WUSTL School of Engineering News

The need for speed

2012-05-18 00:00:00

David Kilper

Washington University in St. Louis students Matthew Monson (left), a junior in mechanical engineering, and Achal Upadhyaya (center), a senior in mechanical engineering, unveil May 7 WUSTL’s entry in Formula SAE, a student competition to design and drive a Formula-style race car organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The WUSTL car runs on E85 (a fuel blend with 85 percent ethanol) and is built of advanced composite materials and features pushbutton shifting. Having just finished finals and the car's construction simultaneously, the team was on its way to the Michigan International Speedway. There, the car competed against 120 teams in skidpad, acceleration, autocross and endurance events. The WUSTL entry performed well until the last event, when the car lost its steering after the first lap of an endurance test. The WUSTL team was started in 2002 and built a car in ’05, ’07 and ’11, as well as this year. This is the second time the team has built a car from start to finish in one year.

Arch Grants awards first $750,000 in grants

2012-05-07 00:00:00

Eleven Washington University in St. Louis-affiliated entrepreneurs are among the winners of $750,000 in inaugural grants from Arch Grants, the global business plan competition providing $50,000 grants to startups and taking no equity in return.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and Jim McKelvey, Square co-founder and head of the Arch Grants Advisory Board, joined Arch Grants today to announce 15 startups that will each receive $50,000 in funding to help launch and grow their business and create a more robust startup culture and infrastructure in St. Louis.

The 11 WUSTL-affiliated winners comprise five alumni, four faculty members and two students.

They are:

Jonathan T.Z. Chen earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2008;
Patrick Crowley, PhD, is an associate professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science;
Peter S. Finley is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Olin School;
Daniel J. Garcia is a senior in the School of Engineering & Applied Science;
Michael J. Gidding is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and two master’s degrees, a master of engineering and a master of business administration;
Zhilin Hu, PhD, is a research associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science;
Kenneth R. Kline earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in Arts & Sciences and a master’s degree in finance from the Olin School, both in 2008;
Margaret S. Stohr earned an MBA from the Olin School in 1991;
Sergi G. Turabelidze earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2008;
Melissa Walker is an adjunct instructor in the Clinical Research Management program in University College in Arts & Sciences; and
Mark T. Womer earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in Arts & Sciences in 1999.

To date, Arch Grants has secured more than $2.9 million in funding from a mix of individual, organizational and corporate donors.

“Small businesses are the biggest driver of job-creation and economic growth in our state,” Nixon said. “As governor, I am committed to helping our startups and small businesses grow, and Arch Grants is another proven tool we are using to do just that. We are extremely proud to have this diverse and innovative group of companies growing, investing and creating jobs right here in Missouri. These pioneering small-business owners will lead our economy and our state into the future.”

“We at Arch Grants are thrilled with the quality and potential of the entrepreneurs who won our international competition out of over 400 applicants,” said Jerry Schlichter, co-founder and president of Arch Grants. “This marks St. Louis as a top destination with a community of high quality startup businesses who will compete in the global economy and Arch Grants will be working hard to build that community as we move forward.”

In its inaugural year, the competition attracted 420 applicants from 12 countries. The 15 winning companies will receive $50,000 in funding as part of a year-long program. Beginning in June, the companies will locate in St. Louis and work toward the goal of attracting additional capital, including up to $100,000 of Arch Grants follow-on funding.

The WUSTL-affiliated entrepreneurs and their winning startups are:

Crowley is CEO and founder and Finley is chief operating officer of Observable Networks, which is pioneering a new approach to enterprise network security and management. Observable Networks is the recipient of the Emerson Arch Grant.

Gidding is president and Garcia is director of science of Saturnis, LLC. Saturnis is commercializing a low-cost, thermochemical process that produces liquid transportation fuels from biomass sources that can be sustainably harvested in the Midwest. Saturnis is the recipient of the Peabody Arch Grant. Himadri B. Pakrasi, PhD, WUSTL’s George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences and professor of energy in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, is Gidding and Garcia’s faculty adviser.

Hu is CEO of Pharos Scientific, which aims to deliver an innovative medical imaging component in the forefront of diagnostic medicine and related products.

Kline is CEO and co-founder with Chen, who is the chief operating officer, of Med Preps, which provides online practice tests and flashcards to help medical professionals prepare for certification exams.

Turabelidze and Giorgi Gioshvili are co-founders of Iveria TV, the “hulu of foreign TV.” Iveria TV possesses the technological infrastructure and business model to deliver foreign language TV streams to millions of immigrants living in the United States.

Walker is president and chief technology officer and Stohr is chief financial officer of Graematter Inc. Graematter developed the TERI Regulatory Intelligence System, which for the first time consolidates the data and information located in more than 100 regulatory data sources into a single, searchable database. Merle Symes is Graematter’s CEO.

Womer is chief financial officer of Labor Voices, which is crowdsourced supply chain intelligence. Labor Voices provides corporations with a real-time monitoring and risk-management tool, with data coming directly from workers in their supply chains. Kohl Gill is CEO and founder.

“If you are building a business, Arch Grants is the reason to do it in St. Louis,” said McKelvey, a St. Louis native and also a WUSTL alumnus, earning both a bachelor’s degree in economics in Arts & Sciences and a bachelor’s in computer science in 1987. He is also general partner at Cultivation Capital.

“The Arch Grants initiative is an imaginative program that will contribute significantly to the ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in our region and the revitalization of St. Louis,” said Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “I am proud that Washington University-affiliated entrepreneurs are among the first winners and look forward to following the success of all Arch Grants recipients.”

“Entrepreneurs here have worked hard to establish a strong base of innovation in the region,” said Sarah Spear, executive director of Arch Grants. “Arch Grants builds on those early efforts by both retaining entrepreneurs and attracting new entrepreneurs to St. Louis. We’re excited about building this game-changing program here in St. Louis. We look forward to grant recipients joining us downtown in June, increasing the entrepreneurial bench strength and innovation in the region.”

Support has been provided by the founders, Missouri Technology Corporation, the Community Improvement District of the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, individual donors, and large corporate donors.

For a complete list of Arch Grants winners, visit http://archgrants.org.

About Arch Grants

Arch Grants is creating an entrepreneurial culture and infrastructure to increase employment growth in the St. Louis area. Launching multiple high quality, new ventures simultaneously, Arch Grants will also help build the image of St. Louis among aspiring entrepreneurs and others looking to have a formative role in building a new entrepreneurial climate in St. Louis.

Arch Grants seeks to develop an environment in St. Louis where entrepreneurs and young people want to start and grow businesses and live in a vibrant community that is affordable and where there’s a huge level of support from business and community leaders.

Outstanding Graduate Todd Coady: School of Engineering & Applied Science

Steve Givens — 2012-05-04 00:00:00

Kevin Lowder

Coady, in the fluid mechanics lab in Urbauer Hall, is an "excellent leader and his passion is contagious," says Melanie Osborn, assistant dean of engineering student services.

Todd Coady wanted more out of college than a degree or two. He wanted to make a difference and maybe change a few lives. He ended up changing 96 of them.

After three years at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Coady came to Washington University in St. Louis in pursuit of an engineering degree as a participant in the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s dual-degree program. He is a candidate for a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering May 18.

A week after arriving at WUSTL, the Jarrettsville, Md., native found himself at a meeting of the campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders, which was looking for an international service project to get behind.

Coady related to the group his earlier experiences with the Mekelle Blind School, located in the southern tip of the Saharan Desert in Ethiopia, which was in dire need of water for drinking and agriculture, a common problem in that part of the world. Coady’s passion for the school’s students made it the overwhelming choice.

“It just took off from there,” says Coady, an inveterate outdoorsman who loves to hike, mountain climb and surf, among other challenges. “I had been in engineering classes maybe a week, so I came not as an engineer but as a guy who had seen 96 faces that I just couldn’t forget.”

Following nine months of research, paper work and conference calls, Engineers Without Borders certified the project, and the WUSTL chapter made a five-year commitment to the school. For Coady, it was the start of keeping a promise he had made when he first visited Ethiopia.

“I told the kids I was going to come back as an engineer and we were going to fix the place up and solve some of the really big problems they were having,” he says.

Courtesy photo

Coady and friends in Ethiopia.

Coady and four other WUSTL students went to Ethiopia for the first time last May for an initial assessment of the school and its surrounding community. What they found was frightening. The school didn’t have the capacity to last for more than a couple of days without water from the city’s system, which sometimes shuts down for a week at a time during the region’s dry season.

Although the school had a functioning water tower with two 5,000-liter tanks, it was sagging and in desperate need of repair. So when the group returns later this month, they will be fixing the tower and then installing a new pump for an existing well.

“We’ll be connecting the well to these tanks so the school will be entirely self-sufficient from the city water system,” Coady says. “Then we’ll be connecting the tanks to the far side of the campus where they can use the water for agriculture.”

Ironically, when the group returns to Ethiopia, the newly graduated Coady will not be with them.

“It’s hard for me to leave a project that I care so much about, but to know that it’s in good hands and the future is bright is a great thing,” he says.

Melanie Osborn, assistant dean of engineering student services, helped Coady shepherd the project through the rigors of the approval process with Engineers Without Borders, and she saw first-hand what makes him tick.

“Todd is an excellent leader and his passion is contagious,” she says. “From the onset, Todd knew that he would be passing this project on, and I have watched him groom current members to take his place and allow this project to live far beyond his time at WUSTL.”

Coady is still discerning his next career steps, but whatever he does he knows there will always be 96 Ethiopian faces urging him on.

“Every time I catch myself starting to slack or complain about time, I just think back to my time at the school,” he says. “The kids cherish school because it’s their only chance. If they don’t pass their national exams in eighth grade, they don’t move forward with their education, and then they are going to beg on the streets. So I need to do everything I can to help them. There’s no letting go.”

Media advisory: Some 80 high schoolers launch self-designed gliders in competition today at Washington University

2012-05-04 00:00:00

WHAT: Student-designed hand-launched gliders will soar across WUSTL’s Field House in the Boeing Engineering Challenge today to determine which has the farthest flight, the straightest path, the longest hang time, and highest quality of flight. Planes with the most creative appearance and most creative engineering also are recognized. High school students create the planes out of balsa wood with consultation from engineers with The Boeing Company. In the process, they learn important concepts in physics and aerospace engineering.

WHO: About 80 high school students and their physics teachers from Clayton, Eureka, Fort Zumwalt, Hazelwood, Marquette and Parkway school districts, as well as WUSTL undergraduate Boeing Scholars and some 17 Boeing engineers who mentored the students.

WHERE: Washington University Field House, Athletic Complex, Forsyth and Big Bend. Parking is available on the top level of Snow Way Garage, which is near Big Bend Boulevard and Forest Park Parkway. Take Forest Park Parkway and turn south onto Throop Drive, then turn right at the “T” intersection onto Snow Way and the garage is on the left. Once on the top level, park near the southwest side of the garage and follow the sidewalk to the Athletic Complex.

WHEN: 4:30-6:30 p.m. Friday, May 4, 2012

MORE: Besides learning career skills in aerospace engineering, each winning design will receive a medal. Boeing is a longtime supporter of K-12 education initiatives at WUSTL, including teacher graduate programs through WUSTL’s Institute for School Partnership. Boeing also contributes to WUSTL’s annual fund, its scholarship programs and its building fund.

The students visited Boeing in November and received the specifications and materials for their hand-held gliders. There are 24 teams competing and each team was assigned a Boeing engineer to serve as a mentor.

Tom Brandt, a Boeing engineer who serves as a mentor to students at area high schools, says that he and the other Boeing mentors work with the students to help them put the gliders together from the time they get their build kits in November, all the way through the final flight challenge at Washington University.

“Over time you see these students overcoming engineering challenges and applying principles of mathematics and physics that they would typically just study about in a textbook,” Brandt says. “It is very inspiring to see how quickly they grasp the situations and work with their teams to figure out solutions. Programs like the Engineering Challenge align with Boeing’s emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math education and developing the workforce of the future,” he adds.

The students also visited Boeing in March to learn about engineering and Boeing and hear from Washington University students about college life and engineering.

Boeing sponsors the competition with support from Washington University’s Alumni & Development Office, the Institute for School Partnership and the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

On-site contact: Chris Mohr, program coordinator at Washington University’s Institute for School Partnership, at (314) 791-1083, or CJ Jayaweera, Regional Communications, Midwest, The Boeing Company, at (314) 452-1468.

Diversity and Inclusion Grants awarded

Susan Killenberg McGinn — 2012-04-24 00:00:00

A project to support Washington University in St. Louis faculty and staff who work with students from underrepresented minority groups and an internship program for underrepresented minorities that could lead to a career in a technology field are among the winning proposals of the university’s Diversity and Inclusion Grants program for 2011-12.

The Advisory Committee for the Diversity and Inclusion Grants has awarded eight grants totaling nearly $174,000 to Washington University faculty and administrators for initiatives that improve the university environment for women and members of underrepresented minority groups.

Faculty and administrators submitted 16 proposals for program initiatives that strengthen and promote diversity and inclusion at WUSTL. Diversity includes differences in gender, race, ethnicity, geography, socioeconomic status, age, politics, philosophy, disability and sexual orientation.

The Office of the Provost funds the Diversity and Inclusion Grant program. Now in its third year, the program has awarded almost $600,000 in grant money for 29 projects.

Funding for the selected projects is one-time only, and awards range in size up to a maximum of $30,000.

“We are continuing to get innovative and ambitious proposals that themselves reflect the diversity of interests in making our campus more inclusive,” says Adrienne D. Davis, JD, vice provost and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law and co-chair of the Advisory Committee for the Diversity and Inclusion Grants. “I think of the grants as democratizing diversity.”

“The quality of the proposals was impressive, and I am hopeful that these grants have the potential to significantly enhance diversity on campus,” says Kathleen B. McDermott, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and the advisory committee’s co-chair.

The project team leaders of the winning proposals, amounts awarded and project titles are:

Timothy J. Bono, PhD, assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and lecturer in the Department of Psychology, $22,000 for “Supporting Faculty and Staff Who Work With Students of Color.”

Koong-Nah Chung, PhD, associate dean and director of medical student research in the School of Medicine, $30,000 for “Training of Meharry Medical College Medical Students in the Washington University School of Medicine’s Summer Research Program.”

Heather L. Hageman, director of educational planning and program assessment and director of the standardized patient program in the Office of Education at the School of Medicine, $19,450 for “Train-The-Trainer Program on Inclusion.”

Denise R. Hirschbeck, assistant vice chancellor for Information Services and Technology, $30,000 for “Expanding Diversity in Technology: Internship Program for Staffing Technology Positions on Campus.”

Panos Kouvelis, PhD, the Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management, senior associate dean and director of executive programs, and director of the Boeing Center for Technology, Information & Manufacturing at the Olin Business School, $30,000 for “Olin Business School Women’s Leadership Forum.”

Peter B. MacKeith, associate dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and associate professor of architecture, $12,350 for “Empowering Faculty, Staff, and Administrators to Support the Integration of International Graduate and Professional Students into Departmental Communities.”

Leah A. Merrifield, executive director for academic-civic engagement in the Office of Government and Community Relations, $12,000 for “Community Guide to Washington University AND the St. Louis Region.”

Michael W. Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and director of the Center for Social Development, and Molly Tovar, EdD, director of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, both at the Brown School, $18,113 for the “Interdisciplinary Leadership Summit for Faculty, Staff, and Students at Washington University.

Hageman and MacKeith were winning project leaders last year as well.

Bono, who is collaborating on “Supporting Faculty and Staff Who Work With Students From Underrepresented Backgrounds” with Diana Hill, PhD, an assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and lecturer in the Department of Psychology, says their project is intended to provide insight into the experiences of minority students so that faculty and staff who work with them can have a greater understanding of the most appropriate kinds of support they can offer their students as well as the particular times during the semester when that support is most needed.

“The findings have the potential to benefit academic advisers, program managers in the First Year Center, and student group advisors in Campus Life,” Bono says.

“For example, there are faculty and staff advisers for the Association of Black Students and Association of Latin American Students. However, there has been relatively little research conducted to govern the work of faculty and staff who work with these populations. We hope to provide that,” Bono says.

Hirschbeck’s project proposal includes recruiting and training talented individuals in underrepresented groups to learn and use technology skills in a structured business environment.

She says that the goal of her team’s project is to create a framework for on-the-job training and employment of individuals who either have traditionally found it difficult to enter the technology field or for whom a career in technology was not presented to them as an option.

“The Diversity and Inclusion Grant program is an important way for Washington University faculty and administrators to make a difference in promoting diversity and inclusion on campus,” Hirschbeck says.

“Our team feels very fortunate to have been selected to receive this grant. By reaching out to high school graduates and members of the WU community, we will provide a path for individuals who may feel that a career in technology is unattainable,” Hirschbeck says.

“A successful program will result in the recruitment and retention of a diverse group of employees and the delivery of university applications that employ the use of newer technology, including mobile friendly web pages and ‘apps.’”

Other members of the Advisory Committee for the Diversity and Inclusion Grants are:

Iver Bernstein, PhD, professor of history, of African and African-American studies and of American culture studies, all in Arts & Sciences;
Naomi Daradar Sigg, assistant director of student involvement and leadership in the Office of Student Activities;
Dayna Early, MD, professor of medicine in the School of Medicine;
Robert G. Hansman, associate professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts;
Vetta L. Sanders-Thompson, PhD, associate professor of public health in the Brown School; and
Jay R. Turner, PhD, associate professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

For more information, visit diversity.wustl.edu.

Prestigious national scholarships awarded to five WUSTL juniors

2012-04-23 00:00:00

Five juniors at Washington University in St. Louis have been awarded prestigious national scholarships.

Three students received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and two students received the Morris K. Udall Scholarship for the 2012-13 academic year.

Winners of the Goldwater Scholarship are Rachel Greenstein, a biology major; Jennifer Head, who is majoring in chemical engineering; and Jenny Liu, who is majoring in electrical and biomedical engineering.

Madeleine Daepp, majoring in economics and mathematics, and Jeremy Pivor, majoring in environmental biology with a minor in public health, won the Udall Scholarship.

Daepp recently learned that she has also won a Truman scholarship.

“I believe the success of our students in winning these extremely competitive national awards is really grounded in the excellent faculty mentoring each of these students has received from very early on in their undergraduate careers,” says Joy Z. Kiefer, PhD, assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and director of the Office of Undergraduate Research.

“This in-depth faculty mentoring is a hallmark of the undergraduate experience here at Washington University, and I am very happy to have us represented so well on the national stage,” says Kiefer, the campus fellowship adviser for current students and recent alumni interested in competitive fellowship and scholarship programs.

The Goldwater Scholarship is considered one of the most prestigious awards for undergraduates planning careers in the sciences, engineering or math. It covers as much as $7,500 annually toward tuition, fees and books for either one or two years.

The U.S. Congress established the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation in 1986 to honor Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, who served in the U.S. Senate for 30 years.

The Goldwater Foundation, a federally endowed agency, awarded 282 scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year, selecting recipients on the basis of academic merit from a pool of 1,123 undergraduate sophomores and juniors nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide.

Udall scholarships are granted to those who demonstrate a commitment to fields related to the environment or to Native American or native Alaskan students in fields related to health care and tribal public policy.

It covers tuition, fees, books and room and board to a maximum of $5,000 per year.

The U.S. Congress established the Morris K. Udall Foundation in 1992 to honor Morris K. Udall, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, and renamed it in 2009 to include Stewart L. Udall in recognition of his public service.

The Udall Scholarship program is administered by the Morris K. Udall and Stuewart L. Udall Scholarship and Excellence in National Environmental Policy Foundation.

A total of 80 Udall Scholars were selected from 585 candidates nominated by 274 colleges and universities this year.

Goldwater Scholars

Greenstein is majoring in biology with a concentration in the areas of molecular biology and biochemistry in Arts & Sciences.

She has worked in the laboratory of Douglas Chalker, PhD, associate professor of biology, since 2010. Under his mentorship, she is studying the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila, an organism that eliminates 30 percent of the DNA from its functional genome during development. The goal of Chalker’s lab is to understand how this massive genome reorganization is regulated and how it is related to DNA packaging in organisms with membrane-bound nuclei.

Greenstein’s contribution was to tag one of the genes suspected of playing a role in the reorganization with a fluorescent protein. She says she felt pure elation when she flipped off the light on her microscope, opened the filter and saw brilliant red dots in the nuclei of the cells, indicating the tagged protein was indeed localized to sites of DNA rearrangement.

She won a research fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to continue her research during the summer of 2011. Working fulltime, she added other tags to serve as handles for biochemical analyses and worked on a "knockout" strain that would be missing the gene she had earlier tagged. (Knocking out a gene can show whether it is essential for cell survival or clarify its role in cellular processes.)

Greenstein, who is motivated in part by the early death of her mother from breast cancer, plans to earn a doctorate in molecular cell biology with the goal of teaching at the university level, a goal only reinforced by her experiences as a teaching assistant and peer tutor for the introductory biology courses at the university.

Head, a Danforth, Ervin and McKelvey Research scholar, is majoring in chemical engineering with minors in environmental engineering and Spanish in Arts & Sciences. McKelvey Scholars, selected from incoming engineering students, each receive an award to conduct research with a WUSTL faculty member in engineering, medicine or the sciences.

Head

Head worked with Yinjie Tang, PhD, the Francis Ahmann Career Development Assistant Professor in Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering. In his lab, she measured the toxicity of nanoparticles by their effects on seed germination and root elongation.

In summer 2010, as part of the International Experience Program offered by the Department of Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering, Head studied environmental engineering at the Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India. During the program, she completed independent research projects on generating water from the atmosphere and microbial fuel cells.

The past two summers, Head has worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati. Under the guidance of Todd Luxton, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the EPA lab, she studied the use of iron nanoparticles from welding fumes to absorb and reduce hexavalent chromium in groundwater.

