03.06.16 - Dr.-Walter-Seipp-Award 2015 to Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schmidt

At TU Dresden the Commerzbank dissertation Prices and the Dr.-Walter-Seipp-Prize were awarded on June 3rd, 2016, for outstanding dissertations of young scientists of TU Dresden. This year the Dr.-Walter-Seipp-Prize, coming with a prize money of 4000 Euro which are donated by the Commerzbank Foundation, was awareded to Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schmidt. He received his doctor's degree at the Institute of Mechanics and Shell Structures of the Faculty of Civil Engineering on "Modeling the biomechanics of arterial walls under supra-physiological loading" in June, 2015.

In medicine, cardiovascular diseases as cause of death number one in western nations have unfolded a vivid research activity. These have in particular the aim to improve the diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerotic arteries. In this context, the numerical simulation of overstretched arterial walls becomes very important in medicine. While the application of computational methods is rather standard in engineering, in the medical community they are rarely used because of the lack of suitable material models for the highly complex biological tissues. In his dissertation, Thomas Schmidt developed mathematical models to describe the damage behavior and applied them successfully in computer simulations of diseased arterial walls. He also went beyond traditional approaches, by including scattered material properties to obtain statements about potential failure probabilities.