Mini profile: James Moore

Professor James E Moore Jr is a Professor at Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, and one of College's newest members of staff.

The Bagrit and Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Medical Device Design, he received a chilly welcome to the UK, arriving in London from Texas A&M University on New Year’s Eve.

What are your research interests?

My training is as a mechanical engineer, but I’ve been doing nothing but biomechanics research since I was a student. Most of that time has been spent looking at blood flow patterns and how they relate to disease formation and treatment, which is actually a research subject that goes back pretty far here at Imperial. Some of my heroes have been working here since the 1960s on arterial fluid mechanics so in that sense I’m very proud to be part of this place now.

What sort of work do you expect to be doing at Imperial?

We’re looking to set up a new masters here in biomedical device design and entrepreneurship. I’ve been giving seminars in this area for a long time, so to have a whole degree programme here at Imperial is very exciting. It’s a great place for something like this. If you look at the environment, there’s a fantastic engineering school, a world-class medical school and the hospitals attached to it, all in close geographical proximity to entrepreneurs. It’s a great city for this kind of thing.

You’ve just been granted a prestigious Wolfson award for your work in “vascular biomechanics and medical device development”. Was it in recognition of your career achievements so far?

I like to think it’s something that rewards potential for doing more. I would be uncomfortable getting something this prestigious if it were just for stuff that I’d already done. The opportunity here is what excites me and I think what has been recognised is the potential to develop devices which can improve patient care, which is the real point of our research. As an example, I worked on stents in the early days of stenting in the mid-90s, when these things were first coming out on the market. That work continues now, and these days we’re looking in particular at modelling biodegradable stents.

On a light-hearted note, I noticed that your page at Texas A&M University is a Simpsons homage. Is there a particular reason for that?

I always put my students in charge of the website, and that was one they came up with several years ago. So it’s a little dated, but it’s cute and on the front page you have Marge and Homer with their lymphatic system explained. I like the Simpsons and I was pleased my students did that - you don’t often get the lymphatic system explained in cartoons. We’ll see what happens with my website here!