2019 News

1. Prof. Aryn Gittis has been awarded a grant from The Michael J. Fox Foundation to advance her research on new treatment methods for Parkinson’s disease. Under the grant, Gittis will collaborate with the University of Minnesota’s Jing Wang to test electrical stimulation protocols. Check out the details. 
2. BME faculty Prof. Marlene Behrmann has been awarded the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions award.The Fred Kavli Distinguished Career award honors senior cognitive neuroscientists for their distinguished career, leadership and mentoring in the field of cognitive neuroscience. This award is sponsored by the Kavli Foundation. Behrmann will deliver the Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Lecture on Saturday, March 14, 2020 in Boston, Mass. See further details.
3. BME Prof. Elizabeth Wayne gives her Brief but Spectacular talk on the power of images in science and life. In her career, this means not only innovating new ways of showing people what happens in the body, but also, being a minority woman in the sciences with the importance of representation and remaining a role model for others.  Check out the details.
4. BME PhD student Saigopalakrishna "Sai" Yerneni, co-advised by Profs. Phil Campbell and Lee Weiss,  is the recipient of 2019 Biofabrication Young Investigator Award presented annually by the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. This competitive award is designed to recognize outstanding achievements by one individual of the biofabrication community (internationally) who are in the early stages of career. Sai will receive the award at the International Society for Biofabrication 2019 Annual Meeting during October 20-22nd in Columbus, Ohio.
5. BME students Jiaming Cao and Rachel Niu named two of six Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute Presidential Fellows. Jiaming is co-advised by Profs. Jana Kainerstorfer and Pulkit Grover, and Rachel is advised by Prof. Bin He. The Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute Presidential Fellowship provides support to six outstanding graduate students, giving students and their faculty mentors critical financial security and flexibility that allows them to develop impactful research and enjoy an enlightening educational experience.
6. BME PhD student Erica Comber and her advisor Prof. Keith Cook published a first-of-its-kind paper that outlines several ways one could fabricate tissue-based lungs from scratch for lung disease patients. The paper discusses current biofabrication methods that could be applied to these lungs, current progress toward differentiated pulmonary stem cells, and how to design a functional, manufacturable lung. See further details. 
7. BME Prof. Jana Kainerstorfer received the 2019 College of Engineering George Tallman Ladd Award in recognition of research, professional accomplishments, and potential. Her research is focused on developing imaging methods for improving early diagnosis and treatment of disease. Current projects include development of a hand held device for breast cancer imaging as well as cerebral hemodynamic monitoring in traumatic brain injury.
8. BME Trustee Professor and Department Head, Dr. Bin He received the 2019 IEEE EMBS William J. Morlock Award for significant contributions to bioelectrical technology and neuroengineering by developing innovative electromagnetic sensing, electromagnetic imaging, and neural interfacing.
9. Erin Kavanagh (BME Minor, Class of 2019) has received a 2019 Fulbright Award. The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs sponsors the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” At Carnegie Mellon, Erin has been involved with research in Prof. Keith Cook's lab, which is working to develop artificial lung devices. Through the Fulbright Award program, Erin will be continuing her artificial lung research in Germany. Check out the details.
10. Three BME faculty, Drs. Grover, Chamanzar, and Kainerstorfer, co-lead a DARPA project to develop a novel non-invasive neural interface that can be used as a wearable device. This neural interface will be capable of both recording and stimulating the brain’s dynamic activity with high temporal and spatial resolution. See further details.
11. BME faculty Prof. Barb Shinn-Cunningham has been named the 2019 recipient of the Helmholtz Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics and Speech Communication "for understanding the cognitive and neural bases of speech perception in complex acoustic environments." The Silver Medal is presented to individuals for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles, or through research accomplishment in acoustics. Check out the details.
12. BME faculty Prof. Marlene Behrmann has been elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joining the world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic leaders. The American Academy is one of the country's oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world. See further details.
13. Profs. Rosalyn Abbott and Rebecca Taylor have been named 2018-2019 Wimmer Faculty Fellows. The fellowships are designed for junior faculty members interested in enhancing their teaching through concentrated work designing and exploring a new pedagogical approach.
14. BME MS student Khulood Al Ali and her team won the 3^rd place (200 participants and 74 finalists) in the DreamNeom competition which is a collaboration between Misk & NEOM, that brings together Misk fellows to tackle the challenges faced by NEOM with innovative solutions.
15. ChemE/BME student Teddy Cai has been selected to participate in the National Institutes of Health Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The program is based on the British system, in which students perform doctoral research without required formal courses other than those students choose to take in relationship to their own interests. Students selected for admission to the program have already developed a passion for science through engagement in summer, job related, or undergraduate research programs.
16. BME Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow Sossena Wood and her research are featured in NBC News. New online video “Discovering You: Engineering Your World” highlights the careers of engineers in a variety of sectors and offers insights to the next generation of students. Sossena is working on noninvasive multi-modal neuroimaging. This research will focus on understanding the impacts of neuronal coupling in patients with neurological damage and/or diseases.
17. Prof. Byron Yu and his postdoc João Semedo found that communication between brain areas occurs through an information bottleneck, which they've termed a "communication subspace." Understanding these communication subspaces could have many implications for understanding how the coordination between brain areas gives rise to brain function. Check out the details.
18. Prof. Adam Feinberg has been elected to the Leadership Advisory Committee for the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI). The LAC advises BioFabUSA related to policies and strategic guidance concerning technology and research priorities, objectives, and content of research programs, policies and strategic guidance concerning the education and workforce development programs, and the strategic direction of BioFabUSA.
19. BME PhD student Saigopalakrishna "Sai" Yerneni, co-advised by Profs. Phil Campbell and Lee Weiss, is the recipient of a competitive 2019 Young Investigator Award and Scholarship from the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) for his work on extracellular vesicles in host-pathogen interactions. As a part of the award, he will be giving a talk at the ISEV 2019 annual meeting in Kyoto, Japan. 

20. A team led by Pulkit Grover, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, created more reliable and efficient deep neural networks called PolyDot coding to reduce errors and increase processing speed. The work was supported by a grant from the NSF WiFiUS program, and NSF CAREER award. See further details.

21. Congratulations to Profs. Itzhaq Cohen-Karni and Kathryn Whitehead, who have been awarded the 2019 Dean’s Early Career Fellowships for cutting-edge innovations in their fields and outstanding contributions to the college and university. Dean’s Early Career Fellowships are awarded to untenured faculty members who have been nominated by their department heads and then selected to receive the fellowship after review and discussion of the nomination package by the CIT Review Committee.