POTSDAM – A City University of New York Distinguished Professor of Biomedical & Mechanical Engineering Emeritus Sheldon Weinbaum will speak Friday about an engineering approach to vulnerable plaque rupture, the largest cause of cardiovascular death in the United States.

Roughly 60 percent of all cardiovascular deaths in the U.S. are caused by the sudden rupture of a fibrous cap that covers a lipid pool or necrotic core in coronary arteries. Why some caps rupture and others do not is probably the single most important unanswered question in treating acute coronary artery disease.

Clinicians for several decades have attributed rupture to calcification, and billions of dollars have been spent visualizing larger calcifications that are easily visible using IVUS, OCT AND MRI.

In his presentation, Weinbaum will propose a surprising explanation to these paradoxes, namely that rupture is caused by very small – less than 50 micrometers -- microcalcifications in the fibrous cap.

Weinbaum will speak at 4 p.m. in Clarkson's Bertrand H. Snell Hall Room 213. Refreshments will precede the lecture at 3:30 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Weinbaum is one of only eight living individuals elected to all three U.S. National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine) and is the only engineer to have received a Guggenheim Fellowship in cell and molecular biology.