Dr. Alain Kassab is a professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCF.  His primary research interests are in bio-engineering, computational heat transfer and fluid flow, inverse problems, boundary elements and meshless methods.  He has over 300 scientific publications including 108 journal papers, 218 refereed international and national archival conference papers, 3 books, and 9 invited chapters in research monographs, and 10 edited proceedings of international conferences. Professor Kassab has chaired or co-chaired 10 international conferences, and he is editor of 2 scientific journals and member of 3 journal editorial boards. He has mentored and supervised to graduation 17 PhD and 28 MS students.  He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Fellow of the Wessex Institute of Technology, and a UCF Pegasus Professor. He is the recipient of several teaching and research awards at UCF, including the 2000 UCF Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award.

He served as MAE Graduate Program Coordinator from 1996-2001 and again 2008-2015. Professor Kassab is currently Director of Biomedical Engineering for the MAE Department at UCF. He is the director of the Bioengineering Minor for the College of Engineering and Computer Science at UCF and was principal author of the MS in Biomedical Engineering Master Program that was established in Fall 2016 in the MAE Department. The program has produced its first 5 graduates in 2018 and currently has 25 enrolled and active graduate students.  He is currently leading a committee developing the PhD in Biomedical Engineering program proposal.

Professor Kassab currently leads a three-year study under the support of American Heart Association (AHA) Transformative Grant that is utilizing multi-scale Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling to investigate a novel surgical manoeuver aimed at reducing stroke risk in Left Ventricular Assist Devices by tailoring the outflow graft implantation. Over the past ten years, his research group has been engaged in a general program bridging engineering and medicine by utilizing computational modeling to aid in treatment planning of congenital heart disease. These studies include the investigation of the hemodynamics of a novel hybrid approach to the comprehensive Stage II operation for single ventricle, the design of a self-powered Fontan circulation, and the detailed hemodynamics resulting from a range of placement of shunts and varying diameters in the Hybrid Norwood palliation of single ventricle congenital heart disease.