical behavior of heart tissue, the fluid dynamics of blood flow, and the long-term adaptation of living tissue. His work has applications in understanding and predicting heart disease progression and optimizing medical device design.

• NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2022-2027)
• Instructor K Award Support, Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute (2022-2024)
• Dissertation Award, Association of German Engineers (2019)
• Student Council Teaching Awards, Technical University of Munich (2016, 2017)

• Richter J, Nitzler J, Pegolotti L, Menon K, Biehler J, Wall WA, Schiavazzi DE, Marsden AL, Pfaller MR. Bayesian Windkessel calibration using optimized 0D surrogate models, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2025. DOI
• Pfaller MR, Latorre M, Schwarz EL, Gerosa FM, Szafron JM, Humphrey JD, Marsden AL. FSGe: A fast and strongly-coupled 3D fluid-solid-growth interaction method, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 2024. DOI
• Gebauer AM, Pfaller MR, Braeu FA, Cyron CJ, Wall WA. A homogenized constrained mixture model of cardiac growth and remodeling: Analyzing mechanobiological stability and reversal, Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology, 2023. DOI
• Pfaller MR, Pham J, Verma A, Pegolotti L, Wilson NM, Parker DW, Yang W, Marsden AL. Automated generation of 0D and 1D reduced-order models of patient-specific blood flow, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 2022. DOI (cover)
• Pfaller MR, Hörmann JM, Weigl M, Nagler A, Chabiniok R, Bertoglio C, Wall WA. The importance of the pericardium for cardiac biomechanics: From physiology to computational modeling, Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology, 2019. DOI