She also analyzed soil from a superfund site in North Carolina for arsenic and lead. At the EPA’s Experimental Stream Facility, she assisted in experiments to determine the effect of mountaintop mining on water systems.

This summer, Head plans to work with Daren Chen, PhD, professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering, to generate nano-sized controlled-release cancer drugs by the electrospray technique Chen has perfected.

Head is the fundraising officer for the WUSTL chapter of Engineers Without Borders and will be the project leader for the chapter’s Ethiopia project in the upcoming school year. The group plans to rebuild a water tower for the Mekelle School for the Blind in Ethiopia.

Liu, an Alexander S. Langsdorf Fellow and a McKelvey Research Scholar, is majoring in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.

Liu

The McKelvey scholarship, she says, allows her to work in a lab while attending school.

Recently, she studied the thermodynamics of a membrane protein in the bacterium E. coli under the guidance of Katie Henzler-Wildman, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the School of Medicine. The protein is a multidrug transporter that can recognize and expel multiple compounds, many of which are antibiotics, such as tetracycline.

Liu says she became interested in drug resistance during a summer internship in a pathology department while she was in high school. “Reading through patient charts describing infection from bacteria strains resistant to pretty much everything available, resulting in amputation or death, was heartbreaking,” she says.

Last May, Liu joined a completely student-run lab started by Sam Fok, who has since graduated, and advised by Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery, of biomedical engineering and of neurobiology in the School of Medicine.

The primary goal of the group is to work on the Ipsihand, a stroke rehabilitation therapy device that uses signals from motor neurons that survived the stroke to move the patient’s hand.

Outside the classroom, Liu builds combat robots with the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for which she is co-secretary. She is also an officer for the International Pre-health Society, a WUSTL group that supports international students in their pursuit of health careers.

Udall Scholars
Daepp, who is majoring in economics and in mathematics, both in Arts & Sciences, plans to earn a law degree before embarking on a joint master’s degree program in agricultural law and economics, with the expectation of working in agricultural policy. Daepp was also named a Truman Scholar.

Daepp

“I would really like to mediate between farmers, researchers and policymakers to encourage the innovation and implementation of more sustainable food production practices,” she says.

As co-president of Burning Kumquat, a student-run garden, Daepp has led many efforts on campus and in the St. Louis community to raise awareness about the economic and environmental issues surrounding food production. She worked with members of the university administration and food service to supply produce from the student garden to the dining facilities and to facilitate a university farmer’s market for the campus community during the growing season.

She also secured the competitive Gephardt Institute for Public Service Civic Engagement grant to fund an environmental education and gardening project for inner-city youth in St. Louis.

She attributes her interest in sustainable food to her father. Both of her parents are mathematicians at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., but her father, who is from Bern, Switzerland, was raised in a culture where produce was eaten fresh and only in season.

Pivor plans to pursue advanced degrees in ocean policy and international environmental law with the goal of becoming an advocate for the sustainable conservation and management of the world’s oceans.

Pivor

A Florence Moog Scholar, Pivor is also a member of the WUSTL’s Pathfinder Program in Environmental Sustainability, a four-year educational program that allows students to examine the issues surrounding environmental sustainability through case studies and field trips.

Pivor has also studied the ecosystems of caves in Missouri, oyster reefs in North Carolina, and coral reefs in Madagascar.

Pivor co-founded Washington University Students for International Collaboration on the Environment (WUSICE). Through WUSICE, he organized WUSTL’s first U.S.-China Undergraduate Conference on Climate Change and Sustainability, inviting students from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, to St. Louis to discuss climate change.

Last fall, Pivor organized the university’s first delegation to the United Nations COP17 climate-change conference in Durban, South Africa, where he also served as the Sierra Club’s student coalition’s international youth delegate. (COP17 stands for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

Engineers receive annual achievement awards

2012-04-23 00:00:00

Seven distinguished alumni and a former dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis were honored at a dinner April 19 at the Coronado Ballroom.

Six received Alumni Achievement Awards, one a Young Alumni Award, and the former dean received the Dean’s award.

The honorees:

Larry Chiang (SI ’73, SI '75)

Chiang

Chiang worked at at Bell Laboratories and for several American companies, before returning to Taiwan in 1985.

As the vice president of sales and engineering of Siemens Telecommunications in Taiwan, Chiang participated in the digitalization of the company’s analog telecommunications network. He was promoted to executive vice president and established a joint venture with Fujitsu for fiber optical products in 1992.

As president of Siemens Telecommunication in 1995, Chiang participated in the design, delivery and commissioning of two GSM mobile networks.

Chiang retired in 2005 and became a senior advisor at Siemens Telecommunications. Today, he works as an investment consultant and supervises a venture capital fund.

To show his appreciation of research assistantships he received while attending graduate school, he established an endowed scholarship ata WUSTL. He also provides scholarships for students in China.

For a video tribute to Chiang, click here.

Richard Janis (SI ’74, GA '74)

Janis

As a professional engineer, registered architect and president of William Tao & Associates, Janis leads building projects both in St. Louis and around the world.

In 2005, Janis was engineer of record and LEED accredited professional for WUSTL's first LEED-accredited building, Earth & Planetary Sciences (now Rudolph Hall). More recently, he led the engineering design of the School of Medicine's LEED Gold Data Center.

Janis earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science & Technology) in 1968. He earned master's degrees in architecture and mechanical engineering at WUSTL in 1974.

Janis went to work with William Tao & Associates, a practice devoted to energy-effective design of buildings. When Tao retired in 1989, Janis became CEO. The firm continued to maintain an industry leadership role in design, growing to include many different engineering services.

Janis has participated in many professional organizations, including the American Institute of Architects and United States Green Building Council, where he served on the executive committee. He is also a past president of the St. Louis chapter of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA).

A senior lecturer for the School of Architecture, Janis has taught at WUSTL since 1976. He is also an adjunct instructor for the School of Engineering & Applied Science where he teaches sustainable systems design. He is coauthor, with Bill Tao, of Mechanical and Electrical Systems in Buildings, soon to be in its fifth edition.

For a video tribute to Janis, click here.

Deepak Kantawala (SI ’63, SI’ 66)

Kantawala

Kantawala currently serves as a consultant to India’s Central Pollution Control Board, with responsibility for reviewing water-quality criteria and standards for India’s fresh, marine and ground waters.

He has been involved in the design and commissioning of more than 100 industrial wastewater treatment plants for various industry subsectors, such as pharmaceuticals and pesticides, and for companies ranging from NOCIL (Shell), to Monsanto.

He also participated in the design and commissioning of effluent treatment plants for industrial estates and of sewage treatment plants.

Kantawala earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Bombay in 1960, and then moved to the United States to attend WUSTL, where he earned master's and doctor of science degrees in environmental and sanitary engineering in 1963 and 1966, respectively.

Kantawala was the recipient of Institution of Engineers (India) Environmental Engineering Design Award for the year 1989-90. In 2000, he was presented with the Chemtech Foundation Chemical Industry Stalwart Award.

He is a member of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and has served in various capacities for the World Bank, World Health Organization, USAID and the government of the Netherlands.

He served as chairman of India’s Research Council of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute from 1994-97. He is a member of the Water Environment Federation and of India’s Institution of Engineers, a life member of the Indian Water Works Association and pf the Indian Association of Environmental Management, and president of the Indian Environmental Association.

For a video tribute to Kantawala, click here.

Janice Karty (EN ’78)

Karty

After earning a bachelor’s in engineering in 1978, Karty went on to earn master's and doctoral degrees from Rice University in 1981 and 1983, respectively. In 1985, she joined McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company (now Boeing), as a research scientist

Karty currently serves as a technical fellow within Boeing Defense, Space and Security. Since 2010, she has worked on electromagnetic environmental effects (known as E3) for products such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the F-15, and the T-45 Training System.

During her 27-year career at Boeing, she has established a record of sustained technical excellence. She was elected to be a Boeing associate technical fellow in 2001, and named a technical fellow five years later.

Karty is a frequent guest lecturer at WUSTL as well as a local science fair judge. She often visits area high schools to speak about careers in engineering and the sciences.

For a video tribute to Karty, click here.

Milind Kulkarni (SI ’96, PMBA ’08)

Kulkarni

Kulkarni serves as vice president and chief technology officer of solar materials and quantitative silicon research at MEMC Electronic Materials.

In this role, he directs cross-functional research on polysilicon production, continuous Czochralski growth, directional solidification, wafering and cleaning processes, solar cell technology and module production.

After earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Mumbai, Kulkarni moved to the United States, where he earned a master's degree from Oregon State University and a doctoral degree from WUSTL, both in chemical engineering. He later earned a master's degree in business administration at WUSTL as well.

In 2005, Kulkarni became a senior fellow in MEMC, the highest technical recognition offered by the company. In 2009 he became a vice president. In 2011 he was named chief technology officer.

Kulkarni developed unifying theories to describe polishing and decorating etchants, developed a novel silicon-etching process, explained the unique defect distributions near the periphery of defect-engineered silicon crystals, and developed key mathematical tools and process insights to enable defect engineering of Czochralski silicon crystals.

He has also guided improvements in the methods used to produce polysilicon and crystalline silicon, and in wafering technologies for making solar cells.

The author of two book chapters, two award-winning journal papers and many other publications, Kulkarni serves as a reviewer for several professional journals in his field.

For a video tribute to Kulkarni, click here.

James McKelvey, Jr. (EN ’87, LA ’87)

McKelvey

McKelvey is an engineer, artist and entrepreneur. As an undergraduate engineer at WUSTL, McKelvey wrote two computer programming textbooks. After graduation he took a job with IBM and a side position as a teaching assistant in glassblowing.

In 1990, he co-founded Mira Digital Publishing, which is today a leader in electronic publishing for scientific conferences.

In 2000, he co-founded Third Degree Glass Factory, one of the most successful glassblowing schools in the world. He also wrote The Art of Fire: Beginning Glassblowing, the leading textbook for novice glassblowers.

In 2009, McKelvey co-founded Square, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.S., which enables anyone to take credit card payments anywhere using their mobile device. McKelvey now sits on the board of directors of Square.

For a video tribute to McKelvey, click here.

Jennifer Dionne (EN ’03, EN ’03)

Dionne

Dionne, the recipient of the Young Alumni Award, is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University.

Her research investigates metamaterials — engineered materials with optical and electrical properties not found in nature — for applications ranging from enhanced solar energy generation to subwavelength optical imaging and nanophotonic manipulation.

Dionne earned a bachelor's of science degree in systems science & engineering and physics in 2003 from WUSTL. She earned a doctoral degree in applied physics in 2009 from the California Institute of Technology.

The recipient of many young investigator achievements, she has won the NSF CAREER Award (2012), the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2011), Technology Review’s Top Young Innovator Award (2011), the Hellman Fellowship (2011), the Terman Fellowship (2010), the Clauser Prize for Best Caltech Thesis (2009) and the MRS Gold Medal Graduate Student Award (2008).

She is the author of Introduction to Solar Photonics and one of the organizers of a science-as-art exhibit, "NanoArt: More than Meets the Eye."

For a video tribute to Dionne, click here.

Salvatore Sutera

Sutera

Sutera, the recipient of the Dean’s Award, came to WUSTL in 1968 to serve as the chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department, a post he held for 25 years. Sutera was instrumental in the creatopm pf undergraduate degree program in biomedical engineering.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 1954 and a master of science in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1955. He spent the following year as a Fulbright Fellow in Paris, France.

Following a year with the DuPont Corp. in Delaware, Sutera returned to Caltech and earned a doctoral degree in 1960. From 1960 to 1968, he was a member of the engineering faculty at Brown University.

Early in his academic career, Sutera began to focus his research on biomechanics. He and his collaborators made many contributions to the understanding of blood flow in the mammalian microcirculation, flow-induced trauma to blood in artificial organs, and the mechanical properties of the red blood cell in health and disease.

A dedicated Francophile, Sutera spent a semester as a visiting professor at the University of Paris in 1973. He has been an active member of the Alliance Française of St. Louis for more than 20 years and has served on the board of directors of St. Louis-Lyon Sister Cities Inc.

For a video tribute to Sutera, click here.

Nobel Laureate Ciechanover to speak April 27

2012-04-17 00:00:00

Aaron Ciechanover, MD, PhD, the Distinguished Research Professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to the discovery and description of a process cells use to discard unwanted proteins, will give a special seminar at Washington University in St. Louis Friday, April 27.

Ciechanover

His lecture, “The Ubiquitin Proteolytic System: From Basic Mechanisms Through Human Diseases and on to Drug Development,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 300. The seminar is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

Sixty years ago, Ciechanover says, body proteins were thought to be essentially stable molecules subject only to minor wear-and-tear, and the proteins we ate were thought to function solely as energy-providing fuel with little or no connection to body proteins.

We now realize, he says, that intracellular proteins turn over extensively, that the process is highly specific in most cases, and that the stability of many proteins is regulated individually and can vary under different conditions.

Regulated proteolysis serves numerous physiological functions, including maintaining the cellular quality control (by removing impaired proteins) and controlling essential processes (by removing, in a programmed and timed manner, different cellular regulators).

Ciechanover and his fellow laureates discovered the ubiquitin-proteasome system that removes damaged or unneeded proteins from the cell. The system marks proteins for destruction by tagging them with a small protein found in all cells called ubiquitin.

Once a protein has accumulated a chain of ubiquitin molecules, it is bound by the proteasome, the cell’s waste disposal system, which unfolds the protein and chops it up into building blocks to be used for the synthesis of new proteins.

Not surprisingly, aberrations in protein breakdown have been implicated in many diseases, among them many cancers, neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, for example) and infectious and inflammatory diseases.

As a result, many pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories now are looking at the ubiquitin system as a target for novel drugs. One drug already on the market combats multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer.

Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel, in October 1947, one month before Israel was recognized by the United Nations as an independent state. His parents had emigrated from Poland with their families as adolescents in the mid-1920s.

From his early days at home, he says, he remembers a strong encouragement to study. While his home was not a rich one, it had a huge library, and his parents had a great collection of classical music. He remembers that Bizet’s Carmen occupied more than 20 RCA 78-rpm bakelite records.

Even as a child, he was fascinated with biology. He collected flowers on Mount Carmel and dried them in his older brother’s heavy Babylonian Talmud. “I will never forget his rage on discovering my love of nature hidden within the pages of the old Jewish tracts,” he says.

Biology at the time was a largely descriptive discipline. Ciechanover remembers the effort invested in memorizing the 12 differences between the frog and the toad or between the circulatory systems and skeletal structure of the cat and the dog.

Since chemistry and physics appeared to him to be strong mechanistic disciplines built on solid mathematical foundations, he had a deep feeling that the future somehow resided in biology and in deciphering basic mechanisms, about which so little was then known.

“Yet the complexity of biological and pathological processes looked to me enormous,” he says, “almost beyond our ability to grasp, and I was intimidated.”

At first he pursued the safer route of training as a medical doctor, only to discover that medicine was even more descriptive than biology, and that because the understanding of disease was so shallow, doctors treated symptoms rather than causes.

In the end, he yielded to his attraction to the “magical and enchanting” field of biochemistry, abandoned medicine and enrolled in graduate school to begin a career in scientific research.

Between 1987-2001, Ciechanover repeatedly was a visiting professor at Washington University’s School of Medicine. In 2006, the university awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree.

For more information, contact Cindy Goessling at cgoessling@wustl.edu or (314) 935-9236.

New imaging technique could speed cancer detection

2012-04-03 00:00:00

A new imaging technique relies on light and sound to create detailed, color pictures of tumors deep inside the body. The technology, called photoacoustic tomography, may eventually help doctors diagnose cancer earlier than is now possible and to more precisely monitor the effects of cancer treatment — all without the radiation involved in X-rays and CT scans or the expense of MRIs.

Clinical trials are in the planning stages, but studies in animal models have given researchers a lot to get excited about. That’s because the technology can easily penetrate the body’s tissues to visualize tumors at depths never before possible.

Wang

“This technology is potentially a game changer, both in how we monitor cancer and in how soon we know it’s there,” says biomedical engineer Lihong V. Wang, PhD., who led the team of developers at Washington University in St. Louis.

For example, the technique could reveal the presence of cancer earlier by showing oxygen use by tissues. Excessive oxygen-burning, called hypermetabolism, is a hallmark of the disease. In the early stages, there isn’t much else to go on, so photoacoustic tomography could alert physicians to the presence of the disease at its earliest stage, Wang says.

Wang will explain the technology April 3 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago. Wang’s presentation follows his publication of a related paper March 23 in Science.

Wang, who is affiliated with the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, is working with Washington University physicians to evaluate the technology for four uses: identifying the sentinel lymph nodes for breast cancer staging, which may eliminate the need for surgical lymph node biopsies; monitoring early response to chemotherapy; imaging melanomas; and imaging the gastrointestinal tract.

A major challenge for diagnosing cancer is the inability to see small tumors growing in the body. Physicians have come to accept the grayness of X-ray images and CT scans (which are based on X-rays), where structures appear as lights and shadows. But they are a poor substitute for “photographs” of our insides.

No such photographs exist because light can’t penetrate soft tissue. Tissues scatter light, which limits the ability to see anything beyond the depth of about a millimeter. But scattering doesn’t destroy the light, which can reach a depth of about 7 centimeters, or about 3 inches.

Photoacoustic imagery brings together the best of both worlds — light and sound. It converts light absorbed by soft tissues in the body into sound waves, which easily penetrate tissues. The tissue to be imaged is then irradiated by a nanosecond-pulsed laser at an optical wavelength.

Absorption of light by molecules beneath the surface creates a thermally induced pressure jump that launches sound waves, which are measured by ultrasound receivers at the body’s surface and reassembled to create what is, in effect, a photograph.

Photoacoustic images have a much higher contrast than X-ray images because there are many highly colored molecules in the body that naturally serve as contrast agents. These include hemoglobin, which changes color as it gains or loses oxygen, but also melanin, the pigment that makes moles dark, and DNA, which in its condensed form in the cell nucleus is darker than the cell cytoplasm.

With a little help from organic dyes or genes engineered to express colorful products, photoacoustic tomography can also image tissues, such as lymph nodes, that would otherwise blend in with their surroundings.

“Every issue of every top journal publishes exciting lab discoveries, but only a tiny fraction of them are ever translated into clinical practice,” he says. “My hope is that photoacoustic tomography can help translate microscopic lab discoveries into macroscopic clinical practice.”

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center is the only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center within a 240-mile radius of St. Louis. Siteman Cancer Center is composed of the combined cancer research and treatment programs of Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.

Trustees grant faculty promotions, tenure

2012-04-02 00:00:00

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, the following faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure effective July 1, 2012, unless otherwise noted.

Promotion with tenure

Peter Benson, PhD, to associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences

David L. Brody, MD, PhD, to associate professor of neurology, effective Jan. 1, 2012, with tenure effective March 2, 2012

Jacob M. Buchowski, MD, to associate professor of orthopaedic surgery, effective July 1, 2011, with tenure effect Dec. 2, 2011

Rowhea M. Elmesky, PhD, to associate professor of education in Arts & Sciences

Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff, JD, PhD, to professor of law

Bradley L. Jolliff, PhD, to professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, effective Dec. 2, 2011

Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, to associate professor of neurological surgery, effective Oct. 7, 2011, with tenure effective Dec. 2, 2011

Jr-Shin Li, PhD, to associate professor of systems science and engineering

Lori Markson, PhD, to associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences

Jason C. Mills, MD, PhD, to associate professor of medicine, effective July 1, 2011, with tenure effective Jan. 1, 2012

Anca E. Parvulescu, PhD, to associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences

Nancy Y. Reynolds, PhD, to associate professor of history in Arts & Sciences

Thomas L. Rodebaugh, PhD, to associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences

Jessica A. Rosenfeld, PhD, to associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences

Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, PhD, to associate professor of Spanish in Arts & Sciences

Yongseok Shin, PhD, to associate professor of economics in Arts & Sciences

Simine Vazire, PhD, to associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences

Amy L. Waterman, PhD, to associate professor of medicine, effective Jan. 1, 2012

Lan Yang, PhD, to associate professor of electrical and systems engineering

Qin Yang, MD, PhD, to associate professor of radiation oncology, effective July 1, 2011, with tenure effective Dec. 2, 2011

Gregory J. Zipfel, MD, to associate professor of neurological surgery, effective June 1, 2011, with tenure effective Dec. 2, 2011

Appointment with tenure

Ronald J. Mallon, PhD, as associate professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences, effective July 1, 2011, with tenure effective Dec. 2, 2011

Gwendalyn Jan Randolph, PhD, as professor of pathology and immunology, effective Sept. 1, 2011, with tenure effective March 2, 2012

Granting of tenure

Venkat Subramanian, PhD, associate professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering

New imaging technique moves from lab to clinic

Diana Lutz — 2012-03-22 00:00:00

Every new imaging technology has an aura of magic about it because it suddenly reveals what had been concealed, and makes visible what had been invisible. So, too, with photoacoustic tomography, which is allowing scientists to virtually peel away the top several inches of flesh to see what lies beneath.

song hu/lihong wang

The arteries (red) and veins (green) stand out clearly in a photoacoustic microscope image of a mouse ear. The technique is very sensitive to color changes like those that occur as hemoglobin becomes saturated with oxygen (sO₂).

The technique achieves this depth vision by an elegant marriage between light and sound, combining the high contrast due to light absorption by colored molecules such as hemoglobin or melanin with the spatial resolution of ultrasound.

Lihong V. Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, summarizes the state of the art in photoacoustic imaging in the March 23 issue of Science.

Chris favazza/ Lihong Wang

This image of the hemoglobin in the human palm is slightly less sharp than the image of the mouse ear because the blood vessels lie deeper. As a rule of thumb, the spatial resolution of a photoacoustic image is about 1/200th of the imaging depth. The technique is capable of reaching as deeply as 7 centimeters (nearly three inches).

