An exciting month for EBICS faculty! Professor Paula Hammond, Professor Steven Stice, and Professor Hyunjoon Kong receive respective honors for their achievements
Paula Hammond, David H. Koch Professor and Head of MIT's Chemical Engineering Department, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Hyunjoon Kong, interim Director of UIUC's Bioengineering graduate program, was elected by the College of Fellows for induction into The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Steven Stice, Director of UGA's Regenerative Bioscience Center, was honored as a recipient of the 2017 Georgia Bio Industry Growth Award.
In the cover article of Nature Protocols's March 2017 issue, Professor Rashid Bashir's research group shares the recipe for the current generation of bio-bots. "The protocol teaches every step of building a bio-bot, from 3D printing the skeleton to tissue engineering the skeletal muscle actuator, including manufacturers and part numbers for every single thing we use in the lab," explained Ritu Raman, now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering and first author of their paper, "A modular approach to the design, fabrication, and characterization of muscle-powered biological machines."
Researchers from Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County have had previously shown that pigment cells (melanocytes) in developing frogs could be converted to a cancer-like, metastatic form by disrupting their normal bioelectric and serotonergic signaling and had used AI to reverse-engineer a model that explained this complex process. However, during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed something remarkable: All the melanocytes in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal. In the new study, the researchers asked their AI-derived model to answer the question of how to achieve partial melanocyte conversion within the same animal using one or more interventions.
EBICS panel makes a case for how EBICS research serves society through science policy at 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting
Feb. 18, 2017 - A multi-institutional panel of EBICS faculty presented on the topic of " Integrated Cellular Systems: Building Machines with Cells" at the 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Press Briefing in Boston, which brought together thousands of leading scientists, engineers, educators, policymakers, and journalists from around the world to discuss the theme of "Serving Society Through Science Policy," focusing on how to inform policies with the best available scientific evidence.
EBICS Knowledge Transfer in Action!: Demarcus Briers showcases research collaborations between BU, Gladstone Institute, and Georgia Tech to BU's Bioinformatics PhD program
Mar. 1, 2017 - At BU's bi-weekly Student Seminars for their Bioinformatics PhD program, Demarcus Briers, EBICS trainee at Boston University, presented "Pattern Synthesis in Networks of Locally Interacting Stem Cell Aggregates," featuring results of research collaborations with Ashley Libby, EBICS trainee at Gladstone Institutes, and EBICS faculty Melissa Kemp of Georgia Tech and Todd McDevitt of Gladstone Institutes.
Researchers in the Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory at the Beckman Institute, led by Mikhail Kandel, EBICS trainee and lead author on the study, recently published in ACS Nano their technique of using label-free spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) and computer processing in order to image the microtubules in an assay.
Jan. 11, 2017 - Kara McCloskey, EBICS faculty member at UC Merced, collaborates with Renuka Nandkishore and Rashid Bashir's lab at UIUC to teach students in her Tissue Engineering Design course to build living, walking robots, aka "bio-bots," out of engineered muscle cells. By harnessing the adaptive response behaviors of biological materials, bio-bots could accomplish more than traditional robots can, due to complex functionalities like self-assembly or self-healing.
