Matthew Maltese, PhD

Dr. Matthew Maltese is the Director of Biomechanics Research in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a Senior Fellow of CHOP's Center for Injury Research and Prevention, as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He has 20 years of experience in bioengineering as it pertains to medicine and injury, with the past 10 years focused on pediatric bioengineering of medical devices in the critical care setting and in the care of patients with traumatic injury. Dr. Maltese in 1994 received a BS from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (Mechanical Engineering), in 2003 a MS from Johns Hopkins University (Mechanical Engineering), and in 2012 a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (Bioengineering). For the past five years, he has advised or co-advised bioengineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering senior design teams from Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. The two most recent senior design projects were focused on pediatric medical device developments, including a numerical algorithm to estimate pediatric temporal aortic pressure from thoracic deformation waveforms during CPR, and a refined pediatric bag-mask ventilation system with optimized flow-inflating technology. Dr. Maltese’s expertise is in occupant biomechanics in motor vehicle crashes, with particular emphasis on pediatric traumatic brain injury, thoracic biomechanics, and anthropomorphic test device biofidelity (human-like). His specific research interests include scaling brain injury thresholds between the infant, toddler and pre-adolescent human, and the development of validated pediatric finite element brain models to simulate traumatic brain injury in the pre-adolescent human. Prior to joining CHOP, Dr. Maltese served as a Mechanical Engineer at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Dr. Maltese’s interest is in understanding the functional relationship between high-rate deformation of CNS tissue and subsequent injury including traumatic axonal injury and cerebral blood flow disruptions in 6- to 10-year old children. Rotation-induced cerebral strains in an in vivo animal model are estimated by finite element analysis, and spatially correlated with histological reports of axonal injury. His research focuses on all aspects of pediatric bioengineering, on such topics as translating traumatic brain injury mechanism paradigms from adults to children, development of medical devices to enhance pediatric resuscitation and critical care, and design of biofidelic pediatric crash test dummies. As a faculty member in both a medical school and biomedical engineering school, Dr. Maltese trains physicians and engineers.  He directs biomechanics research in the clinical and laboratory research setting and is the Executive Director of an FDA-funded consortium to develop pediatric medical devices. His research is funded by federal and industry grants and is widely published, and he is a frequent invited speaker at academic and industry venues worldwide. View a list of Dr. Maltese’s publications here.