Andrew D. McCulloch, Ph.D.
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Professor and Jacobs Distinguished Scholar |
Dr. Andrew McCulloch is Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine and Jacobs School Distinguished Scholar at the University of California San Diego, where he joined the faculty in 1987. He is member of the UCSD Institute for Engineering in Medicine, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a member of the UCSD Center for Research on Biological Systems. Dr. McCulloch is a Principal Investigator of the National Biomedical Computation Resource and Co-Director of the Cardiac Biomedical Science and Engineering Center at UCSD. He served as Vice Chair of the Bioengineering Department from 2002 to 2005 and Chair from 2005 to 2008. Dr. McCulloch is Director of the HHMI-NIBIB Interfaces Graduate Training Program and the accompanying UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Specialization in Multi-Scale Biology.
Dr. McCulloch was educated at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in Engineering Science and Physiology receiving his Ph.D. in 1986. Dr. McCulloch was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Bio-Medical Engineering Society, and is currently Associate Editor of PLoS Computational Biology and co-Editor-in-Chief of Drug Discovery Today: Disease Models. He is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology, Biophysical Journal and Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering and Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. He has given the Konrad Witzig Memorial Lecture and the Donald Wassenberg Memorial Lecture. Recently, he was elected a Fellow of the Cardiovascular Section of the American Physiological Society. He is also chair of the Physiome and Systems Biology Committee of the International Union of Physiological Sciences.
Dr. McCulloch’s lab uses experimental and computational models to investigate the relationships between the cellular and extracellular structure of cardiac muscle and the electrical and mechanical function of the whole heart during ventricular remodeling, heart failure and arrhythmia. Current interests include developing multi-scale models of myocyte excitation-contraction coupling mechanisms and their regulation by PKA and CaMKII. Dr. McCulloch's group has also scaled cellular level models of these processes up to the tissue and organ scales to investigate mechanisms of arrhythmias and ventricular dysfunction associated with targeted gene defects and congestive heart failure. Genetically engineered mice are an important model system for developing and validating these computational models. Important phenotyping techniques in the mouse include optical electrical mapping, isolated muscle mechanics testing and magnetic resonance imaging. The lab is also developing new methods to generate patient-specifc models of the failing heart for clinical use. A second major area of research in the lab has been the role of cytoskeletal and membrane proteins in cardiac myocyte mechanotransduction mechanisms and how defects in costameric and z-disk protein complexes can alter mechanotransduction and lead to dilated cardiomyopathy. The effects of stretch on myocyte membrane configuration and electrical conduction are also under investigation. Finally, we have been using Drosophila as a model system to explore hypoxia tolerance and susceptibility mechanisms in conjunction with metabolomics and metabolic network modeling.
Selected Presentations
Multi-Scale Modeling of the Heart, Monash University eSeminar, September 4th, 2008
Lecture on Cardiac Modeling Methods, Case Western, Nov 29th, 2007
Departmental Overview, UCSD, June 18th, 2007
US National Committee on Biomechanics, Keystone, CO, June 19th, 2007
Departmental Overview, UCSD, November 27th, 2007
ISCE '07 Meeting, Cancun, April 23rd, 2007
IMAG Consortium Meeting, April 11-12th, 2007
Slides and Movies
IT21, Seoul June 12th, 2012
Human ventricular muscle fibers
Sheet architecture
Electromechanical Model of Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy in a Failing Heart with Left Bundle Branch Block
Electromechanical Model of Failing Heart with Left Bundle Branch Block
Automated Measurement of Cardiac Function in the Fruit Fly Heart
MRI in a mouse heart
Tagged MRI in a Patient with Heart Failure
Beating Heart cells Derived from Human Stem Cells
Action Potential Propagation on the Rat LV Epicardium
Action Potential Propagation on the Mouse LV Epicardium
Rat myocyte monolayer action potential propagation
Mouse myocyte monolayer action potential propagation
MURPA seminar