He is already working with physicians at the Washington University School of Medicine to move four applications of photoacoustic tomography into clinical trials. One is to visualize the sentinel lymph nodes that are important in breast cancer staging; a second to monitor early response to chemotherapy; a third to image melanomas; and the fourth to image the gastrointestinal tract.

Among the most exciting advances is the ability of photoacoustic tomography to reveal the use of oxygen by tissues, because excessive oxygen-burning (called hypermetabolism) is a hallmark of cancer.

Joon Mo Yang/lihong wang

Since most animals have body plans that are essentially a tube within a tube, a surprising amount of the body is within the reach of photoacoustic tomography. This image shows a rabbit’s esophagus and adjacent internal organs. Photoacoustic colonoscopy would allow physicians to visualize not just superficial polyps but also deeper lesions

In the early stages of cancer, there isn’t much else to go on, Wang says, and so an early warning diagnostic test that does not require a contrast agent is potentially a game changer.

How photoacoustic tomography works

Although we’ve all come to accept the grayness of X-ray images, where structure appears as lights and shadows, they are a poor substitute for “photographs” of our insides.

No such photographs exist because light photons can penetrate soft tissue only to the depth of about a millimeter before they’re so scattered it isn’t possible to unsnarl their paths and create an image. But scattering doesn’t destroy the photons, which can reach a depth of about 7 centimeters (about 3 inches).

The trick of photoacoustic tomography is to convert light absorbed at depth to sound waves, which scatter a thousand times less than light, for transmission back to the surface. The tissue to be imaged is irradiated by a nanosecond-pulsed laser at an optical wavelength.

Absorption by light by molecules beneath the surface creates a thermally induced pressure jump that launches sound waves that are measured by ultrasound receivers at the surface and reassembled to create what is, in effect, a photograph.

http://youtu.be/DPS1x32DKdw

Light, unlike X-rays, which also penetrate deeply, poses no health hazard. Moreover, photoacoustic images have much higher contrast than X-ray images because there are many highly colored molecules in the body that serve as “endogenous” contrast agents. These include hemoglobin, which changes color as it gains or loses oxygen, but also melanin, the pigment that makes moles dark, and DNA, which in its “condensed” form in the cell nucleus is “darker” than the cell cytoplasm.

With a little help from “exogenous” (introduced) contrast agents, such as organic dyes or genes engineered to express colorful products, photoacoustic tomography can also image tissues, such as lymph nodes, that otherwise blend in with their surroundings. Wang also has been experimenting with “reporter genes,” genes that encode a colored product, which shows up well in photoacoustic images.

Putting down the scalpel

Todd Erpelding, alejandro Garcia-Uribe, Zhilin Hu, Rameez Chatni, Catherine Appleton, Julie Margenthaler, and Ladislav Jankovic

Because lymph is clear or pale yellow, it is harder to visualize than blood. This photoacoustic tomography image of a sentinel lymph node (SLN) in woman with breast cancer was made by injecting the breast with methylene blue dye, which acts to increase the contrast between the node and its surroundings. The lymph node can then be biopsied by needle rather than by surgery. In collaboration with Philips Resarch this technique for sentinel node biopsy is now in clinical trials at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, the hospital affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis.

Sentinel node biopsy provides a good example of the improvement photoacoustic imaging promises over current imaging practice. Sentinel nodes are the nodes nearest a tumor, such as a breast tumor, to which cancerous cells would first migrate.

In a sentinel node biopsy, a surgeon injects a radioactive substance, a dye, or both near a tumor. The body treats both substances as foreign, so they flow to the first draining node to be filtered and flushed from the body.

“A gamma probe or a Geiger counter is used to locate the radioactive particles,” Wang says, “but it gives only a rough idea of the node’s location.” To find the node, the surgeon must cut open the area and follow the dye visually to the sentinel lymph node.

Roughly 10 percent of the patients who undergo this procedure are found to have cancerous nodes, but 5 percent of the patients suffer a side effect, such as numbness, swelling (lymphedema) or a decreased range of motion. So the diagnostic procedure itself is not without risk.

Wang proposes instead simply to inject an optical dye that shows up so clearly in photoacoustic images that a hollow needle can be guided directly to the sentinel lymph node and a sample of tissue taken through the needle.

In the clinical trial now under way, he says, the surgeon is not taking tissue but instead deploying a tiny metal clip through the needle. The patient then undergoes lymph node dissection, the “standard of care” treatment. The dissected lymph node is X-rayed to see whether it contains the clip.

“If this technique proves accurate, we will be converting a surgical procedure into a needle biopsy possible on an outpatient basis,” Wang says. “In the U.S. alone, 100,000 of these surgical biopsies are done very year, so the new procedure would spare many patients injury — not to mention expense.”

Seeing function

One exciting aspect of photoacoustic tomography is that images contain functional as well as structural information because color reflects the chemical composition and chemistry determines function.

Photoacoustic tomography, for example, can detect the oxygen saturation of hemoglobin, which is bright red when it is carrying oxygen and turns darker red when it releases it.

Almost all diseases, especially cancer and diabetes, cause abnormal oxygen metabolism. So the metabolic rate of oxygen use is an important hallmark of disease.

JUNJIE Yao/Lihong Wang

One of the most exciting uses of photoacoustic tomography is to measure oxygen metabolism, a marker for cancer that may permit much earlier diagnosis than is now possible. In this example, melanoma tumor cells were injected into a mouse ear on day 1. By day 7, there were noticeable changes in the blood flow rate (top graph, right), and the metabolic rate of oxygen usage (bottom graph, right). Counterintuitively, the tumor did not increase the oxygen extraction fraction (middle graph). MT stands for melanoma tumor and VD for vasodilation. The colors correspond to depth, with blue being superficial and red deep.

Together with other parameters that can be measured in the photoacoustic images, such as vessel cross-section, concentration of hemoglobin and blood flow speed, the gradient of oxygen saturation can be used to calculate the oxygen use by a region of tissue.

The imaging technique most widely used to measure oxygen use is positron emission tomography (PET), which requires the injection or inhalation of a radioactively labeled tracer and undesirable radiation exposure.

A: Chi zhang/konstantin Maslov/Lihong wang

B: Song Hu/konstantin maslov/lihong wang

C:Chris Favazza/lynn Cornelius/lihong wang

D: todd erpelding/alejandro garcia-urbe/zhilinHu/Catherine Appleton/Julie Margenthaler/Ladislav Jankovic

Among imaging techniques photoacoustic imaging is uniquely able to maintain clarity over a wide range of scales. Shown here are images of tiny organelles containing the pigment melanin in the ear of a black mouse; individual red blood cells (RBC) traveling along a capillary in a mouse ear; a nevus (mole) on a human arm; and a tumor in a woman undergoing sentinel node biopsy. As the scale bars show, the size of the structures in the images varies by a factor of a thousand.

Last year in the Journal of Biomedical Optics, Wang’s team demonstrated that oxygen metabolism betrayed the presence of a melanoma (a skin cancer) and of a glioblastoma (a brain tumor) within a few days of the injection of tumor cells in an animal model. Oxygen use doubled in a week.

“Because hypermetabolism is a quintessential hallmark of cancer,” Wang says, “photoacoustic imaging may allow cancer to be detected at the earliest stage without using a foreign contrast agent.”

Wang will be speaking about photoacoustic tomography at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) this spring.

A singular vision

Wang, who has worked on photoacoustic imaging for more than 10 years, sees a subtler but ultimately even more transformative advantage to the technology.

“Every issue of every top journal publishes exciting lab discoveries,” he says, “but only a tiny fraction of them are ever translated into clinical practice.” Part of the problem is that images are made by different methods at different scales, making comparisons across scales difficult.

“In current practice,” he says, “we use optical microscopy to examine organelles and cells and nonoptical imaging techniques such as X-ray tomography for tissues and organs. None of the clinical imaging technologies give you the strong contrast of the optical techniques.

“So between the micro domain and the macro domain there’s a huge divide, because people can’t relate the images acquired at one length scale to those acquired at another.

“My hope is that photoacoustic tomography, which has consistent contrast over all length scales, can help translate the microscopic lab discoveries to macroscopic clinical practice.”

For similar reasons, he thinks photoacoustic imaging will be useful for systems biology, the new movement in bioscience to focus on systems as a whole rather than on individual components.

“We’re really just tool builders,” Wang says, “who are going to help other scientists make the revolutionary discoveries in biology and medicine. At least that’s my hope.”

Agrawal wins NSF CAREER award

2012-03-16 00:00:00

Agrawal

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER award) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The awards are given “in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization” with the goal of “building a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.”

According to Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, 12 engineering faculty have received a CAREER award since 2005, including nine of the 20 faculty in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

“This truly remarkable achievement is a significant recognition of the tremendous quality of our faculty,” Quatrano says.

The goal of Agrawal’s project, titled “Provably Good Concurrency Platforms for Streaming Applications,” is to design platforms that will allow programmers to easily write correct and efficient high-throughput parallel programs.

In particular, her platforms will be useful for data-intensive applications, such as audio, video and signal processing, allowing these applications to run on modern multicore machines.

Most computers made in the past decade are multicores; that is, they contain multiple processing elements, or cores. In addition, the number of cores on machines is increasing at close to an exponential rate.

Traditional sequential programs cannot make use of more than one core at a time, potentially wasting resources. In order to execute efficiently on these machines, programmers must write parallel programs, programs capable of using more than one core at the same time.

Agrawal’s project concentrates on designing platforms that can efficiently execute a class of parallel programs called streaming programs. In streaming applications, a set (potentially ordered) of operations is applied to each element in a data set (the stream).

Agrawal

One player’s view of a sample puzzle game. The cooperative multiplayer game teaches collaboration with minimal information exchange. The goal is to design a protocol followed by all players that allows them all to get to the yellow ball without colliding with other players' balls, which they cannot see.

Agrawal’s work will enable automatic management of synchronization and scheduling of operations, so that the programmers can write their programs at a high level without worrying about those details. A large class of data intensive applications, including bioinformatics applications, and many scientific applications, as well as audio, visual and image processing, can be expressed as streaming programs.

“This research will advance the state-of-the-art in streaming platforms, both theoretically and practically,” Agrawal says. “While the research is theoretical, we want to design platforms that both academic and industry partners will want to implement in their streaming systems.”

The research will support both graduate and undergraduate research as well as Agrawal’s.

In addition, the research will be integrated into Agrawal’s graduate course “Theory of Parallel Systems.” Agrawal also plans to incorporate parallal algorithms in the undergraduate algorithms and data structures course she teaches. Finally, in her free time, Agrawal designs puzzles that indirectly teach students about parallel computing concepts.

Agrawal joined WUSTL after earning a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a master’s degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore and a bachelor’s degree from Mumbai University.

Finding solutions to Achilles’ heel of renewable energy: intermittency

Diana Lutz — 2012-03-15 00:00:00

William F. Pickard introduces the February 2012 special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE by quoting the Bible: “The wind bloweth where it listeth.” That, in so many words, describes the major technological issue with renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power.

“Wind turbines or solar collectors alone cannot supply baseload power,” Pickard says. “It’s blowing beautifully outside today, and if you had a wind turbine you’d be in fat city. But at sundown the wind could suddenly drop and there’d be no sunshine to replace it. You would freeze in the dark — unless you had stored up energy.”

Intermittency, sometimes called the Achilles’ heel of renewable energy, has so far limited the penetration of renewable sources in most power grids.

Pickard, PhD, senior professor of electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis and a life fellow of the IEEE, co-edited the special issue, “The Intermittency Challenge: Massive Energy Storage in a Sustainable Future,” with Derek Abbott, PhD, professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide and a fellow of the IEEE.

“Most projections show that late in the 21st century, fossil-fuel shortages are going to bite hard,” Pickard says. “If you’re an optimist, you might say 75 years, and we’re going to be in trouble — real trouble. And once economical sources of fossil fuels approach depletion, we have no certain recourse except to renewables.”

What, then, can be done about the problem of intermittency? The Proceedings of the IEEE, the most highly cited general interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science, delves into the problem, focusing on schemes for rendering renewable energy reliable and dispatchable, particularly massive storage facilities for energy.

Pickard, who is retired from teaching, is motivated not by his own welfare but by his grandson’s. “In 70 years,” he says, “you and I will be dead, but my grandson might be left sitting with no energy resources. What benefit has he received from this dissipation of fossil fuels? I got a benefit, you got a benefit, but he gets the ashes.”

Transnational power grids
One of the more ambitious articles in the issue describes a giant power grid, to be called the Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure, that would encompass China, Japan, South Korean, the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states and Australia.

Wind energy is abundant in China and Mongolia, and solar energy is abundant in Australia’s interior. Together, the authors say, they “represent Asia’s most plentiful renewable energy resources for which capture technology currently exists.”

With a grid this big, the authors say, averaging effects come into play and uncorrelated intermittencies can partially cancel each other out.

“Northern China’s peak electricity demand occurs in winter because of heating needs. Australia’s Outback solar energy resources are strongest in the southern summer, which is the northern winter. Therefore, Australia’s peak solar energy output is suited to meeting China’s winter heating peaks.”

This is not the only transnational grid either planned or under construction.

A group of European companies and the Desertec Foundation envision that, by 2050, solar power plants in the Middle East and North Africa will satisfy 70 percent of the area’s electricity needs and 17 percent of the electricity needs of the European Union and some neighboring countries.

The solar energy would be transmitted across North Africa and connected to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. Construction of the Desertec’s first 500-megawatt solar farm in Morocco is scheduled to start in 2012.

Ultrahigh-voltage DC power transmission
But, says Pickard, you can’t ship power over extremely long distances through interconnected synchronous AC systems, because of stability problems. “What you get is sloshing inside the network area and sloshing will begin to take the network down.”

For long-distance transfer of bulk power ultrahigh-voltage (800 kilovolt) DC lines are needed, he says. These lines allow higher transmitted power with the same stability margins and lower losses.

The technical problems with these lines are not trivial, Pickard says, but they’re already being solved — in China. According to the authors of an article in the Proceedings volume on ultrahigh-voltage transmission, “China is constructing a number of high-power DC energy highways, superimposed on the AC grid, in order to transmit electric power from huge hydropower plants in the center of the country to load centers located as far as 2,000 to 3,000 kilometers away.”

Massive energy storage
Most schemes for the energy future, including transnational grids, also will require massive energy storage, some scheme to transform surplus grid energy into a different but conveniently stored form and then back-converted and returned to the grid when electric power is needed. Pickard calls them “granaries for electricity.”

By massive, Pickard means storage with a rated output power of at least 1 gigawatt and a rated storage capacity of at least 2 gigawattdays, enough to see a major metropolitan area through most emergencies.

Many of these storage schemes assume the baseload power would be supplied by concentrating solar power (CSP) systems. A CSP system uses mirrors to bring solar radiation to a hot focus that can then be used to superheat steam and run a turbine for power generation.

Surplus energy from the concentrators could be stored either chemically or thermally. Chemical systems might be based on the reversible dissociation of ammonia or on dissociated metal hydrides. Thermal ones might store the heat directly in concrete or in molten salt.

Compressed air and pumped hydro
But, says Pickard, if you look at the website of the Electricity Storage Association, only two energy storage technologies stand out as truly massive. They are compressed air energy storage and pumped hydro.

Compressed air energy storage is really quite simple, he says. “When you have energy you don’t know what to do with, you simply compress air into a cavity under the Earth and when you need the electricity, you blow this air through a high-speed turbine, spinning a generator, and you’ve got your energy again.”

Of course, there is a catch. As anyone who has pumped up a bike tire knows, when you compress air, it heats up and when you allow it to expand, it cools down. To avoid thermally cycling your storage chamber, he says, you would need to compress the air in stages, with counterflow heat exchangers between the stages.

“If you believe the design figures, you can get 60 or 75 percent turnaround efficiency, which isn’t bad. The only problem is that nobody has ever built a functioning adiabatic compressed-air energy-storage system,” Pickard says.

Pickard prefers pumped hydro, but with a twist. To achieve the goal of 2 gigawattdays of stored power, you’d need a reservoir that would have roughly the volume of 10 Great Pyramids, and to minimize losses and maximize power, this reservoir would have to be several hundred meters above a lower reservoir and yet close to it horizontally.

“The solution is to excavate an underground reservoir many hundreds of meters below surface level and to exchange water between it and a surface reservoir created immediately above it and diked using spoil from the excavation. This variation of hydro storage is called underground pumped hydro,” Pickard says.

Such a facility could be put almost anywhere that there was low-quality land underlain with competent rock — in industrial brownfields, for example.

But, says Pickard, “if underground pumped hydro is so great, how come it does not yet exist?” Perhaps because to displace an entrenched technology, the new technology must be clearly superior under present conditions, he says. But the superiority of pumped hydro may become “starkly manifest” only in the future.

Pickard says it is important to remember that there are moral as well as economic and technical dimensions to the intermittency challenge. If our generation lets the matter slide, “our descendants will be saddled with the detritus of a wastrel lifestyle.”

The entire issue is available free to the WUSTL community here.

Other readers must either benefit from institutional subscriptions or purchase the issue.

EnWeek 2012: Inspiring future engineers

2012-02-28 00:00:00

Kevin Lowder (above); whitney curtis (below)

Oh, for a bit of wrought iron. Using tried-and-true triangular trusses — a staple of high-quality engineering the world over — high school girls, under the watchful eye of Lesley Olson (center), a junior in chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, compete to erect the tallest marshmallow and toothpick tower during Engineering Olympics Feb. 25 on the final day of Engineering Week. The girls — (from left) Kaity Parsons of Fort Zumwalt North High School; Jennifer Chen of Fort Zumwalt West High School; Olson; Jasmine Hyatt of Edwardsville High School; Ginnie Kim of Thomas Jefferson School; and Rachel Rone of Notre Dame High School — were hosted for a day of engineering by the Society of Women’s Engineers. EnWeek began Feb. 19 (below) with a meet-and-greet in fashionable decorated hard hats, like the one to which sophomore engineering student Emily Storey is giving finishing touches. Other activities throughout the week included Lego engineering, "Capture the Flag" with Nerf guns and a paper airplane competition.

No Boundaries: Women Leaders of Washington University

2012-02-23 00:00:00

“No Boundaries: Women Leaders of Washington University,” an intergenerational discussion group, will be held from 3-4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 6, in Brown Hall Lounge. An RSVP is required by Tuesday, Feb. 28.

The event will feature an exchange of ideas and experiences with young women of Washington University who have demonstrated leadership in sports, academics, the community and more. Learn what is unique and what is common about how different generations of women pursue their passions.

To RSVP visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MEETTHELEADERS or contact Kitty Conroy at conroyr@wustl.edu, (314) 935-9104.

The Meet the Leaders series is sponsored by the WUSTL Woman’s Club with the Gephardt Institute for Public Service and the Office of the Provost.

For more information on the Meet the Leaders series, contact Kitty Conroy at conroyr@wustl.edu or 314-935-9104.

Open forum on 2012 election year activities at WUSTL

2012-02-23 00:00:00

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service at Washington University invites student groups, centers, departments and schools, as well as individual members of the university community, to join an open discussion about plans for the 2012 election year.

The meeting will be held from 4-5:30 p.m. Monday, March 5, in the Multipurpose Room, lower level of Mallinckrodt Center on the Danforth Campus.

This forum will help the institute coordinate activities through fall 2012 including voter registration, voter education, speakers and panel discussions on issues, election watch parties and other programming related to politics. Anyone interested in hosting such activities or in brainstorming ideas is welcome to join the discussion.

This meeting will lead to a smaller working committee that will help develop and support a broad range of non-partisan services and programs that increase interest and participation in civic life.

RSVP to Program Director Robin Hattori at rhattori@wustl.edu or 314-935-8628 by March 1 with name and affiliation. Those unable to attend the initial meeting can contact Hattori to be added to the correspondence list.

WUSTL professor Weinberger receives NSF CAREER award

2012-02-16 00:00:00

Weinberger

Kilian Q. Weinberger, PhD, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER award) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The awards are given “in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization” with the goal of “building a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.”

Eighteen CAREER awards are currently “active” at Washington University in St. Louis.

Weinberger will use the projected five-year, $440,000 award to perfect a type of machine learning that could be useful for a broad array of applications.

Weinberger’s CAREER project, “New Directions for Metric Learning,” seeks to solve one of the fundamental problems of machine learning: how to compare individual texts, images or sounds. If an algorithm could perfectly determine whether two instances of a data type are similar or dissimilar, most subsequent machine learning and data analysis tasks would become trivial, he says.

“A common similarity measure between two data instances is the total squared difference of their attributes,” Weingberger says. “With this metric, similar instances end up close together and dissimilar instances are far apart. Although this distance is a convenient and intuitive measure of similarity, it ignores the fact that the meaning of similarity is inherently task-and data-dependent.

“For example, one person might be interested in organizing articles by author, whereas a second might organize them by topic. Given the nature of their respective tasks, both should use very different metrics to measure document similarity.”

To deal with this difficulty, domain experts adjust their data representations by hand — but this is not a robust approach. It would be better if a software program could “learn” the metric (or data representation) that works best for each specific application, and this is the approach Weinberger plans to take.

“Such a metric can be learned,” Weinberger says, “by mapping the digital representation of the data into a high-dimensional representation, which is then deformed to move similar points closer together while keeping dissimilar data instances apart.

Weinberger’s birthday cake, made by a research colleague, is a schematic representation of data where similar points are pulled close together and dissimilar points moved apart by the deformation of the space they occupy. On the cake, the green points have moved closer to the green dot in the center, whereas the blue and red points have moved farther away from it.

"For illustration, imagine a sheet of paper with little dots. In a three-dimensional space you can fold the piece of paper such that any two points become close. If you want to move many pairs of points together at the same time, you might need several thousand dimensions. “

Weinberger expects medical screening will be one of the first applications for the new metric learning methods.

For the educational component of his grant, he plans to develop a K-12 curriculum module about machine learning, which he hopes will show students how fundamental mathematics is to the technologies they use in daily life.

