Research
Left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) designed to improve blood flow throughout the body can aid nearly 26 million people globally struggling with heart failure. But these implantable devices come with risks. New research by Assistant Professor Debanjan Mukherjee suggests that studying patient blood flow patterns could help determine who’s at risk of dangerous side effects from LVADs and lead to improvements that could make them safer.
Assistant Professor Carson Bruns is leading the charge on an NSF-funded project that he and his team like to call "robochemistry." Their goal is to create robotic sidekicks that can assist chemists with burdensome or unsafe tasks that they may routinely encounter in a wet lab. But that's not all: this unique blend of bots and beakers can also inspire youth interest in science.
The Jerome Fox (BME Faculty) research team at the ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ and researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new way to identify genetic changes that help tiny oxygen-producing microbes survive in extreme environments. The findings outline a new experimental approach for learning how microbes and other types of cells, including human cells, respond and adapt to environmental stress.
Kaushik Jayaram, BME faculty member, envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or repairing components that no human could ever reach. For his efforts, Jayaram, recently received a $650,000 NSF grant and a complimentary $1.4 million grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the research wing of the U.S. Air Force.
In a new experiment, aerospace engineers at the ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ will work with astronauts to study how people experience motion sickness when they travel to space—with an eye toward reducing these sometimes debilitating symptoms. Torin Clark, BME Faculty at ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ, explained that motion sickness in space is a common problem—athough not necessarily one that many early astronauts talked about.
Associate Professor Xiaoyun Ding and his team in the Biomedical Microfluidics Laboratory (BMMLab) stumbled across an interesting anomaly during a cell sensing project that used different forms of acoustic waves to measure cell mechanics. The group discovered a new wave mode never seen before that can unlock a new level of cell manipulation capabilities.
Laurel Hind is studying the signals that regulate the immune system and contribute to disease, supported by a major grant awarded to promising early-career faculty.Hind, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Professor Juliet Gopinath (BME faculty) was selected to be part of a team that would help develop new secure quantum communications protocols and new types of distributed quantum sensors and computers through the NSF. Find her work in the first entry of the following article.
Gabriella Erich, a graduating student in biomedical engineering has been selected to receive the ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ College of Engineering and Applied Science 2024 Outstanding Research Award. Her novel research marks the first formal characterization of endoskeletal droplets under acoustic droplet vaporization (ADV).
Payton Martinez, a recent PhD graduate in biomedical engineering has been selected to receive the ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ College of Engineering and Applied Science 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award. His research explores how ultrasound and microbubbles can potentially work in tandem to effectively deliver drugs to the brain and treat neurological diseases in the future.