How Biomechanics Can Help Prevent Tissue Injury: My Journey to PELVITRACK - By Baptiste Pierrat

I have always been fascinated by how things work: mechanisms, electronic devices, computers, even the universe itself. This curiosity is what naturally led me toward science and engineering. My first real step into research happened during my master’s internship at the PROMES laboratory in the Pyrenees. High in the mountains, researchers there use giant parabolic mirrors to concentrate sunlight and reach extreme temperatures to test materials for space applications. It was my first glimpse of experimental research: formulating a hypothesis, designing experiments, analysing results, and iterating. I also discovered that “tinkering” could be a legitimate part of a scientific career, and that people were actually paid to do it.

I continued with a PhD at Mines Saint-Étienne, studying the biomechanical effects of knee braces. That is when I realised that applying mechanical engineering to living tissues could directly benefit clinical practice. After the PhD, I specialised further in the mechanics of soft biological tissues during a postdoctoral stay at University College Dublin. There, I developed experimental devices to measure the local mechanical properties of brain tissue, knowledge that is essential for understanding and ultimately preventing traumatic brain injuries.

After two years in Ireland, in 2016, I got a position at Mines Saint-Étienne and gradually built my own research activities, closely connected to industrial and clinical partners. I worked on simulations of endovascular devices for treating aortic and brain aneurysms, on the biomechanics of the abdominal wall after hernia repair, and on the rupture mechanisms in arterial tissue to better understand the onset of arterial dissection. This research quickly became strongly collaborative. Modern biomechanics sits at the intersection of many fields: mechanics, biology, imaging, medicine, and no single researcher can master all of them. These interactions are one of the most rewarding aspects of my job. Collaboration also means helping form the next generation of scientists: accompanying PhD students as they gain skills, confidence, and autonomy has become a meaningful and motivating part of my work.

As these projects expanded, so did the need for numerical modelling (what many now call “digital twins”). In biomechanics, experiments and simulations go hand in hand, especially since experiments on humans are understandably limited - I still haven’t found any volunteers willing to donate a piece of their arteries for testing 🙂

All of this brought me to my current involvement in Pelvitrack, a project focusing on damage and rupture of perineal tissues during childbirth. Perineal tears are common, have major consequences for women’s health, and yet remain surprisingly understudied (can you guess why?). 

Our first step is to work with animal tissues to understand how microstructure and composition influence mechanical behaviour. From these data, we aim to develop a computational model of childbirth, a tool that could help evaluate protective techniques and ultimately contribute to reducing perineal tears.

In the end, what continues to drive me is the same curiosity that brought me into research: understanding how things work and using that understanding to improve human health.