Weinberger joined the WUSTL faculty in 2010 after a stint as a research scientist at Yahoo Research in Santa Clara, Calif., where he worked on spam filtering algorithms, multimedia search, high-dimensional data analysis and machine learning. His work on metric learning has won several outstanding paper awards.

Weinberger earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science in 2002 from Oxford University in England, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in 2004 and 2007 in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Less lively aluminum baseball bats change game

Diana Lutz — 2012-02-17 00:00:00

Baseball is considered relatively safe, but its reputation was established in the era of wooden bats. Aluminum bats, introduced in the 1970s, had an enormous “trampoline effect” and made the game more dangerous.

A 90-mph pitch could come off a lively aluminum bat at 108 mph and reach the pitcher 0.375 seconds later, leaving him no time to react when the ball was hit right back at him.

In fact, several high school players were severely injured and at least two killed by scorching line drives.

In 2003, 18-year-old Brandon Patch was killed by a line drive when he was pitching for his team in Montana. In 2009, his family won a verdict against the maker of the Louisville slugger for his death.

In 2010, a 13-year-old Vermont pitcher also was killed by a line drive.

Last year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association required all aluminum bats used in college play to meet a new performance standard designed to limit the exit speed of the ball off the bat. This year, the National Federation of State High School Associations also has implemented the new standard.

With spring training beginning at all levels this month, David A. Peters, PhD, the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis, explains the new standard.

WUSTL baseball head coach Steve Duncan, and WUSTL hitting coach and Rawlings category manager for bats Kyle Murphy also comment on the new bats and how they have affected play.

First the balls

Peters, an avid baseball fan, has made 32 video vignettes about the physics of baseball for Cardinal Nation, the St. Louis Cardinals fan club.

“Three things come into play when a baseball comes off a bat,” Peters says. “The speed of the balls coming in; the speed the bat’s being swung — the speed of the bat hit; and then how much energy is lost in that collision.”

The energy lost in the collision depends on how bouncy the ball is and how springy the bat. That bounciness, or springiness, is technically known as the coefficient of restitution, a measure of how much energy the ball or bat gives back after being deformed by an impact.

As a general rule, wood bats made of white ash, the traditional material, give very little and store little energy. But what little they store they give back efficiently. The ball, on the other hand, distorts a lot under impact but is relatively inefficient in giving it back, losing the kinetic energy as heat. This is why a game played with wood bats is relatively safe.

But players are always trying to figure an angle, Peters says.

In the early days of the game, it was often the ball that was “cooked” or “juiced,” so in the late 1960s a standard was introduced to limit variations among balls.

The rule is that a ball shot from an air cannon at 85 feet per second at a wall of northern white ash must rebound with a speed of between 43.7 and 49.1 feet per second.

That gives it a coefficient of restitution of about 0.55, meaning the ball loses in the impact roughly 70 percent of the energy it had coming in.

In contrast, a golf ball is much bouncier; it has a coefficient of restitution of about 0.78.

Then the bats

Hot bats became an issue when aluminum bats were introduced in the 1970s. Because aluminum bats are lighter, they can be swung faster than a wooden bat, and that made the balls come off faster.

The big difference between the wooden and aluminum bats, however, was again the coefficient of restitution, called the trampoline effect in the case of the bats.

The hollow aluminum bats flex more when they’re hit and allow the bat to stay in contact for a longer time, imparting more energy to the ball.

Peters says we’ve all seen the difference this makes in the sport of pole vaulting. The poles, like the bats, were originally made of ash but are now made of tubular aluminum.

“The old poles were rigid,” he says, “but now the pole bends halfway down and springs back, flipping the vaulter over the bar.

“Aluminum bats can be engineered to have any amount of rebound one wants by designing the thickness and shape distribution of the bat,” he says.

In fact, after the introduction of aluminum bats, bat designers went a bit overboard. Bats made of titanium, for example, had such an enormous trampoline effect that they were quickly banned.

Another troublesome design that resulted in law suits was the “Air Attack” bat made by Louisville Slugger. It has a pressurized bladder inside that compresses on impact and then expands fast enough to help propel the ball.

http://youtu.be/ww83-wXCn1o

The new bat standard

The old standard for bats, Peters explains, was the Ball Exit Speed Ratio, or BESR standard. A simple ratio, it consisted of the speed of the ball coming in divided by its speed going out.

“Now they’re saying that doesn’t really tell you much about the bat, because many factors contribute to those speeds,” Peters says.

The new standard, the Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution, or BBCOR, includes the same speed ratio but adds a correction for the coefficient of restitution of the ball used in the test and another correction for the coefficient of restitution of the bat.

According to the standard, a bat’s BBCOR can be no higher than 0.500, meaning that a ball will give up half of its energy in its collision of the bat.

The effect of the standard is to deaden aluminum bats, making them perform more like the traditional white ash bats —but not quite.

According to lab studies, the BBCOR of an old BESR aluminum bat is about 15.5 percent higher than the BBCOR of a wood bat while the new aluminum bats have a BBCOR 10.7 percent higher than wood bats.

Peters, for one, isn’t sorry to see the new standard put in place. Baseball has been and should remain a game of strategy rather than of speed, he says.

What it means for play

At a clinic for St. Louis-area high school coaches Feb 11, Duncan spoke about the effects the new bats had on NCAA play last year.

Steve Duncan with data from Gary Brown, NCAA

Home runs per game peaked in the last three years in which the NCAA used BESR bats bats (2007-2010). Wood bats were last used in the NCAA in 1973.

In the last three years in which the NCAA used BESR bats, runs increased 14 percent and home runs increased by 38 percent, Duncan says. “In general, the BESR bats shifted the advantage from the defense to the offense.

“The BBCOR bats diminish offense. If statistics are a guide, they effectively take the offensive side of the game back to the 1970s,” Duncan says. “We’re seeing nearly the same statistics as in 1973, the last year that wood bats were used in the NCAA.”

In general, he told the coaches, expect:

Quicker games;
Less offense;
Need for better hitting fundamentals, players must swing; faster and more accurately to get the same results;
Increased emphasis on speed;
Increased emphasis on defense;
Increased emphasis on pitching; and
Need for improved strength and coordination; bat is weaker so players need to be stronger.

Steve Duncan with data from Gary Brown, NCAA

One nonobvious consequence of the change to BBCOR bats in the NCAA is that games are now half an hour shorter than they were the last year BESR bats were used.

“I’m a fan of the new regulations,” Duncan says. “By reducing the margin of error, they benefit the good players at the expense of players who had poor hitting fundamentals but were saved by a bat that could perform miracles.”

How the bats are made

According to Murphy, the challenge with the BESR bats was to make the walls as thin as possible to get the most rebound. “And of course you could make the walls thinner with higher grades of alloy and then with composites when they came into the game,” he says.

“In order to pass BBCOR, you had to make the walls much thicker. There are a couple of ways of doing that. Some makers have put metal rings inside the bats. Like putting cinder blocks under a trampoline, that limited the rebound of the bat.

“At Rawlings, we took a different approach,” he says. “We used what’s called a double-butting procedure, and the bat is thin-walled all the way up to the sweet spot, or where the BBCOR test is taken. It’s a thicker wall in that region and then we thin it out again at the end.

“That way, BBCOR bats are better balanced. We’re trying to make the best-balanced bat on the market. The more balanced the bat, the faster the bat speed, the faster the bat speed, the farther the ball will go.”

Murphy also likes what the new standard is doing to the game.

“I think it really brings pitching back into the game,” he says. “It’s going to make the player a whole lot better. There’s such a thing as an ‘aluminum bat swing,’ and that was guys who weren’t mechanically right with their swings but could get away with it because they could hit singles or doubles off their hands or off the end of the bat.

“Now you have to focus on your fundamentals because you’re not going to get away with a ball off the hands being a single anymore.

“It’s also good for scouting,” he says, “because they can really evaluate which players are going to be able to transition to a wood bat in the pros.

“It’s a different game now with BBCOR, but it’s all for the better,” Murphy says.

Engineering Week on campus begins Feb. 19

2012-02-15 00:00:00

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis will host a week of special events beginning Sunday, Feb. 19, to inspire current and future engineers.

WUSTL’s EnWeek is one of many similar celebrations taking place at engineering schools across the country under the auspices of the National Engineers Week Foundation.

The National Engineers Week Foundation, a coalition of more than 100 professional societies, major corporations and government agencies, is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers among young students.

Engineers Week also raises public understanding and appreciation of engineers’ contributions to society. Founded in 1951, engineers week is among the oldest of America's professional outreach efforts.

On Sunday, Feb. 19, the engineers will let off steam by decorating hard hats with stickers and rhinestones and making wallets out of duct tape on the South 40.

The remainder of the week is packed with fun and informative events related to engineering and WUSTL’s engineering school.

Among the activities students will participate in throughout the week are:

games of “Capture the Flag” with Nerf guns in and around Lopata, Urbauer, Bryan and Jolley halls;
a hunt for the “golden mouse” throughout campus;
attending a fair where students will learn about undergraduate research positions in university labs;
a paper airplane competition in which students design and test their own creations in Lopata gallery;
a penny collection for charity; and
a co-ed talent show in which students show their theatrical side.

On Friday, Feb. 24, featured speaker television host Deanne Bell will describe her journey as an engineer at 7 p.m. in the Laboratory Sciences Building Auditorium, Room 300.

Bell

After graduating from WUSTL with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2002, Bell began her career as an aerospace engineer, but went on to appear on PBS’ “Design Squad,” Discovery Channel’s “Smash Lab” and National Geographic’s “The Egyptian Job.”

The student organization Engineers Without Borders selected Bell as its speaker, remarking that she defies the stereotype of a “typical engineer” and exemplifies EnWeek’s mission of promoting a diverse and well-educated engineering workforce.

Bell’s talk is free and open to the public.

An additional component of National Engineer’s Week is "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day," designed to introduce girls to engineering professions. To close EnWeek at WUSTL, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is offering “Girls Day” Saturday, Feb. 25.

Local high school girls have been invited to campus for a day devoted solely to women engineers. The girls may choose to have dinner with SWE members on the South 40 the night before and, if they like, spend the night in a resident hall.

On Feb. 25, they will attend seminars and hands-on activities led by engineering faculty and student groups. After lunch, they will team up for Engineering Olympics, a series of mini design and communication projects.

The day will end with a panel discussion featuring women in engineering, including an undergraduate student, a graduate student, a faculty member and a representative from admissions.

The week’s events are sponsored by the WUSTL student organizations EnCouncil; Engineers Without Borders; the WUSTL chapter of the Society of Professional Engineers; Student Union; and the Society of Women Engineers.

Additional sponsors are the Woman’s Club of Washington University; the Engineering Library; and the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

For more information about engineering week events, including dates and times, visit: engineering.wustl.edu/engineersweek.

Wrighton comments on Obama’s 2013 budget proposal

2012-02-13 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton issued a statement Feb. 13 following the release of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2013 in which Wrighton noted the importance of our nation’s continued investment in scientific research.

Wrighton

Wrighton’s statement:

“The president’s budget recognizes the importance of funding for the kinds of basic scientific research that is carried out at great American research universities like Washington University in St. Louis. Especially in the midst of a challenging fiscal environment, I appreciate that the president has chosen to maintain our nation’s investment in scientific research.

“In the last fiscal year, the talented scholars, scientists and physicians at Washington University successfully competed for more than $600 million in research funding. More than $450 million of that was from federal sources, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“These awards allow our scientists to make important discoveries that encourage innovation and ultimately lead to better patient care, efficient energy sources, and new companies and products while at the same time preparing our students to be the workforce we need to remain competitive in this increasingly global economy.

“At Washington University, we are proud of the contributions we have made toward solving some of the most difficult issues facing our country. In the world of medicine, we have made great strides in recent years in confronting diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and we have helped lead the way in addressing some of the St. Louis community’s most pressing health issues, like obesity and the health disparities that exist between racial groups.

“Additionally, federal funding for research in areas like biology, chemistry and engineering is helping make America’s energy future more independent, sustainable and safe. Given below are just four examples of federally funded research at Washington University that have the potential to improve the lives of all Americans and advance our scientific understanding.

“The president’s budget will now be shaped by Congress and there are areas, like the NIH, that require increased funding to ensure continued U.S. leadership. I strongly encourage all members of Congress to support scientific research as a key national investment in our future.”

Federally funded research examples at Washington University

Cancer genomics — a path toward personalized medicine

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine are playing a leading role in an effort to understand the genetic basis of cancer. By decoding the genomes of cancer patients and the genomes of their tumor cells, and comparing the genetic sequences side-by-side, they can identify the unique genetic changes at the root of a patient’s cancer. This research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, has laid the foundation for applying a more personalized approach to cancer treatment. Rather than base treatment decisions on where cancer is located in the body, doctors conceivably could select therapies based on the underlying genetic defects in a patient’s tumor. To date, our scientists have sequenced the genomes of hundreds of cancer patients, which has allowed them to identify novel cancer mutations that are improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Alzheimer’s disease — improving early diagnosis, treatment

Scientists now think that Alzheimer’s begins to ravage the brain 10 to 20 years before signs of dementia develop. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine are exploring multiple avenues to detect the disease in its earliest stages and treat it before a patient’s memory deteriorates. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, they are leading an international collaboration to understand inherited forms of the disease, caused by mutations in key genes. As part of this collaboration, Washington University investigators soon will begin clinical trials of drugs designed to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Patients enrolled in the trial won’t have Alzheimer’s symptoms but will have inherited genetic mutations that make it certain they will develop the disease, often at a young age. If the drugs can slow or prevent Alzheimer’s in these patients, they could then be evaluated in others at risk of developing the disease.

Energy independence — making solar energy more efficient

An interdisciplinary group of Washington University science and engineering researchers, along with several other select scientists from academia, private research institutes and national laboratories, are working together to understand the basic scientific principles that govern solar energy collection by photosynthetic organisms, which use structures called antennae to collect and funnel light energy to reaction centers where it can be fixed in a more permanent form. Funded by the Department of Energy, the team plans to use this knowledge to enhance natural antenna systems and to fabricate biohybrid and bioinspired systems for light-harvesting. The overriding goal is to open the path to simple, robust light-harvesting systems with efficiencies equal to or better than the native photosynthetic antenna and that will contribute to revolutionary advances in artificial systems for solar-energy conversion.

Planetary research — exploring the global habitability of planets

Washington University’s Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory directed by Ray Arvidson,

PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, focuses on the surface processes and histories of Earth, Mars and Venus. Laboratory personnel have been or are involved in NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey, Mars Exploration Rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix Mars Lander, and Mars Science Laboratory missions. The laboratory also participated in the Magellan mission to Venus and the 2008 NASA Mars Phoenix Lander mission. The laboratory’s mission is defining the global habitability of planets, with a current focus on Mars and past and present conditions that may have been suitable for the development and evolution of life. As the home of the Geosciences Node of the NASA Planetary Data System, the laboratory is responsible for curating and archiving data from planetary space missions. This data is available for public access through the node. Students are also actively involved in the laboratory as a part of innovative undergraduate courses such as the Pathfinder Program in Environmental Sustainability, in which multidisciplinary approaches to environmental problems are stressed.

Apply now to spend three weeks in China next summer

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:37:59 CST

Wikimedia Commons

The Prince’s Residence and Garden from the Qing Dynasty located on the grounds of the Tsinghua University

Reluctant to spend another summer in steamy St. Louis? Consider taking a month to learn about China in China while helping Chinese students learn English.

Frank Yin, PhD, ambassador to Tsinghua University, a partner institution in the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, invites Washington University in St. Louis faculty and students to participate in Tsinghua’s annual English summer camp, which will be held from June 26 to July 13.

Last summer, WUSTL sent seven teachers and eight volunteers to Tsinghua. The same number will attend this year, says Yin, the Stephen F. and Camilla T. Brauer Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and chair of the department of biomedical engineering in WUSTL’s School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Tsinghua, one of China’s premier universities, is located in northwest Beijing, on the former site of Qing Dynasty royal gardens. The campus retains Chinese-style landscaping as well as traditional buildings.

The English summer camp is an intensive English language experience for Tsinghua students. Each day is devoted to lessons, lectures, and various activities, including seminars, song and dance competitions, and other games.

The camp is for students who have just completed their freshmen year at Tsinghua. The university anticipates about 3,300 students to take part this summer.

The camp’s goal is to increase the students’ interest and enthusiasm in learning English as well as to improve their basic English skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

WUSTL native or near-native English speakers are invited to join the camp as visiting teachers and volunteers.

Visiting teachers will teach English classes, give lectures on topics of interest, and help out with group activities. Volunteers will facilitate lecture discussion seminars and lead group activities, such as competitions involving music, speech and drama.

Teachers should hold at least a master’s degree or be a currently enrolled graduate student, and; volunteers should be currently enrolled undergraduate students.

During the camp’s three weeks, teachers and volunteers will be provided free meals and on-campus accommodations. Teachers will receive a stipend of approximately $2,000 in U.S. dollars and volunteers a stipend of approximately $470 in U.S. dollars.

There will be two days of orientation and team coordination prior to the camp (June 23-24), and both teachers and volunteers arrive in Beijing on June 21 or 22. Transportation between the Beijing airport and the Tsinghua campus will be provided.

To view the camp’s website, visit flc.tsinghua.edu.cn. For more information or to apply, email Yin at yin@biomed.wustl.edu.

The application deadline for teachers is Feb.22. The deadline for volunteers is March 15.

Teaching graduate and postdoctoral students to be successful teachers

2012-02-09 00:00:00

David Kilper

Kristin Powell, a graduate fellow in biology, talks to students Megan Yu and Liz Anterasian during a breakout session in an ecology course. The students were asked to identify the main ideas in a reading about pitcher plants and the next steps the ecologist should take to pursue his research questions. Powell is participating in a pilot project in which graduate students make curricular changes and then learn to evaluate the effect of those modifications on learning. The WUSTAR program is modeled on programs at other universities. If it is successful, the organizers hope to expand it to all of the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines on campus.

Washington University in St. Louis has joined a national experiment to develop a new generation of college science and engineering faculty, one equipped to excel in the classroom as well as the lab.

In 2003, the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). The center’s mission is to prepare science graduate students to be as bold and creative in the classroom as they are in their programs of research.

The CIRTL network has since expanded to 25 research universities, including Washington University. Organizers hope to have as many as 100 members in the next five years.

Supported by the National Science Foundation, CIRTL is working to develop a national faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). CIRTL focuses on the challenges of improving student learning and increasing diversity in STEM.

CIRTL, says Kathryn Miller, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences, provides a new philosophical and strategic springboard for individual campuses to develop programs aimed at giving graduate students in the sciences, engineering and math the skills and tools to be creative and rigorous in the classroom.

“CIRTL is organized around three core ideas, called the CIRTL pillars: teaching-as-research, learning communities and learning-through-diversity,” Miller says.

A foundational CIRTL concept is that improving one’s teaching boils down to the key question “What have my students learned?” This question, Miller argues, can be addressed in each classroom by adapting the experimental method familiar to scientists: hypothesis generation, experiment, observation, analysis and improvement. This approach is called “teaching-as-research,” Miller says.

“The WUSTL CIRTL learning community will introduce graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to ‘active learning’ and inquiry-based approaches to teaching,” Miller says. “We hope some of them will also participate in ‘teaching-as-research’ projects.”

As an example, she cites the WU-STAR (STEM Teaching-as-Research) internships, a pilot project that is allowing four graduate students to develop teaching-as-research projects in collaboration with The Teaching Center and faculty members Eleanor Pardini, PhD, lecturer in environmental studies and biology, Tiffany Knight, PhD, associate professor of biology, and Joseph Jez, PhD, associate professor of biology.

The WU-STAR interns are making curricular modifications to biology courses being taught this spring. With staff from the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning and Education (CIRCLE), the interns are learning how to evaluate the effects of these modifications on student learning.

They are also meeting with staff from The Teaching Center for weekly discussions of teaching-as-research. The WU-STAR interns are getting a comprehensive view of teaching-as-research and of teaching as an endeavor among a community of scholars — rather than an isolated experience.

CIRTL organizers envision that graduate students will take on the roles of “fellow,” “practitioner” or “scholar,” depending on the time they can commit to projects. The goal is that 20 percent of graduate students at member institutions be fellows, 10 percent be practitioners and 2 percent be scholars.”

“We’re particularly concerned about the postdoctoral fellows,” Miller says, “because graduate students are required to teach and to participate in training on teaching, but it is less clear how postdoctoral fellows can fit this training into their other responsibilities.”

The CIRTL website cirtl.net provides a virtual forum for formal and informal interactions among registered members of the center.

The website offers online courses about issues related to teaching, a café where people can meet for informal discussions at “coffee hour,” a virtual conference room for formal meetings, CIRTL-casts (webcasts) for one-shot seminars and an exchange program that allows graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who have teaching-as-research projects to present their work at other institutions in the consortium.

To learn more, interested faculty can contact Miller at miller@biology.wustl.edu or (314) 935-6859.

Visual nudge improves accuracy of mammogram readings

Diana Lutz — 2012-01-26 00:00:00

In 2011 — to the consternation of women everywhere — a systematic review of randomized clinical trials showed that routine mammography was of little value to younger women at average or low risk of breast cancer.

The review showed, for example, that for every 50-year-old woman whose life is prolonged by mammography, dozens are treated unnecessarily — some with harmful consequences — or treated without benefit. Hundreds are told they have breast cancer when they do not.

Cindy M. Grimm, PhD, associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, was not surprised by the review, a prestigious Cochrane review of the scientific evidence for a medical treatment.

“It’s not just the mammogram that’s the problem,” she says, “it’s accurately interpreting the mammogram.

“People aren’t good at it. Even expert radiologists aren’t good at it. Results vary widely from person to person, even when people have gone through the same training.”

But Grimm thought a perceptual trick she and colleagues had invented, called subtle gaze direction, might be used to improve training.

An experiment showed that a novice could be subtly guided to follow an expert’s scanpath across a mammogram and that this subtle nudging improved the novice’s accuracy.

