Biomedical engineer Dr Daniel Timms, the inventor of the BiVACOR titanium heart, has been named a QUT Outstanding Alumnus for 2025.
Dr Timms was honoured last night (November 6) at the annual QUT Outstanding Alumni Awards at the university’s Gardens Point campus in Brisbane.
Dr Timms is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of BiVACOR and worked on his revolutionary total artificial heart (TAH) design for his PhD project while he was a postgraduate student at QUT.
Twenty years later, the device has now been implanted in patients during trials in the USA and Australia.
QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Margaret Sheil said Dr Timms was focused on the future of cardiac care and the Outstanding Alumnus award celebrates his groundbreaking work on the BiVACOR artificial heart.
"Recognised as an Outstanding Young Alumnus in 2013, his relentless pursuit of innovation continues to transform biomedical engineering,” Professor Sheil said.
Dr Timms completed a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) at QUT in 2001 and a PhD in 2006.
He has spent two decades working on the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart – a small titanium machine that uses a single spinning disk, suspended within a magnetic field, to propel blood to the lungs and around the body.
Dr Timms’ early journey included working unpaid and couch surfing around the globe to learn from international experts and progress his idea.
“Not long after starting my engineering degree and beginning my PhD, my father had a heart failure, and that motivated me to find ways to apply my engineering skills to create a device that might help him someday – or others like him,” Dr Timms said.
“It’s been an incredibly long journey from concept to clinical implementation of this device, more than 20 years.
“Seeing the device implanted in a patient for the first time was quite surreal. But the most rewarding part was when the patient woke up with the device and interacted with their family once again … that gave them a new lease on life.
“That, ultimately, made all that work worthwhile.
“Unfortunately, in my father’s condition, it didn’t work out so well for him. My family and I have had to live without him for all of these years.”
Dr Timms said QUT – and particularly his PhD supervisors – had given him the early skills and contacts to pursue his vision for the artificial heart.
“The supervisors at QUT are very practical-minded and very supportive of this kind of new idea,” he said.
“They were able to create links outside of the university to the hospital (Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane), knowing that these types of devices needed to go there.
“Rather than trying to develop in isolation at university, we would visit the hospital at least once a month and interact with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons to gather their insights.”
Dr Timms said his work had been helped by many people at QUT, including Emeritus Professor Mark Pearcy (the Foundation Chair of Biomedical Engineering), who was “an instrumental mentor”.
Dr Timms said he was honoured to be named a QUT Outstanding Alumnus and hoped his journey would motivate today’s students – especially those with technology ideas that seem almost too difficult to pursue.
“There are many times it seems impossibly hard to keep going … But know that a path exists, and even starting from a small Level 2 lab of O Block at QUT, it is possible to bring a device like this to the rest of the world,” he said.
“For anyone who has a new idea, my best advice is to pursue that idea – but not in isolation.
“Make sure you get out there and challenge the idea with experts around the world. Most of the time, they’ll say it’s not going to work for this reason or that – listen to them and fix that reason, and then go back to them and look for other ways to progress that idea.
“The last thing you should do is isolate yourself in a room and try to keep your ideas to yourself. Ultimately, you need input from many different people to effectively translate an idea – not only to make it work but also to turn it into an organisation and a company that is self-sustaining and capable of sharing the idea with the world.”
Learn more about the 2025 QUT Outstanding Alumni Awards winners here.
Information on studying engineering at QUT can be found here.
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