Our Mission
The Digital Heart Research Group — part of the Engineering Medicine Research Group at the Medical School of Nanjing University — works at the intersection of computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and cardiovascular medicine.
Our research themes — from ion channels to patient-specific digital twins of the heart.
What we do
We build digital twins of the human heart — biophysically detailed, anatomically realistic, and patient-specific computational models — and use them to understand and treat cardiac arrhythmias.
Our work spans:
- Multi-scale, multi-physics modeling of cardiac electrophysiology and electromechanics, from ion channels to the whole organ.
- Patient-specific digital twins constructed from CT/MRI imaging and clinical data, for virtual clinical trials and personalized therapy planning (e.g., catheter ablation).
- AI-accelerated simulation: deep-learning surrogate models and causal-inference methods that make high-throughput, clinically useful modeling possible.
- Mechanistic insight into arrhythmogenesis and the screening of anti-arrhythmic drugs and cardiotoxicity.
Our goal is to bring to medicine the level of predictive impact that computational modeling has long had in engineering.
Who we are looking for
We welcome trainees from diverse educational backgrounds. Cardiac digital-twin research is inherently interdisciplinary — we have benefited enormously from people trained in:
- Computer science, electronic & information engineering, biomedical engineering
- Physics, applied mathematics, mechanical engineering
- Physiology, pharmacology, cardiology, and other life-science disciplines
- Clinical medicine
What matters most is curiosity, rigor, and a willingness to learn across fields. If any of the following excites you, we would love to hear from you:
- Heart digital twins and complex-system modeling of disease
- Deep-learning surrogate models for physics-based simulators
- Causal inference for mechanistic understanding of disease
- Virtual / augmented reality for clinical and scientific applications
- High-performance computing for biomedical simulation
We recruit at all levels — postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. and master’s students, research assistants, visiting students, and undergraduates.
Interested? See the Join page or email hni (at) nju.edu.cn.