The experimental results will be presented at the Eye Tracking Research & Application Symposium this March.

Grimm and her colleagues say the technique, should it prove durable, is widely applicable to visual search tasks. Not only might it improve the reading of mammograms and other types of medical images, such as MRIs and PET scans, but it might also be used to improve the accuracy of airport screening and learning in virtual environments.

Directing the gaze

Wikigallery.org

In this painting of a Jewish Quarter by the 19th-century Dutch painter Salomon Leonardus Verveer, the people in the center of the image are brighter than they would be in a snapshot, which draws your eye toward them. The walls of the buildings focus your attention toward the middle of the image as well. WUSTL computer scientist Cindy Grimm says similar tricks can be used to help people learn difficult visual search tasks, such as scanning mammograms for tumors.

Grimm invented subtle gaze direction together with colleagues Reynold Bailey, PhD, then her graduate student, and Ann McNamara, PhD, then of Saint Louis University, a conference acquaintance.

“I had double-majored in art and computer science as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley,” Grimm says. “So I was aware that artists have all sorts of tricks for guiding viewers to look at particular areas in a painting, sometimes, in the case of narrative art, in a particular sequence.

“They might make an area brighter than the background, increase the contrast or have strong edges (borders) that attract the eye.

“Movie producers do the same thing in post processing,” Grimm says. “For example, when one actor is talking and others are listening, the audience tends to watch the talker. But the producer can direct attention to a listener’s reaction instead by changing the color or brightness of that part of the image.”

Subtle gaze direction is a high-tech version of this time-honored craft. It works, says Grimm, by exploiting the difference between peripheral and central (foveal) vision.

“We use a small area in the central part of our retina called the fovea to see detail,” she says. “But foveal vision doesn’t actually cover much of our field of view.

“If you hold out your thumb, your foveal vision — the part of your surroundings you’re actually seeing in detail — covers about the same area as your thumbnail.

“We use our foveal vision to read or drive or for other detail-oriented tasks. At the same time, we are monitoring the rest of our environment with our peripheral vision, which has lower resolution but responds faster than our foveal vision.

“When our peripheral vision picks up a stimulus, our eyes move to focus our foveal vision on it so that we can see it clearly.

“During those quick eye movements, called saccades, vision is suppressed, or masked, so that the motion of the eye, the motion blur of the image and the gap in visual perception are not noticeable to the viewer. We lose an astonishing 40 minutes of vision a day to saccadic masking.”

Grimm, Bailey et al.

In subtle gaze direction, the modulation of the brightness (middle column) or warmth (third column) of a part of the image in the peripheral field of view is used to attract the viewer’s focus to that area. By moving the stimulus the viewer can be coaxed into scanning the image in a particular pattern. The stimulus is cut off before the viewer can focus on it and so the gaze direction remains subtle.

To direct the gaze, Grimm and her colleagues changed the brightness or “warmth” of an area in the peripheral field of view to draw the novice’s focus to this area.

The stimulus remained subtle, however, because the viewer’s gaze is monitored in real-time by an eye-tracking device and the modulations to the peripheral vision are terminated before the eye fixates on them.

“The idea,” says Grimm “is to get someone to look in a particular direction while altering their experience of viewing the image as little as possible.”

“In the case of mammograms,” for example, “you want to get a learner to look at the tumor region but you don’t want to do anything that makes the tumor region look different than it does on the mammogram itself.”

The mammography study

Reading mammograms is a good target for computer assistance because training is time-consuming and expensive, typically requiring a four-year residency and a two-year fellowship.

Despite advances in technology, novices are still trained by working as an apprentice to an expert.

The mammography study, led by Bailey, now an assistant professor of computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, brought together the same group of scientists as the subtle gaze direction experiment. McNamara is now assistant professor of visualization at Texas A&M University.

For the study, Grimm and her colleagues used a database of images provided by the Mammographic Image Analysis Society that includes both images and text files that contains coordinates of abnormalities and their size.

“Expert diagnostic radiologists have a particular search pattern that is not the same as that of a novice,” Grimm says. “We don’t know exactly what they’re doing, but they tend to do a fairly broad scan and then fixate on parts of the image that have a tumor-like texture. A novice might instead attend to brighter spots in the image or fail to scan all of it.”

Bailey hired an expert radiologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology to view and mark 65 images from the database. The expert’s scanpath was recorded during this process by an eye-tracking system.

During the experiment, subtle gaze direction was used to guide a group of novices along the expert scanpath. A control group viewed the mammograms without gaze manipulation.

In the study, gaze direction was used to nudge novices into following an expert radiologist’s scanpath (a simplified version of which is shown in green) as they looked at a mammogram. A potential tumor is circled in red.

Novices who were guided were significantly more accurate than the control group or a third group guided along a random path. Moreover, even though the training session was brief, the effect lingered even after gaze manipulation was disabled.

To watch a Power Point of the experimental results, click here.

Grimm says more work must be done to show that more extensive training will stick long-term. In the meantime, she can think of many ways gaze manipulation could be used to improve performance on visual search tasks.

“One simple use of the technology would be to make sure readers look at every part of the image. If you’re using eye tracking,” she says, “you know where people are looking, so you can make sure they don’t skip part of the image.”

Gaze manipulation might also be used to assist tumor-recognition software. “Suppose you had a software program that was reasonably good at spotting possible tumor areas but, erring on the side of caution, flagged too many areas as suspicious.

“Such software might be paired with gaze direction to ensure the radiologist looked at all of the flagged areas,” she says. “That wouldn’t necessarily be a training application; it could be a routine element of reading mammograms.”

The mammogram study is widely applicable, Grimm says, because there are so many visual search tasks. She mentions airport scanners, but they are just at the top of a long list.

“I work with someone who identifies pollen species,” she says. “Apparently, it takes a novice a year to learn, and they spend hours and hours looking through a microscope at these pollen grains. Again, some people are good at it and others struggle for competence.

“Perhaps in that case, as well, gaze direction could be used to train novice pollen identifiers.”

McDonnell Academy welcomes 12 new scholars from around the world

2012-01-20 00:00:00

A select group of research universities in countries throughout the world are partners in the McDonnell International Scholars Academy. Graduates of the 27 partner institutions are eligible to apply to become McDonnell Scholars.

The McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University in St. Louis welcomed 12 new talented graduate and professional students for the 2011-12 academic year.

The new scholars are graduates of one of 27 premier universities from around the world partnered with Washington University in the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.

The new scholars are: Naoko Akimoto, Chen Li, Richa Joshi, Li Yunzi, Li Weijie, Lin Chih-Chung, Leandro Medina de Oliveira, Bharatkumar Suthar, Wu Mengfei, Antonio Zanutto, Zhang Liu and Zhu Chuanmei.

Headquartered at Washington University, the McDonnell Academy enrolls exceptional graduate and professional students across all graduate disciplines at the university.

The McDonnell Academy Scholars are expected to be future global leaders. As such, they are provided not only with a rigorous graduate education at Washington University, but also with cultural, political and social activities designed to prepare them as leaders knowledgeable about the United States, other countries and critical international issues.

Employing an unusual approach, the McDonnell Academy brings together top scholars from Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America to pursue world-class education and research while forging a strong network with one another.

Key to this are partnerships Washington University has established with top universities and corporations around the world, with an eye to increasing opportunities for joint research and global education.

“In creating an international network of research universities, Washington University intends to develop a cohort of future leaders in a global university system and promote global awareness and social responsibility,” says McDonnell Academy Director James V. Wertsch, PhD, associate vice chancellor for international affairs and the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

“Since getting to know our newest class of scholars over this past semester, I know that they are making great contributions to the research effort at Washington University as well as enhancing the educational experiences of our domestic students through sharing their culture, history and the politics of their countries,” Wertsch says.

Academy ambassadors

Once selected for this highly competitive program, each academy scholar is matched with a distinguished member of the WUSTL faculty who serves as a mentor and also as an academy “ambassador” to the university partner from which the scholar has graduated.

The academy ambassador assists the McDonnell scholar in academic and professional life and travels annually with the scholar to the partner university to build relationships between the two institutions.

“The scholars, working with their ambassadors, help foster collaborative research and educational efforts across the academy institutions on issues such as energy and sustainability, international understanding and public health,” Wertsch says. “The academy is an incubator of new ideas on global networks in research and education and will continue to pursue new initiatives in the future.”

The McDonnell Academy organizes special events for the scholars, including leadership training, cultural opportunities, seminars and workshops with experts in key areas, conferences on crucial issues, and sessions in Washington, D.C., with U.S. government policymakers and grant administrators.

Scholar support

The McDonnell Academy Scholars receive funding for full tuition and living expenses for the time it takes to get a degree at WUSTL. The academy also provides support for an annual trip back to the scholar’s alma mater.

To help foster a sense of community, many of the scholars reside in two fully equipped and furnished apartment buildings near campus.

Funding is provided through a sustaining endowment gift from John F. McDonnell, vice chair of WUSTL’s Board of Trustees and retired chairman of the board of McDonnell Douglas Corp.

Additional support comes from 22 multinational corporations, foundations and individual sponsors. Sponsoring corporations also offer internships and on-site educational opportunities for the academy’s corporate fellows.

To view a list of the academy sponsors, visit http://mcdonnell.wustl.edu/sponsors/.

Partner universities

Partner universities in the academy are committed to excellence in education and research and to the importance of international collaboration.

The select group of worldwide research universities that are partners with the McDonnell International Scholars Academy follows:

Ankara
Middle East Technical University
Bangkok
Chulalongkorn University
Beijing
China Agricultural University
Peking University
Tsinghua University
Brisbane
The University of Queensland
Budapest
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Campinas
State University of Campinas
Haifa
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Herzliya
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
Hong Kong
Chinese University of Hong Kong
University of Hong Kong
Istanbul
Bogaziçi University
Jakarta
University of Indonesia
Melbourne
The University of Melbourne
Mumbai
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
New Dehli
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Santiago
University of Chile
Seoul
Korea University
Seoul National
Yonsei University
Shanghai
Fudan University
Singapore
National University of Singapore
Taipei
National Taiwan University
Tokyo
University of Tokyo
Utrecht
Utrecht University

Ann Rehme, Sever academic adviser, 60

2012-01-18 00:00:00

Ann Behan Rehme, academic adviser at the Henry Edwin Sever Institute in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, died Dec. 30, 2011, of pancreatic cancer. She was 60.

Rehme

She had worked at Washington University in St. Louis for more than 25 years, most of that time as an adviser at the Sever Institute.

Steve W. Bannes, program director of graduate studies in construction management at the Sever Institute, says that the Sever Institute programs serve working professionals whose lives sometimes throw obstacles in the way of their educational plans.

“No matter what the problem, Ann always took the time to listen to students and to do whatever she could to help them,” Bannes says.

“She was a deeply authentic person who represented herself and our programs with a great deal of character and integrity. You can teach someone the business of being an adviser, but you can’t teach someone how to care,” Bannes says.

One of Rehme’s advisees was Stephen P. Thibodeaux, a quality engineer at the Boeing Co.

Thibodeaux says he had reservations about attending WUSTL until he connected with Rehme. Rehme was “one of the nicest advisers I’ve ever had the pleasure to deal with,” Thibodeaux wrote to the school after hearing of Rehme’s passing.

“When I think of my enrollment in Washington University, I think of her pleasant personality and the encouragement I garnered from such a kind and dedicated person.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in education from St. Louis University.

Born and raised in Clayton, Mo., Ann is survived by her husband, Joel F. Achtenberg of Webster Groves, Mo.; and her mother, Virginia Behan Rehme, of St. Louis. Her father, Roy, Sr., died in 1985.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, memorials be sent to the Humane Society of Missouri, 1201 Macklind Ave., St. Louis, Mo., 63110.

Nominations sought for Civic Scholars program

2012-01-18 00:00:00

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service is accepting nominations for the Civic Scholars program, which recognizes Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate students who exemplify future potential for civic leadership.

Five to seven rising juniors will be selected based on their commitment to community service and civic engagement.

For two years, Civic Scholars take academic coursework with American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences, receive intensive leadership training, and form a mentorship network to prepare them for a life dedicated to public service. They also are awarded a scholarship of $5,000 to support a substantial civic project or internship for the summer after junior year.

“In my position at the university, I have the opportunity to meet many exceptional undergraduates,” says Amy O’Brien, program coordinator for the Institute for School Partnership.

“The Civic Scholars program is a way to recognize those students who are standouts in leadership and community service,” she says. “Last year, I nominated four students, and two were chosen for the inaugural group.

“I encourage everyone to nominate students who are looking for an experience that will shape their future in civic service.”

Nominate a current sophomore by Friday, Feb. 3, by filling out a brief form on surveymonkey.com/s/CivicScholarsNominationForm.

Self-nominations, peer nominations and nominations from faculty and staff are welcome.

Nominees will be invited to submit full applications by March 5 and the cohort will be announced in April.

For an application or more information, contact Gephardt Institute Program Manager Jenni Harpring at Jharpring@wustl.edu or call (314) 935-8182.

Global climate change: Ralph Cicerone joins WUSTL conversation

2012-01-12 00:00:00

Brian Wilson

Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, delivering the Princeton Environmental Institute’s 2011 Taplin Environmental Lecture.

Ralph J. Cicerone, PhD, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, will present a seminar on climate change at Washington University in St. Louis at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, in Room 300, Laboratory Sciences Building on the Danforth Campus.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton will introduce him.

The seminar, "Global Climate Change and Demand for Energy," is part of a conversation about climate change that began last October when a small group of faculty gathered in the new International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) conference room in Green Hall to brainstorm ways to put the entire weight of the WUSTL community behind efforts to address climate change.

"Contemporary climate change is seen in measured temperatures of air and oceans, ice losses from the Greenland and Antarctic continents and the Arctic sea, and sea-level rise." Cicerone says.

"Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere from human activities, principally fossil-fuel burning, are the likely cause of these changes. Earth's carbon cycle is out of balance, with more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere each year than can be absorbed by oceans and land so that future climatic changes may be much larger.

"The challenge of meeting energy demand without causing dangerous climate change is joining two other strategic goals for energy: access to domestically secure and low-cost sources," he says.

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Tyson Research Center and I-CARES. It is free and open to the public.

The seminar is part of a larger conversation about climate change that is being led by Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences, vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and director of the Tyson Research Center, and coordinated by Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, professor of energy in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and director of I-CARES.

Cicerone’s research in atmospheric chemistry, climate change and energy has involved him in shaping science and environmental policy at the highest levels nationally and internationally.

He has taken a leading role in the writing of the National Research Council series of reports “America’s Climate Choices.” These are authoritative analyses produced at the request of Congress to inform and guide responses to climate change across the nation.

The series includes four focused panel reports and an overarching report. The panel reports are: Advancing the Science of Climate Change; Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change; Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change; and Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change.

The overarching report is America’s Climate Choices: Final Report. All of the reports can be ordered from the National Academy of Sciences site: http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/sample-page/

“Its a great opportunity to hear one the nation’s leading scientists who was involved in the research on the topic and now leads a lot of the response to climate change, “ Schaal says.

An ongoing conversation

Schaal has long felt that the climate debate has not been moving forward fast enough.

As she points out, global warming has been a topic of concern since the late 1950s, when scientist Charles D. Keeling’s measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii first alerted the world to the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When Schaal took over as director of the Tyson Research Center last summer, she felt she had been handed a golden opportunity to act on her concerns. At the research center, which includes 2,000 acres of woods, prairie, ponds and savannas located some 20 miles southwest of the Danforth Campus, dozens of WUSTL faculty study ecology, biodiversity and restoration management.

Schaal quickly discovered that Pakrasi was thinking on parallel lines as he sought to find ways to engage the entire university community in issues central to the I-CARES mission.

I-CARES was founded in 2007 to foster institutional, regional, and international research on biofuels from plant and microbial systems, sustainable alternative energy and the exploration of environmental systems and practices.

Under the I-CARES umbrella are the Tyson Research Center and the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC).

“When I started thinking about climate change, it became absolutely clear in my mind that the entire institution should be involved, and we don’t have anything going on that is focused that broadly,” Pakrasi says.

By design, the initial group that met in October to brainstorm was small and comprised people from disparate disciplines. “We have anthropologists, we have engineers, we have artists, we have social scientists,” Schaal says. “The broader the better. That’s where you’re going to get the real synergies — among all the disciplines, not just science.”

The climate change conversation is one of three I-CARES conversations Pakrasi hopes to start this year.

A second conversation, “Building for the Future of Our Cities,” led by Christof Jantzen, the I-CARES Professor of Practice in the School of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration and dean of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, is getting underway this month.

What might come of a conversation

One purpose of the conversation, Schaal says, is to lift the pall of apathy that seems to have fallen over the topic of climate change.

“It’s so easy for people just to give up, and we can’t do that,” Schaal says. “Tyson gave me an opportunity to say, ‘let’s talk about climate change at this university, not just in science but across a lot of different fields, and see what we can do.’

“Let’s see if we can get graduate students interested — I know the undergraduates are tremendously interested. There are many things that can be done,” Schaal says.

“One of the problems with universities,” Schaal says, “is that it’s really hard to learn what other people are studying. But once you know what somebody else is doing, you can see really wonderful areas of overlap where there could be collaborations. So one purpose of the conversation is to locate the synergies among faculty,” she says.

Pakrasi says he regards the I-CARES conversations as similar to start-up companies; they will live or die by their success in engaging the university community.

“It’s up to them,” Pakrasi says. “They need to feel that this is important enough that they will do all that needs to be done.”

But both Schaal and Pakrasi are deeply committed to the climate change conversation.

“I view climate change as a tremendous challenge,” Schaal says. “Something that is going to be with us for a long time, something that I think our undergraduate students need to be aware of and educated about, and something that a responsible university needs to address.”

Pakrasi needs no convincing. His family was displaced to India from Bangladesh, widely recognized as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and already suffering increased rainfall, rising sea levels and ferocious tropical cyclones.

“Another foot of water will take 80 percent of that country below water,” he says. “It’s beyond getting worried, we need to prepare for the changes that are coming.”

Pakrasi remains optimistic. “The hope is always with the young people,” he says, “because it’s their future that’s at stake.”

For a video of Barbara Schaal introducing Ralph Cicerone’s talk “Climate Change Seen from Space and Earth’s Surface,” visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jd5A_FLOtc

MD-PhD student starts nanotechnology company

Caroline Arbanas — 2012-01-11 00:00:00

Joe Angeles

Washington University MD-PhD student Matthew MacEwan recently started his own nanotechnology company, NanoMed LLC, which is developing a synthetic polymer surgical mesh made of individual strands of nanofibers.

Matthew MacEwan is no ordinary medical student.

The neurosurgeon-to-be, a student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also is pursuing a doctorate in biomedical engineering. And at 29, he recently started his own company, NanoMed LLC, aimed at revolutionizing the surgical mesh used in operating rooms worldwide.

The lead product, invented by MacEwan and Jingwei Xie, PhD, a former postdoctoral researcher in engineering, is a synthetic polymer mesh made of individual strands of nanofibers. The mesh was developed to repair injuries to the brain and spinal cord but could also be used to mend hernias, fistulas or other injuries.

The nanofiber material has the potential to make operations easier for surgeons to perform. For patients, the mesh could lead to fewer complications after surgery because it naturally breaks down over time.

Existing surgical mesh used to repair the protective membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord is thick and stiff, making it difficult to work with. But the novel material MacEwan and Xie developed is thin and flexible and more likely to integrate with the body’s own tissues.

“It’s almost like a cloth,” MacEwan says. “But it’s designed on a nanoscopic scale. To put that into perspective, every thread of the mesh is thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a single cell.”

The technology’s promise has caught the attention of the business world. In 2011, MacEwan won the prestigious Olin Cup, sponsored by Washington University’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. The business plan competition recognizes startups with a high probability of success.

Then in June, he won the Licensing Executives Society Foundation’s International Graduate Student competition in London, and in November, the Idea to Product Global Competition in Stockholm. The winnings of more than $100,000, along with other investments and in-kind services, have helped MacEwan get the company off the ground.

“It’s incredibly exciting to see a product we developed make its way to the commercial market,” MacEwan says.

The nanofiber material was developed in Washington University laboratories by MacEwan and Xie, now a senior scientist at Marshall University in West Virginia, along with collaborators Younan Xia, PhD, the James M. McKelvey Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Zack Ray, MD, now a neurosurgical fellow at the University of Utah. MacEwan has worked closely with the university’s Office of Technology Management, which has filed patents on the technology.

Courtesy image

Fibroblasts (in bright blue), the cells that cover the surfaces of the intestine and other organs, grow along nanofabricated surgical mesh designed in a starburst pattern. The individual nanofibers originate from a central point and radiate outward, encouraging cells to migrate and grow toward the center for a wound.

Currently, many surgical meshes are derived from pig or cow skin. These tissues must be chemically treated and processed so that they can be left in the body. As a result, the meshes can be rigid and bulky, and difficult to shape to the convoluted surface of the human brain.

In contrast, the nanofiber material MacEwan developed is organized on a size scale familiar to cells and replicates their natural environment.

“We’ve taken the whole idea of surgical mesh and pushed it into a new direction,” MacEwan says. “It’s not just a foreign material you’re putting into the body. The nanofabricated nature of the mesh creates a scaffold that cells can easily penetrate and populate to recapitulate the body’s tissues.”

The surgical mesh looks like gauze but feels sticky, like a spider web. It is typically composed of multiple layers of nanofibers and can be cut to size for different uses. Once the mesh is placed in the body, cells grow along the individual nanofibers, which gradually degrade in nine to 12 months, leaving the body’s own tissue in its place.

One advantage of the new technology is that different patterns of nanofibers can be created in the mesh to promote the healing of different kinds of wounds. For example, in a starburst pattern used to repair ulcers and other circular wounds, the nanofibers originate from a central point and radiate outward. This encourages cells to migrate and grow toward the center of the wound.

For linear defects like tears and incisions, nanofibers can be aligned perpendicular to the wound, encouraging cell growth across the injury, which provides reinforcement to the new tissues.

