Meet the Team

Dr. Seraina Dual is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Signal Processing at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Health Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, where she leads the Intelligent Heart Technology Lab (I-HeaL). The lab develops intelligent systems for the prediction, prevention, prehabilitation and rehabilitation of disease, with cardiovascular disease as its main application. Its work follows four lines: advanced monitoring, digital twins of human physiology, physical emulators, and closed-loop control of medical devices.

Seraina Dual trained as a Mechanical Engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). She earned a Bachelor's degree focused on biomedical engineering and a Master's degree in robotics, embedded systems and control. She received her doctorate (DSc) in the Product Development Group Zurich, where she worked on sensor systems for cardiovascular applications within the Zurich Heart Project. During her doctorate she developed implantable sensor technologies in collaboration with the Vörös Group at ETH Zurich, the German Heart Center Berlin, and St. Vincent's Hospital Sydney, Australia. Her thesis received the ETH HILTI Innovation Award for the most innovative doctoral thesis and the Gold PhD Award of the European Society for Artificial Organs.

She then joined the Cardiovascular Institute at Stanford University as a Translational Fellow in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, where she took part in multi-center, NIH-funded clinical research. She went on to a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Radiology at Stanford, in collaboration with MIT. There she developed an extra-aortic soft robotic cardiac support device using rapid design iterations in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This work was done with Prof. Daniel Ennis and Prof. Ellen Roche, in close collaboration with Prof. Alison Marsden and Prof. Mark Cutkosky. Her publications span cardiac surgery, medical devices, artificial organs, implantable and wearable sensors, signal processing, soft robotics, and MRI.

Since founding I-HeaL at KTH in 2021, she has pioneered cardiac locomotor control. This is a wearable, non-invasive approach that synchronises footfall with the heartbeat to support heart function, and a spin-out (StepWise) is now in preparation. In partnership with Scandinavian Realheart, her team carries out pre-clinical testing of the company's total artificial heart. They use the lab's hybrid mock circulatory loop to evaluate its physiological control during exercise and sleep, and the results feed into the regulatory process towards first-in-human implantation. In 2025 she was selected as one of 16 Future Research Leaders nationally by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. The selection included an assessment of her leadership potential. She is an affiliated researcher at Karolinska Institutet and holds the Swedish title of Docent. Her research is further funded by the Swedish Research Council (Starting Grant and 3R grant), the Göran Gustafsson Foundation (Research Prize in Technical Physics), the Åke Wiberg Foundation, the Kamprad Family Foundation, the innovation agency VINNOVA, and KTH Digital Futures.