Ileana Pirozzi

Bio

Ileana Pirozzi, from Santa Maria a Vico / Colleferro, Italy, is an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University School of Engineering. Ileana is also a graduate of the Stanford School of Medicine and Stanford School of Engineering, where she earned her PhD in Bioengineering as a Knight-Hennessy (KH) Scholar. As part of the KH program, Ileana completed three years of global leadership training. In fulfillment of her PhD work, Ileana led a variety of projects to push the next generation of smart medical devices to prevent and treat heart failure. Her clinical focus is congestive heart failure and congenital heart disease, and her engineering approach includes biomimetic device design leveraging computational modeling, optimization techniques and soft robotics. Ileana is also interested in exploring novel approaches integrating AI and sensing for improved patient monitoring and long-term care.

Ileana earned a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering and biomedical engineering from Brown University. She was also a research intern at the NASA Ames Research Center and at the Tripathi Biomedical Engineering Lab at Brown. She was elected President of the Rhode Island Alpha Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the National Engineering Honors Society. Additionally, she was named a Vincent and Ruby DiMase Research Fellow at Brown’s School of Engineering and was a recipient of the Domenico Ionata Award for excellence in research and creativity in engineering, the Outstanding Senior in Biomedical Engineering Award, the Distinguished Thesis Prize and the K.T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award. With a team of Brown University and RISD students, Ileana developed an implantable medical device for use in cardiopulmonary bypass surgeries. Further development of the device was pursued through a startup company under the name of EmboNet. The company was awarded several national and international prizes and grant awards.