Miranda Wang

Miranda Wang is a graduate student in medical engineering and medical physics studying how mechanical forces drive disease progression in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the most common inherited heart condition and a leading cause of sudden death in young adults. She integrates engineered cardiac microtissues with controlled mechanical perturbations and MATLAB-based computational pipelines to quantify cardiomyocyte structure and function across multiple genetic backgrounds and loading conditions. Rather than accepting convenient but imperfect models, she is independently generating isogenic iPSC lines harboring defined HCM mutations through CRISPR genome editing, establishing the rigor necessary to definitively attribute observed effects to specific mutations. As a MathWorks Fellow, she will expand her automated image analysis and traction force microscopy workflows to systematically identify mechanosensitive signaling pathways dysregulated across HCM variants. Miranda’s research could reshape treatment approaches by uncovering new druggable targets for HCM through establishing how mechanical stress couples with sarcomeric mutations to alter cellular function.