“We can really manipulate and change the design of the material to optimize it for specific clinical uses and applications,” MacEwan says.

MacEwan is now evaluating the product in animal models, a first step toward gaining U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Preliminary studies indicate the nanofiber material is safe and effective. MacEwan is hopeful that clinical trials in patients will begin later this year.

NanoMed LLC is based in St. Louis. In November, Agnes Rey-Giraud, a former executive and board member at Express Scripts, joined the company to head business development.

For now, MacEwan is finishing his doctorate and has two years left before he receives his medical degree. He’s planning a career in academic medicine, where he can spend time in the laboratory and the operating room. There, he hopes to use the nanofiber surgical meshes he developed to improve the care and surgical outcomes of his own patients.

“At Washington University, I have continually focused on moving discoveries beyond the laboratory,” MacEwan says. “I hope to see this technology have a positive impact on many patients. Nothing would be more thrilling to me.”

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

MEDIA ADVISORY: McCaskill continues energy tour with Jan. 9 visit to Washington University in St. Louis

2012-01-06 00:00:00

WHO: U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill will participate in a roundtable discussion with Washington University administrators and energy researchers, and the region’s energy leaders on the nation’s urgent energy needs while addressing important environmental concerns.

WHAT: Roundtable energy discussion and tour of Washington University’s Ultrafast Laser Facility.

WHERE: Washington University’s Brauer Hall, Room 3015, near the corner of Skinker Boulevard and Forest Park Parkway. From Forest Park Parkway, enter Danforth Campus at Hoyt Drive. Turn at first left (east) into parking lot. Brauer Hall, dedicated to teaching and research in energy and environmental engineering at WUSTL’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, is the second building on left.

WHEN: Noon on Monday, Jan. 9, 2012

MEDIA ACCESS: The media are invited to cover the roundtable discussion and the 1 p.m. laser facility tour. McCaskill and other discussion participants will be available for interviews during the tour or immediately following the tour at 1:15.

WHY: McCaskill is visiting WUSTL as part of her statewide Hometown Energy Tour that began Jan. 5, focused on finding “practical, accessible, and affordable” solutions to meet the nation’s energy needs.

As one of the country’s leaders in the development of new energy sources as well as one of the region’s leaders in helping St. Louis become a worldwide center for bioenergy research, Washington University is playing a major role in the effort to provide clean energy resources to the world.

The university is also a leader in sustainability initiatives and programs. Among its notable accomplishments, Washington University is the first university in the country to ban the sale and use of bottled water throughout its main campus and its Living Learning Center shares the world’s first full “Living Building” certification.

The Ultrafast Laser Facility that McCaskill will tour is part of WUSTL’s Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), established with a $20 million research award — the largest ever on the Danforth Campus — from the U.S. Department of Energy to do research on novel energy initiatives. PARC researchers are studying forms of energy based on the principles of light harvesting and energy funneling.

PARC comes under the umbrella of WUSTL’s International Center for Advanced Research in Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), started in 2007 to foster research on energy, environment and sustainability that can contribute to rapid progress in addressing the world’s energy needs.

Introducing new faculty members

2012-01-03 00:00:00

The following are among the new faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis. Others will be introduced periodically.

Jan Bieschke, PhD, joins the Department of Biomedical Engineering as assistant professor. After earning a doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and a research group leader at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany. Bieschke’s research focuses on protein folding and misfolding and how these processes can lead to age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Bieschke aims to dissect and influence protein self-assembly using biophysical tools such as single molecule fluorescence, atomic force microscopy and sub-diffraction microscopy in order to develop new strategies to counteract protein misfolding diseases.

John Cunningham, PhD, joins the Department of Biomedical Engineering as assistant professor. After earning a doctorate at Stanford University, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in machine learning at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Cunningham designs algorithms for analysis of neural data, primarily in the motor cortex, both to advance scientific understanding of the neural basis of movement and with the goal of engineering neural prosthetic systems, also called brain-machine interfaces.

Kristen Naegle, PhD, joins the Department of Biomedical Engineering as assistant professor. After earning a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was a postdoctoral associate at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Department of Biological Engineering at M.I.T. She combines computational mining and modeling techniques with experimental molecular biology approaches to understand the function of post-translational modifications of RNA in the regulatory networks of the cell, particularly those regulatory events that are involved in diseases such as cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders.

Kedron Thomas, PhD, joins the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. Her research interests include international law, fashion and branding and indigenous entrepreneurship in Guatemala. She is co-editor of Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2011). She earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 2012. Previously, she was awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation, titled “The Ethics of Piracy: Intellectual Property Rights in Post-Conflict Guatemala.”

Lead levels in drinking water spike when copper and lead pipes joined

Diana Lutz — 2011-12-15 00:00:00

Joe Angeles/WUSTL

Old lead water pipes are spliced to brand new copper pipes in Dan Giammar’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis using either a plastic or a brass fitting. Homeowners end up with a similar setup if they decline to have their portion of a service line replaced. Giammar (above in red) has found that the juxtaposition of two dissimilar metals leads to galvanic corrosion that releases lead into the water.

Lead pipes once used routinely in municipal water distribution systems are a well-recognized source of dangerous lead contamination, but new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that the partial replacement of these pipes can make the problem worse.

The research shows that joining old lead pipes with new copper lines using brass fittings spurs galvanic corrosion that can dramatically increase the amount of lead released into drinking water supplies.

“Work done in our laboratory shows galvanic corrosion in joined service lines is significant and lasts for a long time,” says Dan Giammar, PhD, the Harold D. Jolley Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

His study, published in the Proceedings of the 2011 Water Quality Technology Conference, suggests that safety-minded, lead-pipe-removal programs at water utilities across the country actually may be increasing the risk of lead exposure for water customers.

An experiment running in his aquatic chemistry lab shows why. It features 80- to 100-year-old lead water pipes that were dug out of the ground in Washington, D.C., and shipped to his St. Louis laboratory. Some of the lead pipes have been cut and then joined with brass couplings to brand new copper pipe.

This setup mimics what happens if a utility company is replacing lead service lines and homeowners decline to have their sections of the lines replaced.

A service line runs from the main to the home. The utility owns the part from the main to the homeowner's property line and the homeowner owns the part from the property line to the house. The utility cannot replace the homeowner’s half of the line unless the homeowner gives permission and pays for replacement. In the U.S. only 10 percent of homeowners agree to the charge.

“Since you started with a whole lead pipe and you now have half a lead pipe, you might think your problem would be half of what it was or — maybe — completely unchanged,” Giammar says.

His experiment reveals that instead, it could be far worse. The joined lead-copper pipe in his lab releases five times more lead than did the original lead pipe.

The lead is released by galvanic corrosion, a process set up whenever two dissimilar metals are immersed in a conducting liquid.

The same thing happens if lasagna or another acidic dish is made in a stainless steel pan, covered with aluminum foil, and placed in a refrigerator. The two metals and the lasagna act as a galvanic cell, and some of the aluminum may migrate out of the foil and plate out on the surface of the lasagna.

Joe Angeles/WUSTL

The old lead pipes from Washington, D.C., must be “conditioned” for several months before they’d start behaving the way they behaved when they were buried in the ground, Giammar (right) explains to doctoral candidates Yin Wang and Vrajesh Mehta. To condition them, the pipes are filled daily with water that simulates district water.

The Lead and Copper Rule
The project to measure galvanic corrosion of lead pipes was the third Giammar has done for the Water Research Foundation, an organization of water utilities that allows them to pool their money to support research on problems of common interest.

Giammar, who calls himself a heavy metals guy, did his doctoral work on uranium contamination of soil and groundwater, work relevant to the far-flung branches of the Manhattan Project that purified uranium for the atomic bomb during World War II.

He still works on uranium remediation, but when he moved to St. Louis in 2002, he thought that he really ought to work on lead as well, because Missouri has historically been one of the two largest lead-producing states in the country. The other is Alaska.

Giammar began with experiments directed at understanding exactly what happens when phosphates are worked into lead contaminated soil. Under the right conditions, the phosphate will bind to the lead and immobilize it.

Phosphate remediation of lead contaminated soils had been successful in Joplin, Mo., a town located in the Tri-State district, an historic lead-zinc mining district that takes in parts of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

While Giammar was working with phosphates and soils, the media began reporting that lead levels in the tap water in Washington, D.C., were higher than before and indeed were higher than national drinking water standards allowed.

Lead, as Giammar says, is a “xenobiotic” element (literally foreign to living systems). Unlike some metals, it serves no biological purpose and only does harm. But lead pipes weren’t outlawed in new construction until 1978.

That the district knew it had a problem was remarkable in itself. The levels of lead in drinking water weren’t regulated until 1991, when the Lead and Copper Rule was passed.

The lead levels in Washington, D.C., drinking water began to rise in 2001.

The case of Washington, D.C., water

The lead levels rose for an interesting reason, says Giammar. The district water utility was trying to improve water quality.

In the U.S., he explains, water is delivered with a disinfectant still in it. There are two ways of chlorinating water to disinfect it. Utilities either use free chlorine, which is essentially bleach, or they use chloramines, which are essentially bleach combined with ammonia.

Free chlorine is a better disinfectant but it also forms higher concentrations of chlorinated disinfection byproducts — things like chloroform — that we don’t want in our drinking water, Giammar says.

In an effort to decrease the concentrations of disinfection byproducts, the district switched from chlorine to chloramine.

This is where the water chemistry comes in. “The lead pipe, in itself, is not much of a concern,” Giammar says. Pure lead, lead 0 as it’s called, is not particularly reactive or soluble, which is one of the reasons people made plumbing out of it. Lead pipes last much longer than iron pipes.

But lead can oxidize — essentially corrode. The lead species that then form determine how much lead ends up in the water. The various forms of lead in the +2 oxidation state are all more soluble than lead 0, but lead sulfate is more soluble than lead carbonate, which is in turn more soluble than lead phosphate. (The oxidation state of an element is a rough measure of how many electrons it has "lost to other, nearby elements that are attracting the electrons more strongly.)

When it comes to lead in the +4 oxidation state there’s a twist.

“If you have a strong oxidant, you can form species with lead in the +4 oxidation state,” Giammar says. “These have very low solubility but they’re only stable in the presence of a strong oxidant. As soon as the strong oxidant goes away, the lead +4 is no longer stable. It starts to come back to lead +2, and it can release the lead quite quickly.”

The free chlorine the district had been using is a very strong oxidant. The chloramines they switched to are less strong.

“So when they switched to chloramines, the pipe scale that had formed over years of chlorine treatment began to release lead into the water,” Giammar says. It was a classic example of an unintended consequence.

What the district case demonstrates, Giammar says, is that tap water is a manufactured product, not a natural resource. The water leaving the treatment plant can have essentially no lead in it, but by the time it reaches the faucet that could have changed.

The lead comes from the piping, but whether it is released depends on the chemistry of the water running through the distribution system.

Looking at water chemistry
When he read about the district problem, Giammar wrote a proposal to the Water Research Board offering to study the chemistry of the insides of pipes, particularly the dissolution rates of lead phosphates, lead carbonates and the lead +4 oxides, as a function of pH, added phosphate and disinfectants.

“That was our first entry into the field of lead and drinking water,” he says.

“We knew pH would be an important variable,” he says. “You don’t want your pH to fall too low, especially for the lead carbonates, which dissolve at lower pH.”

“But we didn’t realize how important pH was. We studied water samples with a pH of 10, 8.5 and 7.5. You wouldn’t think there would be a much of a difference between a pH of 8.5 and 7.5, but there was.

“In some cases, the pH made the difference between a lead concentration that met the drinking water standard and one that didn’t.”

St, Louis water

“You might be surprised to know that the pH of St. Louis drinking water is 9 to 9.5," Giammar says, “much higher than the pH of distilled water, which is 7.”

In fact, it is heading toward milk-of-magnesia territory.

He explains that the pH of the Missouri River is about 8, because the river flows through limestone, which makes the water somewhat alkaline.

The limestone also makes the water hard, meaning it contains high levels of calcium and magnesium. So when it reaches the St. Louis water treatment plants, the pH is raised to between 10 and 11 to precipitate out some of the calcium carbonate and soften the water. The water utility then lets the pH drift back down to somewhere between 9 and 9.5 before the water is delivered.

“It’s a nice stable water with good water chemistry,” Giammar says. “Quite non-corrosive, has a good stable pH. They do all right with their distribution system,” he says.

By the way, St. Louis water is disinfected with chloramines rather than chlorine.

Phosphate also turned out to be important. “It had a huge impact on the dissolution rates of all the lead corrosion products we studied,” says Giammar.

So one way to bring down lead levels is to add phosphate. But phosphate costs money, so the utilities want to add as little of it as they can to produce a good-quality water.

“It’s never going to be a one-size-fits all solution because the source-water compositions are different,” says Giammar, “but we came up with some pretty strong recommendations.”

The final report on the project, “Influence of Water Chemistry on the Dissolution and Transformation Rates of Lead Corrosion Products,” was published last year.

Should you let the tap run?
“Another thing we studied in that first project,” Giammar says, “was whether we should be more worried about reaction rates or about the equilibrium state of the reactions.

“To put it another way, if you let the water sit in the pipes for six hours, will it be different from water that sat in the pipes for only an hour?”

It turned out that most lead species dissolve relatively quickly, so reaction rates are not particularly important. The water is the same no matter how long the water has been sitting in the pipes.

But this isn’t true of the lead +4 oxides, the material that formed the scale inside the Washington, D.C., pipes. “They are never at equilibrium with the water flowing over them,” Giammar says. “Instead everything depends on the rate at which those oxides form or the rate at which they dissolve.”

So Giammar proposed a second project for the Water Research Foundation just to study the lead +4 oxides. “They’re fascinating solids,” he says.

Then Giammar’s lab picked up a third project. “A little over a year ago, I got a call from an environmental engineer in Washington, D.C., who was looking at something called galvanic corrosion and its potential to release lead into drinking water,“ he says.

This is the project that led to the centenarian lead pipe experiment now taking up much of the bench space in his lab.

Unlike some of the other water problems he has studied, galvanic corrosion is national in scope. The Environmental Protection Agency is concerned enough that it has appointed a science advisory board to make recommendations on how best to deal with it, Giammar says.

How low can we go?
It’s difficult to talk about lead in a sensible way. The current threshold for drinking water is 15 micrograms per liter, Giammar says. And while there’s talk in the community about lowering the allowable levels of some water contaminants, lead is not among them.

Environmental lead is ubiquitous and everyone has measurable levels of lead in their blood. We are exposed to it through dust and air as well as through water, thanks in part to the tetraethyl lead added to gasoline as an antiknock compound for 80 years.

“If your dominant exposure is through dust, there’s little benefit to ratcheting down your exposure to water even further,” Giammar says.

But, he says, because of the Lead and Copper Rule, water utilities now monitor lead levels. And he learned at a recent conference that during the most recent monitoring period, only 30 utilities had lead levels above the drinking water standard.

That may seem like a lot, he said, but there are roughly 54,000 water utilities in the U.S.

Brauer Hall receives six construction awards

2011-12-07 00:00:00

Kevin Lauder

Pratim Biswas (center), PhD, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering (EECE), and Patty Wurm, EECE lab technician, show Stephen F. Brauer, WUSTL benefactor and chair of Washington University’s Board of Trustees, the Jens Molecular and Nanoscale Instrumentation Laboratory in Brauer Hall. Brauer Hall has received many awards in part because of the complexity of the laboratory spaces it houses.

Stephen F. & Camilla T. Brauer Hall, a new LEED Gold-certified engineering building near the northeast corner of the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, was honored last month with a Project Achievement Award by the Construction Management Association of America (CMAA).

The CMAA award, which only is given to 11 projects yearly, is one of six construction awards recently garnered by Brauer Hall, home to the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering (EECE) and an incubator for tomorrow’s technologies that embodies the engineering school’s bold vision for the future.

The construction awards recognized Clayco, the project’s general contractor, and mechanical contractor Murphy Co. for following best practices throughout the Brauer Hall’s planning and construction.

The presentation of the CMAA award took place during CMAA’s national conference held in early November in Washington, D.C. Arthur J. Ackermann, associate vice chancellor of Facilities Planning & Management, accepted the award on behalf of the WUSTL team and Clayco.

“As the home of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, and with additional space for the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Brauer Hall is a hub for innovative research and education that is already leading to a healthier, more sustainable and cleaner planet,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Spencer T. Olin Professor.

“With its central location within the new engineering complex and its state-of-the-art distance-learning room, Brauer Hall provides endless opportunities for engineering faculty and students to collaborate across disciplines and around the world,” Quatrano says.

The 150,875-square-foot, four-level building includes 32 labs; a data center; a chiller plant; conference rooms; 60 offices; and two classrooms, including the 90-seat distance-learning classroom.

“I am proud of the many awards that Brauer Hall has received,” Quatrano says, “and I am grateful to the outstanding design and construction team that made these awards and this building a reality.

“I am also grateful to all of the donors, especially Steve and Kimmy Brauer, for their support and commitment for this exceptional facility that will serve Washington University, the region and the world for decades to come.”

Formed in 1982, CMAA promotes construction management, an array of techniques for defining the responsibilities and management structure of the project management team, organizing project controls and communication protocols, and identifying elements of project design and construction likely to give rise to disputes and claims.

“Brauer Hall has been a special project because we used a Building Information Model — a digital computer model of the building linked to a database of project information — to reduce changes, improve schedule and coordinate the design,” says Neal T. Schaeffer, project manager in Facilities Planning & Management.

Below are the other five awards recognizing excellence in the construction of Brauer Hall.

2010 Design-Build Award from Contracting Business

Design-build is a method of project delivery in which one entity, the design-build team, works under a single contract with the project owner to provide design and construction services. Design-build is an alternative to design-bid-build. Under the latter approach, design and construction are split between entities and contracts.

Contracting Business is a business-to-business magazine for commercial, residential and industrial contractors in the heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration industries.

Best Project Award by the Design-Build Institute of America’s Mid-American Region

The Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) promotes best practices in design-build, an approach that integrates design and construction services under one contract with a single point of responsibility. DBIA has 16 regional chapters. The Mid-American Region consists of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

2011 Keystone Award from Associated General Contractors

The Keystone Awards were created to recognize the best projects built by St. Louis area construction firms. The Associated General Contractors (AGC) is an organization that provides networking opportunities, educational opportunities and labor relations representation both in St. Louis and nationally, through AGC of America.

St. Louis Construction News & Review Regional Excellence Award

The Regional Excellence Awards recognize projects completed in the previous year that demonstrate excellence in design and construction and a positive contribution to the St. Louis community.

St. Louis Construction News & Review, now St. Louis Construction News & Real Estate, is a magazine that provides in-depth news and analysis of the St. Louis construction industry.

Best Practices Award from the St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers.

The St. Louis Council of Construction Consumers is an owner organization that seeks to foster the efficient delivery of capital facilities and maintenance by the St. Louis design and construction industry.

The Brauer Hall submission featured planning for startup of this multipurpose building. Because Brauer Hall includes laboratories, classrooms and administrative offices, startup required careful sequencing and scheduling of systems for the heating plant, chilled water, both high- and low-pressure steam systems, backup chillers and a server room.

Brauer Hall also received LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the USGBC in March 2000.

LEED certification provides independent, third-party verification that a building achieves high performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. Four different levels of certification are available, based on the number of LEED credits a building earns. Gold is the second-highest of four LEED levels.

Recognizing outstanding faculty

2011-12-06 00:00:00

Jerry Naunheim Jr.

Faculty Achievement Award winners (from left) Wayne M. Yokoyama, MD, the Sam J. and Audrey Loew Levin Chair for Research in Arthritis, professor of medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator; and Erik Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of biological anthropology, talk with Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship winners Jonathan S. Turner, PhD, the Barbara J. and Jerome R. Cox Jr. Professor; and Jerome R. Cox Jr., ScD, senior professor, both in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, before the awards ceremony Dec. 3 in May Auditorium, Simon Hall. During the program, Yokoyama and Trinkaus gave presentations of their scholarly work and each received a $5,000 award. Turner and Cox each received a framed certificate and an engraved Steuben glass bowl. The recognition ceremony immediately was followed by the annual Chancellor’s Gala at the Danforth University Center. For more information on the Faculty Achievement Award winners, visit news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22262.aspx. For more information on the Chancellor’s Award winners, visit news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22822.aspx.

I-CARES career development awards go to Fortner, Williams

2011-11-09 00:00:00

When Washington University in St. Louis created the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) in 2007, it set aside $12.5 million for the endowment and start-up costs of five new professorships in the fields of energy, environment and sustainability.

Donors have since stepped forward to endow two more I-CARES professorships.

Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, announced Sept. 19, 2011, that the school would use the I-CARES endowment funds to support junior faculty through career development awards until future I-CARES professors are recruited.

Two engineering faculty have been chosen for career development awards: John Fortner, PhD, and Brent Williams, PhD, both assistant professors in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering.

“Career development awards are wonderful vehicles to welcome young investigators to the distinguished group of I-CARES professors,” says Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, professor of energy in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and director of I-CARES. “I look forward to working with John Fortner and Brent Williams during the coming era.”

“As we compete with the very best engineering schools, it is often difficult to attract and retain highly sought-after emerging leaders, such as John Fortner and Brent Williams,” Quatrano says. “These I-CARES career development awards give our school a competitive edge as we build a strong international reputation in the areas of the environment, renewable energy and sustainable technologies.”

John Fortner

Fortner

Fortner was named the I-CARES Career Development Assistant Professor.

His research focuses on the environmental implications and applications of advanced materials.

He has studied the environmental fate, reactivity and impacts of engineered carbon nanomaterials, including fullerenes and carbon nanotubes, in aqueous systems.

Fortner also is developing nanoscale iron-based materials for detecting low levels of heavy metals and similar, metal oxide materials for novel, high-efficient, water treatment processes.

