Temple University is among four schools selected as part of a massive Department of Defense research grant—among the largest in university history—researching brain trauma and how blasts affect it. And one veteran engineering professor will help lead the effort.

Temple University is among four schools selected as part of a massive Department of Defense research grant—among the largest in university history—researching brain trauma and how blasts affect it. And one veteran engineering professor will help lead the effort.

Dr. Kurosh Darvish has developed an expertise on brain trauma, having co-authored multiple papers on the subject. The associate professor of mechanical engineering has studied the effects of brain injuries through sports and blasts. Working with primary investigator Dr. T. Dianne Langford in neuroscience and other faculty in the Katz School of Medicine and College of Public Health, Dr. Darvish looks to recreate high blast situations to better analyze their impact and understand how people get injured.

"We want better models to predict injuries," he said of the two-year project. "My work is about biomechanical models of traumatic brain injury and testing them. One of the main goals in biomechanics of injury is to replicate what happens during trauma in a controlled lab environment. We try to create reality-based experiments of what happens, involving high accelerations and high pressures. That's why the tests are elaborate. We need safety precautions!"

Key to this replication process is creating high-velocity collisions. Dr. Darvish's lab currently employs some major pieces of equipment for this project. Blast injuries are studied utilizing shock tubes and acceleration injuries are created using a linear sled. The lab uses a blast rate shear device to test brain tissue in conditions similar to blast explosions. As part of this grant, Dr. Darvish is building a room-sized shock tube, measuring 25-feet in length.

Dr. Darvish and his team look to provide more insight on brain trauma and ways to protect people from it in various activities, from safer helmets in sports to stronger body armor in combat. So far, the research has yielded interesting results.

"We're able to test the impacts on brain tissue at higher rates than was done before," Dr. Darvish said. "It shows interesting results. We get some behavior that we didn't know before. When a head is hit, the brain gets deformed. One thing that's important is how the information of deformation goes through. It is like a wave and it takes some time for this information to go through and there are reflections of waves. Imagine sound waves and how they echo. It's the same idea. We're able to understand the speed of that propagation better than what we did before and how the wave changes as it goes through. This knowledge will help us to understand brain trauma better and build more effective safety devices."