CONTACT INFORMATION

Corina S. Drapaca, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics
Member, Penn State Center for Neural Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
212 Earth-Engineering Sciences Building, office 307D
University Park, PA 16802, USA
Phone: 814-867-2313
E-mail: csd12@psu.edu

DEGREES WITH FIELDS, INSTITUTION AND DATE

B.S. in Mathematics-Mechanics, Faculty of Mathematics - University of Bucharest, Romania, 1995.
M.S. in Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics - University of Bucharest, Romania, 1996.
Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics - University of Waterloo, Canada, 2002.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

1996-1997: Teaching Assistant, Institute of Civil Engineering and Faculty of Mathematics, Bucharest.
1997-2002: Teaching and Research Assistant, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
2002-2004: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Radiology, University of California in San Francisco.
2004-2005: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
2005-2006: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, Mayo Clinic.
2007 - present: Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Pennsylvania State University.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

MATHEMATICAL MEDICINE:

Brain Neuro-mechanics (coupling the biochemistry and biomechanics of the brain)
Continuum Mechanics (new theoretical and analytical methods for studying soft biological tissues)
Computational Mechanics (numerical methods for non-linear heat equation, reaction-diffusion equation, coupled hyperbolic-parabolic system of equations using finite difference, finite element, and generalized finite element methods)
Medical Image Processing (segmentation, registration, denoising/deblurring techniques)
Elastography and Inverse Problems
Tumor Classification and Growth Modeling

PUBLICATIONS

O.Veledar, C.S. Drapaca, Brain Stiffness Analysis from Medical Images of Brains with Chiari Malformations, in preparation.

A. Palocaren, C.S. Drapaca, Elastography based on Image Mass Spectroscopy: A Study, in preparation.

C.S. Drapaca, S. Sivaloganathan, The Fractional Model of Continuum Mechanics, to be submitted.

D. Engels, A.E. Segall, C. Drapaca, Technical Note: An Inverse Solution for Determining Nonlinear Thermophysical Properties, submitted to International Journal of Applied Mechanics.

C.S. Drapaca, A Novel Mechanical Model for Magnetic Resonance Elastography, submitted to Revue Roumanie des Sciences Techniques serie de Mechanique Apliquee (invited paper).

R.I. Rosca, C.S. Drapaca, Direct and Inverse Problems for the Eversion of a Spherical Shell, submitted to the Proceedings of the Romanian Academy - Series A: Mathematics, Physics, Technical Sciences, Information Science.

J.Fritz, C.S. Drapaca, A Triphasic Mechano-Electrochemical Model of Brain Neuro-Mechanics: Application to Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus, to appear in the Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference in Computational Mechanics and Virtual Engineering COMEC2009 (refereed conference paper).

J. Fritz, C.S. Drapaca, A Study of the Effect of the Pulsatile Ventricular Pressure in the Development of Hydrocephalus, to appear in the Proceedings of the The 3rd International Conference in Computational Mechanics and Virtual Engineering COMEC2009 (refereed conference paper).

K.P. Wilkie, C.S. Drapaca, S. Sivaloganathan, A Theoretical Study of the Effect of Intraventricular Pulsations on the Pathogenesis of Hydrocephalus, to appear in Applied Mathematics and Computation.

D. Aruliah, R.D. Donaldson, C.S. Drapaca, G. Lewis, A. Sanchez, V. Takeva-Volkov, Constitutive Models for Tumor Classification, Proceedings of the OCCAM-Fields-MITACS Biomedical Problem Solving Workshop 2009.

D.L. Andre, B. Shanmugasundaram, C. Drapaca, B. Gluckman, Mechanisms Determining Safety and Performance of Brain Stimulating Electrodes, to appear in the Proceedings of the 31st Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (refereed conference paper).

R.I. Rosca, C.S. Drapaca, Direct and Inverse Problems for the Eversion of a Spherical Shell, to appear in the Proceedings of SISOM 2009 and Session of the Commission of Acoustics (refereed conference paper).

D. Engels, A.E. Segall, C. Drapaca, Inverse Analysis of Thermal States from Transient Histories with Nonlinear Thermophysical Properties, to appear in the Proceedings of PVP 2009 (refereed conference paper).

C.S. Drapaca, A Nonlinear Total Variation-Based Denoising Method with Two Regularization Parameters, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol.56, no.3 (2009): 582-586.

C.S. Drapaca, A New Multi-scale Model for Magnetic Resonance Elastography, Proceedings of SISOM 2008 and Session of the Commission of Acoustics, pp.66-70 (refereed conference paper).

C.S. Drapaca, S. Sivaloganathan, G. Tenti, Non-Linear Constitutive Laws in Viscoelasticity, Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids, vol.12, no.5 (2007): 475-501.

C.S. Drapaca, G. Tenti, K. Rohlf, S. Sivaloganathan, A Quasilinear Viscoelastic Constitutive Equation for the Brain: Application to Hydrocephalus, Journal of Elasticity, vol.85, no.1 (2006): 65-83.

C. Studholme, C.S. Drapaca, B. Iordanova, V. Cardenas, Deformation Based Mapping of Volume Change from Serial Brain MRI in the Presence of Local Tissue Contrast Change, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol.25, no.5 (2006): 626-639.

C.S. Drapaca, V. Cardenas, C. Studholme, Segmentation of Tissue Boundary Evolution from Brain MR Image Sequences using Multi-phase Level Sets, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, vol.100, issue 3 (2005): 312-329.

C.S. Drapaca, G. Tenti, S. Sivaloganathan, J.M. Drake, Dynamical Morphology of the Brain’s Ventricular Cavities in Hydrocephalus, Journal of Theoretical Medicine, vol.6, no.3 (2005): 151-160.

C. Studholme, C.S. Drapaca, V. Cardenas, M. Weiner, Challenges and Progress Toward Quantitative Deformation Morphometry of Gyral Anatomy, ISBI 2004: 599-602.

C.S. Drapaca, V. Cardenas, C. Studholme, Robust Space-Time Extraction of Ventricular Surface Evolution using Multi-Phase Level Sets, Medical Imaging 2004: Image Processing, Proceedings of SPIE, vol.5370 (2004): 538-548.

C.S. Drapaca, The Motion of a Viscous Incompressible Fluid with Free Surface through an Elastic Pipe, Annals of the University of Bucharest, Mathematics XLVI (1997): 21-26.

C.S. Drapaca, An Application of the Korteweg-De Vries Equation, Annals of the University of Bucharest, Mathematics - Informatics, Special Issue, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Faculty of Mathematics, November 28-30, 1996, XLVI (1997): 121-126.