Mohammad Mofrad started his mechanical engineering career studying fire. Now he focuses that passion for mechanics into curing humanity’s greatest ailments.

Mofrad, an assistant professor of bioengineering at U. California-Berkeley, examines how physical forces interact with living systems on a cellular level within the cellular biomechanics field.

“As a mechanical engineer by training, I always have a mechanical eye on phenomena I encounter in nature, and nothing captured my eye better than the cell,” he said in an e-mail. “You can see the beauty and the beast of nature in the cell. It has an unending mine of important engineering and scientific questions that you can wrestle with, and every little contribution you make toward the understanding of this field has double blessings; you enjoy the science and engineering of it, but also feel that you are eventually making a little step toward tackling a human disease.”

Although biomechanics dates back to Galileo Galilei, researchers have only recently been able to delve deeper into the area thanks to modern microscopy and experimental technologies.

“Francis Crick and Arthur Hughes eloquently articulated (that) if we were compelled to suggest a model of the cell, we would propose Mother’s Work Basket – a jumble of beads and buttons of all shapes and sizes, with pins and threads for good measure, all jostling about and held together by colloidal forces,” Mofrad said in an e-mail. “Some 60 years later, our understanding hasn’t changed. The field of cell mechanics is focused on defining these beads and buttons, pins and threads, and how they come together and interact.”

In his lab, Mofrad and his students are looking at cellular biomechanics as it relates to human diseases, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS. Atherosclerosis – the build-up of plaque in arteries and the leading killer in the United States – is an overarching interest in Mofrad’s research. By looking at the condition from a mechanical perspective, he noticed that it does not occur randomly in the body but rather at specific sites, such as curved arteries and smaller, branching arteries. He believes that mechanical factors contribute to the disease’s development.

In addition, Mofrad built a model of the aortic heart valve that he hopes will allow researchers to predict the calcification of one of the major tissues in the aortic valve.

“We’re trying to go where experiments cannot go,” Mofrad said.

This interest in diseases began when he interacted with patients on a personal level during his fellowship at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

“That’s why I do these fundamental projects, but at the same time I always have a disease project; I always have one foot in the fundamental and have a disease project going on so I stay in touch with reality,” he said.