A/Prof Baratchi heads the Mechanobiology and Microfluidics Laboratory at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and co-leads the Heart Attack Research Program. She is also the 5th Alice Baker and Eleanor Shaw Gender Equity Fellow and holds an academic appointment at the University of Melbourne.

Her research focuses on understanding how mechanical forces regulate immune and vascular cell behaviour in health and disease. By integrating engineering, immunology, and clinical science, she has pioneered the development of organ-on-a-chip models that replicate human blood vessels and heart valves under physiological and pathological conditions. These models are used to uncover disease mechanisms and identify new therapeutic strategies, particularly in calcific aortic valve disease and atherosclerosis.

Her work has been published in leading journals such as Circulation, Nature Communications, Circulation Research, and Lab on a Chip, and cited over 4,000 times. She has a SciVal Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 2.21, with over 59% of her publications in the top 10% of journals globally. Her research is widely referenced by mechanobiologists, clinicians, engineers, and immunologists across more than 11 scientific disciplines.

A/Prof Baratchi’s laboratory has developed widely adopted microfluidic and organ-on-a-chip platforms, which provide ethical and human-relevant alternatives to animal testing. Her lab collaborates with national and international institutions and integrates patient-derived samples, single-cell omics, and clinical data.

Her work has received national media coverage, including in the Herald Sun, COSMOS Magazine, and Channel 7 News. She regularly speaks at international conferences and has delivered keynote and invited presentations at the International Symposium on Mechanobiology (Taiwan), International Society for Vascular Biology (Amsterdam), and the Asia-Pacific Society of Atherosclerosis and Vascular Diseases (2025).

A/Prof Baratchi is a founding member of the Australian Society for Mechanobiology. She has served as Treasurer (2019–2021), Vice President (2022–2024), and is currently President Elect. She has also chaired the Society’s national meetings and co-chaired its 2022 international conference. She is a member of the organising committee for MicroTAS 2024–2025, and serves as Topic Editor for Frontiers in Medical Technology.

Her research is supported by more than $2.5 million in competitive funding, including ARC and NHMRC grants. She is a committed mentor, having supervised/ mentored more than 20 PhD and early-career researchers, many of whom now work in research, government, and industry across Australia and internationally.

Her current program focuses on understanding how increased matrix stiffness and altered hemodynamic forces — arising from cardiovascular conditions such as calcific aortic valve disease, vascular ageing, and arrhythmia — drive pathological cellular responses in the vasculature and heart valves. She uses bioengineered models and omics approaches to dissect how valvular and immune cells interact within the stiffened extracellular matrix, aiming to identify therapeutic targets that could prevent or reverse disease. Through this work, she seeks to establish a new foundation for the development of non-invasive, mechanism-based treatments for cardiovascular disease.