Fortner joined the WUSTL faculty in fall 2010. He earned a doctorate in environmental engineering from Rice University in 2006 and held postdoctoral positions at Georgia Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Before coming to WUSTL, he was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Rice University.

Brent Williams

Williams

Williams was named the Raymond R. Tucker Distinguished I-CARES Career Development Assistant Professor.

His research focuses on the composition, chemistry and physical properties of Earth’s atmosphere, particularly the role of biogenic and anthropogenic gases and particles in Earth’s climate system.

Williams joined the WUSTL faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2010. He earned a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed novel organic aerosol measurement instrumentation — which he deployed to study urban and agricultural pollution and the long-range transport of pollutants.

After earning a doctorate, he served as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota Particle Technology Laboratory and as a postdoctoral scientist at Aerodyne Research.

Williams’ professorship is named in honor of Tucker, who earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from WUSTL in 1920.

Tucker, who died in 1965, was an associate professor of mechanical engineering from 1927-1934, head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 1942-1953 and a three-term mayor of the City of St. Louis.

In the early 1930s, when he was an associate professor of mechanical engineering at WUSTL, he was active in promoting the adoption of an anti-smoke ordinance for St. Louis, and when this ordinance passed in 1937, he became the city’s first smoke commissioner.

Smoke pollution had been a problem in St. Louis for many years because of the large-scale burning of bituminous coal to provide heat for homes and power for businesses.

First I-CARES professor

Jantzen

Christof Jantzen of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts was the recipient of the first I-CARES professorship in 2009.

Jantzen is a LEED-accredited architect and founding partner of Behnisch Architects in Los Angeles. Headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, Behnisch Architects also has offices in Munich and Boston. The firm has designed some of the world’s most distinctive, ecologically sensitive buildings, including the Institute of Forestry and Nature Research in the Netherlands; Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hanover, Germany; and the Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Jantzen, a native of Aachen, Germany, earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and a diploma at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1985. In 1992, he earned a master of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica.

He has taught design at the University of Stuttgart, SCI-Arc, California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, and the University of Southern California as well as at WUSTL.

As an architect, he continues to explore architectural theory while maintaining a practice that is grounded in the realization of built projects that synergize design excellence with sustainability.

WUSTL receives Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations funding

2011-11-09 00:00:00

Tang

Washington University in St. Louis will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address persistent health and development challenges.

Yinjie Tang, PhD, the Francis Ahmann Career Development Assistant Professor in energy, environmental & chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, will pursue an innovative global health research project, titled “Using Fecal Sludge for Butanol Fermentation.”

Grand Challenges Explorations funds scientists and researchers worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Tang’s project is one of 110 Grand Challenges Explorations grants announced Nov. 8.

“We believe in the power of innovation — that a single bold idea can pioneer solutions to our greatest health and development challenges,” says Chris Wilson, director of Global Health Discovery for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “Grand Challenges Explorations seeks to identify and fund these new ideas wherever they come from, allowing scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs to pursue the kinds of creative ideas and novel approaches that could help to accelerate the end of polio, cure HIV infection or improve sanitation.”

Projects that are receiving funding show promise in tackling priority global health issues where solutions do not yet exist. This includes finding effective methods to eliminate or control infectious diseases such as polio and HIV as well as discovering new sanitation technologies.

To learn more about Grand Challenges Explorations, visit grandchallenges.org.

Tang proposes to develop a genetically engineered fungal species that can convert fecal sludge to butanol, a high-energy biofuel similar to gasoline. The fungal species could not only produce biofuels, but also kill pathogenic microorganisms in fecal sludge.

“Many fungi have robust metabolisms,” Tang says, “so there’s a good chance that some will be able to live off of different organic compounds in the sludge, producing molecules that can be used as fuels as a waste or byproduct.”

“Fungi also secrete alcohols and antibiotics that would inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria or organisms, always a concern when fecal material is recycled,” he adds.

“The Gates grant application process is very simple,” Tang says. “You just need to present your innovative idea.“But turning the idea into a reality will be very challenging, since we need to engineer a genetically stable and robust species that can out-compete native microbes in the sludge. That’s not so simple."

He'll know soon whether it will work. "We'll be testing our idea during phase 1 of the grant, which will complete in the next 18 months," Tang says.

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, Grand Challenge Explorations grants have already been awarded to nearly 500 researchers from over 40 countries. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short, two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have an opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

Introducing new faculty members

2011-11-08 00:00:00

The following are among the new faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis. Others will be introduced periodically.

Parag Banerjee, PhD, joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science as assistant professor after earning a doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to his doctoral studies, Banerjee was a process engineer at Micron Technology Inc. in Boise, Idaho, for six years, where he worked on D-RAM, S-RAM and FLASH devices. His research interests are the synthesis of nanomaterials with tunable properties using principles of self-assembly and self-limited reactions and the integration of those materials in biomedical sensors, energy storage and energy harvesting devices.

Danielle Dutton, PhD, joins the Department of English in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. She earned a doctorate from the University of Denver in 2007 and holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky, 2007) and S P R A W L (Siglio, 2010), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Believer Book Award and was featured in Harper’s Magazine. Most recently, she taught fiction and literature classes in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and was book designer for Dalkey Archive Press. She continues as editor of Dorothy, a publishing project, which has published books by Renee Gladman, Barbara Comyns and Manuela Draeger.

Josh Jackson, PhD, joins the Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. His research examines how personality develops across the lifespan and the effects that personality has on important life outcomes, such as educational attainment and health status. His work also examines different methods to best measure personality and assess personality across time and contexts. He earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011 with his dissertation titled “The Effects of Educational Experiences on Personality Trait Development.”

Kristina Kleutghen, PhD, joins the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. She specializes in cross-cultural perspectives on late imperial, modern and contemporary Chinese art, and her research examines the lives and afterlives of Qing dynasty (1644–1911) imperial objects. She is revising a manuscript titled Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in Eighteenth-Century China. Most recently, she was visiting assistant professor at Dartmouth College and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for 2011.

Charlie Kurth, PhD, joins the Department of Philosophy in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. His research interests are ethics, moral psychology and metaphysics. His recent work focuses on questions about moral objectivity, moral reasoning and judgment, questions about the nature of promises, and debates about the metaphysics of color. He earned a doctorate from University of California, San Diego, in 2010 with his dissertation “Rethinking the Objectivity of Ethics,” which defended a broadly constructivist account of moral reality. Some of his research has been published in Philosophical Studies. He was awarded Outstanding Paper Prizes by the American Philosophical Association in 2008, 2010 and 2011. Most recently, he was associate instructor at the University of California, San Diego.

Zhao Ma, PhD, joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. His research interests include modern China, urban culture, women and gender, and political and legal history. He earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2007 with a dissertation titled “On the Run: Women, City, and the Law in Beijing, 1937-1949.” Previously, he was assistant professor at SUNY Fredonia. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow in China studies at Washington University from 2009-11.

Paulo Natenzon, PhD, joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. His research interests include economic theory, decision theory and behavioral economics. He earned a doctorate from Princeton University in 2011. As a doctoral student, he was awarded the Stephen Goldfeld Research Fellowship, the Bernard Marcus Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Department of Economics Towbes Prize for Outstanding Teaching. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of São Paulo and a master’s degree in mathematics from the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (Rio de Janeiro).

Jay Ponder, PhD, joins the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences as associate professor. An expert in computational chemistry, his research focuses on developing and applying molecular simulation and computational tools for problems in structural biology, organic chemistry and materials science. His laboratory produces and distributes software packages that allow for the prediction and modeling of structural chemistry and the relation of structure to molecular properties. He earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University. He holds courtesy appointments in the biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences and in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine.

Elizabeth Quinn, PhD, joins the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. Her research interests include breastfeeding, breast-milk composition, cross-cultural parenting, intergenerational influences on human biology and health, human growth and development, developmental plasticity, and infant-feeding beliefs and practices. Her work also includes methodological applications, specifically the development of new techniques for the study of human milk and continued research into natural variation in milk composition within and between individuals. She earned a doctorate from Northwestern University in 2011 with a dissertation titled “Life Course Influences on Milk Composition in Filipino Women.”

Lucia Strader, PhD, joins the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. Her research interests include the study of the roles of phytohormones on plant development in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Her work has been published in The Plant Cell, Molecular Plant and The Plant Journal, among others. She earned a doctorate in molecular plant sciences from Washington State University in 2004. Most recently, she was a postdoctoral research scientist at Rice University from 2004-11.

Axelbaum installed as Stifel & Quinette Jens Professor

2011-11-07 00:00:00

Mary Butkus/WUSTL

Richard L. Axelbaum, PhD, the new Stifel and Quinette Jens Professor of Environmental Engineering Science speaks during his installation ceremony.

Richard L. Axelbaum, PhD, professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, is the new Stifel & Quinette Jens Professor in Environmental Engineering Science.

He was installed Oct. 31 by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton in a ceremony in Brauer Hall.

“Rich has been a tremendous faculty member, very creative, and creative in several dimensions,” Wrighton said. “I especially appreciate his leadership in the establishment of the Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization, but beyond that he has also been a key contributor in the development of programs in materials science and in efforts to improve our success in innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Rich has been involved in the founding of two companies and has been very inspirational in this regard,” Wrighton said.

After Wrighton’s remarks, Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, introduced Axelbaum.

“With input from leaders around the world, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering has identified key challenges for the 21st Century — many of which relate to developing environmentally sustainable and affordable technologies,” Quatrano said. “Our school is taking a global leadership role in addressing these challenges, and I am grateful to Rich for his significant contributions in this effort.”

Axelbaum is the director of Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization and heads the Laboratory for Advanced Combustion and Energy Research.

He served as the associate director of the Center for Materials Innovation from 2005-08 and directed the engineering section of the NASA Missouri Space Grant Consortium at WUSTL from 1997-2009.

From 1998-2007, he was chairman and chief scientific adviser for AP Materials Inc., a startup company he founded that specialized in flame synthesis of nanopowders.

Cabot Corp. acquired the company assets and technology in 2007.

Recently, Axelbaum has been involved in the start up of another company, Xtend Energy, which will help address the cost and performance issues of electric-vehicle batteries by making ultra-high-performance materials for lithium-battery cathodes.

In addition to his regular teaching schedule, Axelbaum has developed an innovative short course on energy and the environment that is offered to both students and industry.

Axelbaum studies combustion phenomena, ranging from oxy-coal combustion to flame synthesis of nanomaterials. His work on fossil fuel combustion focuses on understanding the formation of pollutants, such as soot, in order to develop novel approaches to eliminating them.

In response to global concerns over carbon dioxide emissions, he has begun developing approaches to carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Axelbaum’s materials research also has yielded methods of synthesizing — in flames — stable metal nanoparticles and single-walled carbon nanotubes. He currently is working on the synthesis of long-life battery materials for electric vehicles.

Axelbaum earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University, and a master of science and doctorate, also both in mechanical engineering, from the University of California, Davis.

He returned to WUSTL in 1990 as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and became professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering in 2008.

Stifel & Quinette Jens

The endowed chair is the culmination of Stifel Jens’ lifelong dedication to the twin goals of improving the environment and supporting the engineering school.

Stifel Jens earned a bachelor’s of science and a master’s of science, both in civil engineering, from WUSTL in 1932 and 1933; he died in 1995. Quinette Cowan Jens graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences in 1931; she died in 1997.

After graduation, Jens joined the firm of W.W. Horner and Human Shifrin, and soon developed a reputation as an expert in hydraulic, hydrologic, sanitary and drainage systems.

During the 1930s and ’40s, Jens served as a principal consultant in a nationwide study of drainage basins, as a designer of the storm drainage system for National Airport in Washington, D.C., and as a designer of the Houston water system.

In 1963, he co-founded the firm of Reitz and Jens. That same year he co-founded the American Society for Civil Engineers’ Urban Water Resources Council.

In 1970, Jens received a presidential commendation for his contributions to environmental excellence. He also received many awards from WUSTL: the Alumni Citation in 1973, the School of Engineering Alumni Achievement Award in 1985 and the Robert S. Brookings Founders Day Award in 1993.

The Jenses made many significant contributions to the School of Engineering & Applied Science, among them two endowed professorships, an environmental laboratory and graduate fellowships--all in environmental engineering.

Apply now for Bear Cub grants

2011-10-20 00:00:00

Washington University's Bear Cub Fund is soliciting grant applications from university researchers who want to move inventions from their laboratories toward commercialization.

The fund supports innovative translational research not normally backed by federal grants. Any WUSTL faculty member, postdoctoral researcher, graduate student or employee may apply.

Individual grants of $20,000 to $75,000 will be awarded in January. Applications are due Nov. 30.

The Bear Cub Fund was established in 2002 and is administered through the Office of Technology Management. Earlier this year, five Bear Cub grants totaling $240,000 were awarded to WUSTL scientists.

You can download an application and application instructions. For more information about the grants, contact Jon Kratochvil at 747-0923.

Jerome Cox, Jonathan Turner to receive 2011 Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

2011-10-13 00:00:00

Jerome R. Cox Jr., ScD, senior professor, and Jonathan S. Turner, PhD, the Barbara J. and Jerome R. Cox, Jr. Professor, both in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, have been selected to receive the 2011 Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, announced Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.

They will receive the award during the Faculty Achievement Awards ceremony at 6 p.m. Dec. 3 in Simon Hall Auditorium. A gala immediately follows in the Danforth University Center.

“Professors Turner and Cox are extremely deserving of this important recognition,” Wrighton says. “Both are highly regarded for their path-breaking research in engineering, but both also should be commended for their ability to turn their discoveries into commercial enterprises that have brought benefit to others.”

The Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was first presented last year to Jack H. Ladenson, PhD, the Oree M. Carroll and Lillian B. Ladenson Professor of Clinical Chemistry in Pathology and Immunology and professor of clinical chemistry in medicine.

The award stems from the university’s involvement in entrepreneurship and technology transfer and is given to a faculty member whose research has led to the successful development of an idea or business that has brought great benefit to others.

Jonathan S. Turner

Turner, who is internationally recognized for his accomplishments in computer networks and telecommunications, has helped enable today’s Internet.

Turner

Turner’s early work on high-performance packet-switching systems and networks played a central role in the development of Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology, a flexible, reliable and efficient communications technology that was developed to enable voice, data and video applications to co-exist in a common, high-quality communications infrastructure.

With colleagues Cox and Guru M. Parulkar, PhD, a former computer science and engineering professor, Turner has led a series of major research projects that has contributed to the development of high-performance network technology and multimedia applications.

In 1997, the three founded Growth Networks, a successful startup company, which developed high-performance switching components for Internet routers. In 2000, they sold the company to Cisco Systems Inc. for $350 million in Cisco stock. The transaction became a model for technology-transfer initiatives at WUSTL.

Turner has been awarded 30 patents for his work on switching systems and he has authored many widely cited publications.

Before being named to the Cox professorship in 2006, Turner was WUSTL’s Henry Edwin Sever Professor of Engineering. He joined the engineering school in 1983 as an assistant professor of computer science and served as department chair from 1992-97.

He is one of WUSTL’s first dual-degree graduates, earning bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering in 1977. He also earned a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

After his graduation, he went to work at Bell Laboratories, while continuing his graduate studies at Northwestern University, earning a master’s (1979) and doctorate (1982) in computer science.

Jerome R. Cox Jr.

Cox is a leader in the application of advanced technology for introducing new treatments in biomedical engineering. Like Turner, he is dedicated to the transfer of innovative achievements in the laboratory to biomedical solutions in practice.

Cox

With his research team, Cox has developed new computer methods for CT and PET scanners that improve the diagnosis of cancers and cardiovascular disease. His innovations were instrumental in developing early monitors for detecting heart rhythm disturbances.

While a member of the team that designed and developed new high-speed switching technology during the 1990s, Cox held the Welge professorship from 1989 to 1998.

Cox, who has been at WUSTL since 1955 after graduating from MIT, founded the Biomedical Computing Laboratory in 1964.

Cox is responsible for bringing the Laboratory Instrument Computer, known as LINC — along with its development team — to Washington University in 1964. LINC, which was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1962, is a contender for the title of the first personal computer because of its size and adaptability.

Applications for LINC began to diversify after the group arrived at WUSTL, expanding to include computer-assisted planning of radiation treatments, monitoring of heart arrhythmias, rendering of radiological imaging data and understanding of the molecular properties of new drugs.

In 1975, Cox became founding chairman of the Department of Computer Science, and guided the department's development and growth for more than 15 years.

Most recently, Cox has launched a new company, Blendics Inc., which makes Computer-Aided Design software that aids in the development of asynchronous computing systems.

Cox, who earned bachelor’s (1947), master’s (1949) and doctoral degrees (1954) in electrical engineering from MIT, was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree from Washington University in 2001.

Also during the Faculty Achievement Awards ceremony, Erik Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of biological anthropology, will receive the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award, and Wayne M. Yokoyama, MD, the Sam J. and Audrey Loew Levin Chair for Research in Arthritis and director of the Medical Scientist Training Program, will receive the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award.

Danforth Campus celebrates Campus Sustainability Week

Jessica Daues — 2011-10-12 00:00:00

Kevin Lowder

A tour of the Burning Kumquat garden will be offered Saturday, Oct. 22, as a part of Campus Sustainability Week.

Washington University in St. Louis will celebrate Campus Sustainability Week Monday, Oct. 17, through Saturday, Oct. 22, on the Danforth and Medical campuses.

WUSTL’s Campus Sustainability Week — along with national Campus Sustainability Day, Thursday, Oct. 20 — is held to bring attention to the achievements and challenges for students, faculty and staff in working to instill sustainability principles in higher education institutions and their surrounding communities.

Details on Danforth Campus events, which are open to the entire university community, are below. For more information about events on the Medical Campus, visit news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22786.aspx.

Monday, Oct. 17, Energy Awareness Day

3:15-6:30 p.m. Living Learning Center Tour, meet at base of Brookings Hall steps: Tour WUSTL’s Living Learning Center — one of the country’s greenest buildings and one of the first two buildings in the world to be certified as a “living building” by the International Living Building Institute — at the university’s Tyson Research Center near Eureka, Mo. Visitors also will learn about ecological sustainability research at Tyson. Transportation to Tyson will be provided. To RSVP, visit tinyurl.com/sustainabilityweek2011.

Tuesday, Oct. 18, Clean Energy Day

11 a.m.-2 p.m. Clean Energy Challenge Lunch & Learn, Brauer Hall, Room 12: Sponsored by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Clean Energy Challenge Lunch & Learn includes a panel discussion, Q&A and networking sessions with a focus on clean technology innovation in the St. Louis region.

The Clean Energy Trust’s annual business plan competition awards cash prizes to top cleantech entrepreneurs in the Midwest. This year’s competition has a $100,000 prize for students. Panelists will discuss the Clean Energy Challenge and the services their organizations provide to entrepreneurs and small businesses. Register for lunch at ideabounce.com/skandalaris/events or join the reception and networking at 1 p.m. in the Brauer Atrium.

Panelists are:

Isabel Acevedo, licensing associate, WUSTL’s Office of Technology Management
Vicki Gonzalez, managing partner, Nidus Partners LP
Ken Harrington, director, WUSTL’s Skandalaris Center
Winston Lazar, senior analyst, Clean Energy Trust
Erin Noble, director of community relations, Straight Up Solar
Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, director, WUSTL’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability
Martha Schlicher, bioenergy technology lead, Monsanto Co.
Suzanne Stelmasek, policy intern, Clean Energy Trust
Phil Valko, WUSTL director of sustainability

For more information, visit sc.wustl.edu/Programs/Pages/cleanenergytrust.aspx.

2:30-3:30 p.m. Green Hall and Brauer Hall LEED building tours, meet at Brauer Hall Lobby: Learn more about the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s newest buildings, Green Hall and Brauer Hall, both built to LEED Gold certification standards. Learn how they were constructed and what features make them more sustainable. Snacks are provided.

Wednesday, Oct. 19, Car-Free Day

1:30-3:15 p.m. Alternative Transportation Fair, Danforth University Center North Courtyard and Mudd Field: An activities fair promoting alternative means of transportation will feature free bicycle repairs, bicycle commuter education, food, and informational booths by Metro, WeCar, the Washington University Police Department, Velo Bear, Great Rivers Greenway and Trailnet.

3:30 p.m. Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Centennial Greenway trail through campus, outside Steinberg Hall along Forsyth Boulevard: Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration, and others will cut the ribbon for the Centennial Greenway bicycle route through campus. For more information about the Centennial Greenway, visit news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22506.aspx.

5 p.m. Bike ride, meet outside Goldfarb Hall along Forsyth Boulevard: Ride along the Centennial Greenway through campus, north to Delmar Loop, North Delmar along Ackert Walkway, east to the Delmar MetroLink stop, south through Skinker-DeBaliviere to Forest Park, and back to campus. The ride will be led by Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration. All riders must wear a helmet, bring a bicycle and be prepared for an up to 5-mile ride.

Thursday, Oct. 20, Meatless Thursday

3:15-5:30 p.m. Single-stream recycling tour, meet at base of Brookings Hall steps: Ever wonder how the single stream recycling gets sorted? Join us by visiting WUSTL’s recycling vendor IESI’s recycling sorting facility and find out. To RSVP, visit tinyurl.com/sustainabilityweek2011. Transportation will be provided.

6-9 p.m. Dinner and a movie — 100 percent local dinner and the movie Fresh, Ibby’s Bistro and Ursa’s Fireside: Enjoy a 100 percent local dinner at Ibby’s Bistro in the Danforth University Center and a screening of Fresh, a documentary that celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across the United States who are re-inventing the American food system, at Ursa’s Fireside on the South 40. To RSVP for the dinner, visit tinyurl.com/sustainabilityweek2011. The movie is hosted by the Congress of the South 40.

Friday, Oct. 21, Landfill-Free Challenge Day

Noon-1 p.m. Green Strum Project performance, Danforth University Center Edison Courtyard: This nationally recognized folk musician group makes their own instruments out of discarded/found objects. For more information, visit greenstrum.org.

