Ender Finol, Ph.D.

Zachry Mechanical Engineering Department Endowed Chair

Professor and Chair, Mechanical Engineering

Ender Finol is a computational biomechanics scholar with a particular focus in biofluid mechanics, fluid mechanics modeling for medical applications, vascular biomechanics, design and optimization of intravascular medical devices, and medical image analysis.

He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in biofluid mechanics, cardiovascular bioengineering, biomechanics, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. He also manages the Vascular Biomechanics and Biofluids Laboratory at UTSA, which evaluates the role of blood flow and its relationship with disease by developing and applying computational, experimental and theoretical methods to evaluate vascular structures and assess their physiological environment in diseases and interventional scenarios.

Finol has been awarded more than $8 million in competitive grant funding from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, and other private funding agencies. He also serves as a reviewer for grant proposals submitted to the British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, the American Heart Association, and the National Institutes of Health.

With an h-index of 33 and over 3,800 citations, Finol’s research output is substantial. The author of 90+ peer-reviewed or refereed journal articles, Finol serves as the associate editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering and is on the editorial board of the Annals of Vascular Surgery. He serves as a reviewer for more than two dozen academic journals, including the Journal of Engineering in Medicine, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Journal of Medical Devices, to name a few. He is also a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and is a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Finol is also involved at UTSA outside of his research. In addition to his role as Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, he has served on many different committees at the college and department levels, including faculty review advisory committees, faculty search committees, and graduate student recruitment/review committees for mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. He has also served on university-wide committees such as the Conflict of Commitment Committee, the Graduate Council, the Committee on Conflict of Interest, Qualitative Literacy Committee, and the University Scholarship Committee.

Finol earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with an additional major in Biomedical & Heath Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad de Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela. Prior to joining UTSA in 2011, Finol was a research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.