Ellen Roche

Ellen Roche is an Irish biomedical engineer and Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science. She has contributed to heart failure prevention with her inventions, the Harvard Ventricular Assist Device (HarVAD), a soft-robotic sleeve device that goes around the heart, squeezing and twisting it to maintain the heart’s functionality, and Therepi, a reservoir that attaches directly to damaged heart tissue. Early life and education Originally from Salthill, County Galway, Ellen Roche was 'torn between studying engineering and medicine' after leaving secondary school, so she enrolled in a biomedical engineering programme at National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). In her third year in college, Roche enrolled in a graduate export orientation programme at Mednova Ltd, and after spending six months at Mednova’s office in Galway, she transferred to Abbott Vascular in Redwood City, California, due to its acquisition of Mednova, where she worked for almost four years. Then she worked in Medtronic, Galway, as a research and development engineer. She worked on the development of a replacement aortic valve which was used in humans during her time at Medtronic. In 2004, Roche graduated from NUI Galway with a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering. She went on to complete a Masters in Bioengineering from Trinity College Dublin in 2010. In August 2011, Roche was one of two Irish recipients of the Fulbright International Science and Technology PhD Award, which awarded her funding to undertake a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Harvard Medical School. There she met David Mooney, a Professor of Bioengineering, and Conor Walsh, a Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Under the guidance of Mooney in the Mooney Lab and Walsh in the Harvard Biodesign Lab, she performed research on the design, modeling, experimentation, and pre-clinical evaluation of a soft-robotic device that helps patients with heart failure. Roche returned to NUIG as a post-doctoral research fellow under Peter McHugh, where she used computational methods (finite element analysis) to analyze drug release kinetics from implantable devices.