2:30-5 p.m. Compost St. Louis Tour, meet at base of Brookings Hall steps: Eighty thousand pounds of food waste at WUSTL were diverted from landfills to a composting facility in Belleville, Ill., last year, and that number continues to grow this year. Follow your food scraps’ journey from WUSTL to compost. To RSVP, visit tinyurl.com/sustainabilityweek2011. Transportation will be provided.

Saturday, Oct. 22, Environmental Justice Day

10 a.m.-1 p.m. Environmental Justice Tour, meet at base of Brookings Hall steps: Learn more about environmental justice by touring industrial sites in north St. Louis City and meeting members of the communities that live near them. For more information and to RSVP, visit tinyurl.com/sustainabilityweek2011. Transportation will be provided.

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Burning Kumquat workday, Burning Kumquat garden behind Alumni House: Come join a workday at the Burning Kumquat — the student-run, organic garden at Washington University. For more information on the Burning Kumquat, visit burningkumquat.wustl.edu.

Noon-2 p.m. Burning Kumquat tour, Burning Kumquat garden behind Alumni House: Take a tour of Burning Kumquat — the student-run, organic garden at Washington University. For more information on the Burning Kumquat, visit burningkumquat.wustl.edu.

$ 2.2 million Department of Energy grant to build a fuel-producing bacterium

Diana Lutz — 2011-10-12 00:00:00

David Kilper/WUSTL

Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences and Cynthia Koehler, research technician, check on algal cultures in his lab. Pakrasi’s group has just won a $2.2 million Department of Energy grant to determine how cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) might be modified to produce fuel.

During World War II, German scientists discovered that some strains of algae, when starved of nutrients, quickly build up oil in their cells. The war ended, and the discovery lay dormant until people began to search in earnest for greener alternatives to fossil fuels.

In the early 2000s, algal fuel production enjoyed a tremendous vogue, as scientists and venture capitalists were seduced by the notion of converting “pond scum” to oil. But a recent wave of bankruptcies has made it clear that algae biofuel companies got ahead of the science.

To address this shortfall, the Department of Energy has funded a three-university collaboration led by Washington University in St. Louis to approach the problem of algal fuels systematically.

The principal investigator on the grant is Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, professor of energy in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and director of the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES).

In a two-step project, groups at Washington University, Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University will first attempt a comprehensive understanding of the metabolic machinery of selected cyanobacterial strains and then implement that understanding by assembling a novel bacterium with the metabolic machinery needed to produce fuel molecules.

Far from outrunning the science, the team will be bringing to bear the most sophisticated approaches contemporary biology now has to offer: systems biology and synthetic biology.

Systems biology is the discipline that takes into account the full complexity of a cell’s metabolic machinery before abstracting a simpler model consisting of the essential metabolic pathways. This route to simplicity through complexity — made possible by automated high-throughput lab equipment and powerful computers — stands to some extent in opposition to the reductionism that has long characterized biology but is increasingly unable to deal effectively with the outpouring of new data.

A systems biology approach integrates layers of information contained in large data sets that identify the molecules important to a cell’s metabolism and their interactions. The study of each layer of information is a discipline in itself; together they are informally called the “omics.” Pakrasi’s team, for example, plans to include cyanobacterial phenomics, genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics within the sweep of its study.

Molecular BioSystems

Transcriptome map for a particular strain of cyanobacterium shows the genes the bacterium is expressing under dark (blue dots) and light conditions (red and green dots), and the interconnections between these transcription products. By analyzing networks like these, researchers can find bottlenecks in a bacterium’s metabolism that might be addressed by genetic engineering. The image is from an article by Pakrasi and colleagues that appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of Molecular BioSystems.

“Although it might seem that systems biology would lead to information overload,” says Pakrasi, “the goal is to locate the control points, or the hubs in the network where many pathways intersect. This actually gives scientists much finer control over the organism than if they were to reach in blindly and replace one node without understanding what role that node plays in the complex network that gives the organism its robustness and resilience.

“It all depends on the questions you ask of the data,” Pakrasi says. “You want to know the important things, just as, when you look at a car, you want to know first how many cylinders it has, not how many nuts and bolts.”

The second step in the process, synthetic biology, gained notoriety when Craig Venter of human genome fame announced in May 2010 that his team had created the first synthetic bacterium. Since Venter’s team put newly constructed parts into existing but empty cells of brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), some said the organism was not entirely new and so couldn’t claim the title of the first entirely synthetic organism.

In fact, however, synthetic biology is an elastic discipline that includes any attempt to design and construct biological functions or systems not found in nature.

Yuri Gorby, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

An electron micrograph of Synechocystis, the cyanobacterium that will be used as the "chassis" for the assembly of a synthetic fuel-producing bacterium.

Pakrasi’s team plans to take a similar approach. In their case the “chassis,” as Pakrasi calls it, will be the cyanobacterium Synechocystis 6803 rather than brewer’s yeast. Synechocystis 6803 has been studied for more than 25 years and has the distinction of being the first photosynthetic organism to have its genome sequenced.

“The knowledge base for this organism is huge,” Pakrasi says. “For example, three years ago, we published a paper that included information not just from our lab but also from 17 other labs that collectively describes the behavior of Synechocystis at the level of gene expression under 151 environmental conditions.

“In many ways Synechocystis is a run-of-the-mill cyanobacterial strain,” Pakrasi says, “just one we know a lot about. The systems biology work we are doing with other strains will allow us to identify useful metabolic modules that Synechocystis does not have, and add them to Synechocystis as needed to create a family of bugs tailored to produce a range of fuels or fuel precursors.”

One of the reasons Synechocystis is such a good lab rat is that, even though it is called a blue-green alga, it is really a bacterium. As is true of many other bacteria, its DNA can easily integrate foreign DNA. The initial wave of enthusiasm for algal fuels, on the other hand, was based on micro-algae, which are essentially single-celled plants. The genomes of most of them are not as easy to manipulate. They’re also much bigger, more elaborate and less understood.

“People all started with micro-algae because they were already making a ton of oil,” Pakrasi says. “But guess what? So little is known about their biology that you cannot do anything with them beyond what they’re already doing by themselves. You don’t have the option to go in there and modify the genome or make changes in the cellular composition that will allow you to achieve your goal in a more facile way.

“People used to say, ‘Well, cyanos don’t make oil.’ That may be true, but we can engineer them so that they make oil, and that is what is happening now.”

The algal fuel industry is coming back to take a second look at cyanobacteria. “But,” says Pakrasi, “compared to us they are newcomers to this field; we’ve got a 25-year head start.”

Biswas installed as the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor

2011-10-13 00:00:00

Mary Butkus/WUSTL

Wrighton presents Biswas with a medallion installing him as the new Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor at a ceremony in Whitaker Hall Oct. 10.

Pratim Biswas, PhD, is the new Lucy and Stanley Lopata Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton installed him in a ceremony Monday, Oct. 10, in Whitaker Hall.

Biswas, chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering (EECE), is one of the world’s leading experts in aerosol science.

“Pratim is one of my great friends and colleagues,” Wrighton says, “and we’re thrilled with the leadership he is bringing to our Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering.”

Biswas also directs WUSTL’s Aerosol & Air Quality Research Laboratory (aerosols.wustl.edu/aaqrl), which is working to understand the formation of particles from the molecular state so as to prevent the release of unwanted particles from industrial systems and to design nanomaterials for applications in energy and environmental systems.

His research interests in aerosol science and technology are nanoparticle technology, environmental nanotechnology, air quality and pollution control, environmentally benign energy production, and environmental science and engineering. He has published more than 200 papers in his field.

“Pratim’s vision and especially his energy are very important to me and to this school,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, who introduced Biswas. “I am grateful for his leadership, his dedication and his ability as we work to develop the School of Engineering & Applied Science.”

Biswas serves on the steering committee of Washington University’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) and directs the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environment Partnership (MAGEEP), a partnership of 28 premier universities from around the world that is working to advance energy, environmental and sustainability research and education.

He has been a leader in the development of several major research initiatives, including the $20 million Department of Energy-funded Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), the $12 million industry-funded Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization, and the $2.5 million National Science Foundation-funded National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network.

Biswas is a faculty scholar in the university’s Institute for Public Health, stimulating collaboration between EECE and other schools at Washington University with the goal of improving public health.

He also serves as the ambassador to the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, a partner institution of WUSTL’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy. He interacts frequently with faculty there, several of whom traveled to his installation.

Biswas chaired the 15th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Aerosol Research and the Critical Review Committee of the Air and Waste Management Association. He also has served on the board of directors of the American Association for Aerosol Research and was an associate editor of the Aerosol Science and Technology Journal and a past-president of the American Association for Aerosol Research.

After earning a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in mechanical engineering, Biswas came to the United States to continue his education. In 1981, he earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1985 a doctoral degree from the California Institute of Technology.

He joined WUSTL in August 2000 as the inaugural Stifel and Quinette Jens Professor and director of the Environmental Engineering Science Program,

Lucy and Stanley Lopata

Mary Butkus/WUSTL

Along with the medallion given to Biswas (left), Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton (second from right) also presented Lucy Lopata (second from left) with a framed medallion in recognition of her many generous contributions to the university. Ralph S. Quatrano, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, participated in the presentation as well.

Longtime generous supporters of Washington University, Lucy and Stanley Lopata established this distinguished professorship in the School of Engineering & Applied Science in 1996.

Stanley Lopata graduated from Washington University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1935. Founding Carboline Co. in 1946, he built his coating and sealant company from a basement laboratory into a multimillion-dollar business with global reach before selling it to Sun Oil Refining and Marketing Co.

In 1986, he started Lopata Research and Development, which provides seed money for new chemical and technical products for industry. He passed away in 2000.

Lucy Lopata was born in Germany and attended school in Switzerland. For 60 years, she and her husband earned a reputation as two of the most generous and engaged people in the St. Louis area.

Touching the lives of many through her tireless efforts, she helped found the Miriam School for Learning Disabled Children and has directed her volunteer efforts to countless organizations.

From the Butterfly House and the Lopata Garden to the Missouri Botanical Garden or a sculpture garden at the Sheldon, Lucy Lopata has made the St. Louis community stronger in many ways.

Evidence of the Lopatas’ generosity and leadership may be found at Washington University in the endowment of scholarships in the schools, named spaces across campus, two professorships and the annual Lopata Basketball Classic.

In February 2011, Stanley’s Cafe, named after Stanley Lopata, opened in the newly renovated Lopata Hall Gallery. Quatrano took advantage of the occasion to present Lucy Lopata with a Stanley’s Cup, a thermal cup that all incoming engineering freshman received this year as a welcoming gift.

WUSTL scientist wins prestigious Presidential Early Career Award

2011-10-03 00:00:00

Yang

The White House announced Sept. 27 that Lan Yang, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

The early career award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. This year, there are 94 recipients.

“It is inspiring to see the innovative work being done by these scientists and engineers as they ramp up their careers — careers that I know will not only be personally rewarding but also invaluable to the nation,” President Barack Obama said in the award announcement. “That so many of them are also devoting time to mentoring and other forms of community service speaks volumes about their potential for leadership, not only as scientists but as model citizens.”

“I am pleased that the President has honored Lan with this special award for her world-class record of achievement,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

“She is a model for other assistant professors, and I have great confidence in her potential for continued future success. As only the fourth assistant professor at Washington University to receive this prestigious recognition since its inception 15 years ago, this award brings great visibility to Lan and her innovative work and to our school and university,” Quatrano says.

The other three WUSTL recipients were Shirley J. Dyke, PhD, then-assistant professor of civil engineering, who received the award in 1999, Michael L. Dusting, PhD, then-associate professor of pathology and assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the School of Medicine, who received the award in 2000, and Kelly Botteron, then-assistant professor of psychiatry (child) and radiology in the School of Medicine, who received the award in 2001.

Joseph Jez, PhD, now associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, received the award in 2005 when he worked at the Danforth Plant Science Center.

Yang received the award “for innovative research in microlasers on a silicon wafer and development of photonic devices with applications from opticalcommunications to ultra-sensitive biochemical sensing; and for pioneering studies of real-time, in-situ detection and sizing of nanoparticles using low-power on-chip devices.”

The tiny ring lasers her laboratory makes have many applications, including characterizing nanoparticle products, detecting impurities such as soot in air, and detect viruses or proteins in the bloodstream.

For more information about Yang’s work, visit her lab site, or the related stories to the right.

“It’s a very great honor to receive the Presidential Early Career Award,” Lan says. “Combining nanotechnology and photonics has allowed us to create devices that can do more than ever before. For example, we have built an on-chip optical resonator that can size single nanoparticles in a single shot measurement.

“With the support provided by PECASE, we will continue to explore the use of novel photonic devices to characterize nano-scale structures with applications in environmental engineering, energy and biomedicine,” Lan says.

Sixteen federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate the most meritorious scientists and engineers whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for assuring America’s preeminence in science and engineering and contributing to the awarding agencies' missions.

The awards, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President.

Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.

Yang will travel to Washington, D.C. to receive the award from President Obama.

Preston M. Green Hall dedicated Sept. 23

2011-09-23 00:00:00

David Kilper

The northeast-facing facade of Preston M. Green Hall provides a gateway to the university at the intersection of Skinker Blvd. and Forest Park Parkway.

A dedication ceremony for Preston M. Green Hall, a new engineering building on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, was held Sept. 23. The keynote speaker at the dedication was Charles M. Vest, PhD, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Also speaking was Stephen F. Brauer, chair of Washington University’s Board of Trustees; Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton; Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Spencer T. Olin Professor; Danielle Hoover, a WUSTL senior majoring in systems science & engineering; and Nancy Green, Preston Green’s widow.

Green Hall, the third building in a new engineering complex at WUSTL, is home to the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, the second oldest electrical engineering department in the country, and the headquarters for the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy & Sustainability (I-CARES), a center that coordinates university-wide activities that cannot be done by single investigators or by single disciplines alone in the areas of energy, environment and sustainability.

Green Hall also includes space for the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering.

Joe Angeles

Seconds after cutting the ribbon at the dedication of Green Hall, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Nancy Green share a smile.

“Preston M. Green Hall is more than a magnificent new facility,” Wrighton said at the dedication. “Generations of outstanding students will be educated and contribute to the discovery of new engineering knowledge in the classrooms and laboratories of Green Hall.

“As a gathering place for scholars dedicated to bringing benefit to humankind through new technologies, Green Hall represents a commitment to addressing the world’s most pressing challenges,” he said.

The 83,849-square-foot building, designed by the architectural firm RMJM and constructed by Clayco, is located at the northeast corner of the Danforth Campus. An archway diagonal to the intersection of Skinker Blvd. and Forest Park Parkway echoes architecturally the archway of the university's signature building, Brookings Hall, providing a dramatic entrance to the campus.

Construction of Green Hall began in April 2010 and finished last month in time for classes that began Aug. 30.

Green Hall includes three classrooms and was designed for 17 laboratories, with research already under way that includes medical and energy applications. For example, electrical engineering faculty and students are working on next-generation non-invasive imaging techniques that could allow for better understanding of brain function and the ability to identify patients at risk for heart attacks more quickly and accurately. Electrical engineers also are working on smart-grid efficiency and energy storage.

Systems science and engineering faculty and students are using mathematical methods to improve radiation therapy and model carbon-cycle feedbacks to understand global climate change. With physical connections to the engineering school’s departments of Biomedical Engineering and Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, researchers and students will be able to collaborate more efficiently.

“As part of the new engineering complex, Green Hall not only links and integrates multiple disciplines within the School of Engineering & Applied Science,” Quatrano said, “but its location just steps away from the Skinker Metrolink station provides a direct connection to the Washington University School of Medicine. These connections and other connections with the physical sciences are critical for the implementation of the research foci in our school’s strategic plan.”

Vest listed important innovations of our time that have come primarily, and in some cases exclusively, from our research universities: computing, the laser, the Internet, numerically controlled machinery, the fundamentals of the GPS system, the deployment of the World Wide Web, the genomic revolution and most of modern medicine.

“My point,” Vest said, “and the one point I’d like you to remember if you take nothing else away, is that this is serious business in which we are engaged. I don’t think there’s a job in America that is not based on utilizing one or more of these innovations that have stemmed from our research universities.”

He went on to list challenges engineering faces in a changing world, including the precipitous decline of American students taking engineering degrees, but went on to say that “this is without question the most exciting era in human history to be engaged in science and engineering” and that if “you really want to make the world a better place, there’s no better pathway through which to do it.”

Green is more than just the name of the building; like all of WUSTL’s recent construction projects, the hall was designed to meet LEED specifications for a Gold rating. LEED, the acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a nationally accepted rating system for the design, construction and operation of buildings that use its specifications for achieving environmental sustainability.

Sustainable features include: more than 50 percent of the building’s wood products came from sustainably managed forests; more than 90 percent of the construction waste was diverted from landfill; and 100 percent of irrigation is provided by captured rainwater stored in a turn-of-the-century brick sewer converted to a cistern.

Preston M. Green

The building is named in honor of the late Preston M. Green, an alumnus and benefactor of Washington University. In 2006, Chancellor Wrighton announced an $8 million commitment from the estate of Preston Green to support the School of Engineering & Applied Science and its Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, which is also named in Green’s honor.

In 2010, the Preston M. Green Charitable Foundation committed an additional $5 million to support the construction of the Preston M. Green Hall, bringing the total support to $13 million.

“It is a privilege to have the opportunity to honor our distinguished alumnus Preston M. Green,” Wrighton said. “This building will be a lasting tribute to a longtime friend and benefactor.”

Born in 1915 in St. Louis, Green earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in 1936. After graduation, Green worked in a local factory until he joined Southwest Steel Supply Co. in 1950 as vice president of purchasing and production.

He became president in 1955 and chairman of the board in 1957. During his career at Southwest Steel Supply Co., Green was responsible for adding a second manufacturing plant in Madison, Ill., and growing his company into the leading processor of steel throughout the Midwest.

Green designed most of the equipment used by Southwest Steel Supply Co. and was acknowledged for creating more efficient processing procedures. He was recognized nationally for his leadership and vision within the steel industry, including receiving the Steel Distributor of the Year award in 1986 from the Association of Steel Distributors.

In 1990, Green sold Southwest Steel to Hanwa American, a subsidiary of the Hanwa Corp. of Japan. Green died in 2003, but his legacy continues today through his many contributions, both professional and philanthropic, and through the work of his widow, Nancy Green, who lives in St. Louis and serves on the advisory board for the Preston M. Green Charitable Foundation.

“I wish Preston could be here today to see his dream become reality,” Nancy Green said. “He was a strong believer in innovation and forward thinking. Preston would have been so very proud of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the facilities that it is providing for its students.”

The future of engineering education and research

Held in conjunction with the dedication of Green Hall, Washington University hosted a symposium “Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education & Research,” which featured the National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh, DSc; Dennis Muilenburg, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security and a member of WUSTL’s Board of Trustees; and P.R. Kumar, DSc, professor and College of Engineering chair in computer engineering at Texas A&M University and a WUSTL alumnus.

The speakers addressed national science and engineering policy in a time of retrenchment and highlighted the work ongoing at Washington University, including in Green Hall. The speakers’ remarks and the questions and answers that followed can be viewed online at engineering.wustl.edu/symposium.

Symposium on the future of engineering and science will coincide with the dedication of WUSTL’s Green Hall

2011-09-19 00:00:00

Suresh summarizing his concerns about the future of science in America at last winter’s AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis will dedicate a new building, Preston M. Green Hall, Friday, Sept. 23, and in conjunction will hold the symposium “Challenges & Opportunities in Engineering Education & Research.”

The symposium, which will feature National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh, DSc, is open to the public. It will begin at 2:30 p.m. in Room 300 of the Laboratory Sciences building on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus.

In addition to Suresh, other speakers will be Dennis Muilenburg, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security and a member of WUSTL’s Board of Trustees, and P.R. Kumar, DSc, professor and College of Engineering chair in computer engineering at Texas A&M University and a WUSTL alumnus.

“We are honored to have such a distinguished panel of symposium speakers that will present on the difficult challenges that our global society faces and the tremendous opportunities that are available as a result of interdisciplinary activity,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

“Researchers across disciplines realize that the greatest advancements are occurring at the interfaces between engineering and other disciplines, but this interdisciplinary activity among engineers and scientists brings into question how we should teach the engineers of tomorrow.

“These and other topics will be highlighted during the symposium that is being held in conjunction with the dedication of Preston M. Green Hall, our newest building that links and integrates multiple disciplines within engineering,” Quatrano says.

At last year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Suresh delivered a sobering assessment of America’s current position in the fierce global competition for technological leadership.

“Other nations are investing heavily in science and engineering,” Suresh said. “The U.S. is not the world leader in terms of gross (research and development) expenditure relative to (gross domestic product) ... U.S. students are not performing at the top of the charts in international math and science assessments. The demographics of the science and engineering workforce do not match the nation’s changing demographics.

“These are troubling signs that U.S. leadership in science and engineering may be faltering and with it our competitive edge in the global marketplace,” Suresh said.

The only way out, according to Suresh, is through investment in research and education, which offer the best prospect for economic growth, good jobs and a rising standard of living in the future. But that investment is difficult to achieve in a time of high unemployment and budget austerity.

Muilenburg speaking at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington, D.C., in September 2010.

Muilenburg will discuss how Boeing and other aerospace companies are working with educational institutions to keep the talent pipeline filled with engineering and other technical professionals. “Aerospace, robotics, cybersecurity — these are just a few of the critical need areas for us in an extremely competitive marketplace,” Muilenburg says. “Working with universities on student retention and research projects in these areas, for example, helps build our workforce and strengthens the industry overall.”

Kumar teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Kumar is interested in wireless networks, sensor networks and network-embedded control systems — hot topics at the intersection of academia and industry — but he is also an influential teacher who has supervised more than 30 doctoral students.

In a frank talk for graduate students, he once advised them that they should consider an academic job “only if doing research is completely unstressful to you,” warning that they would be required to do “roughly one PhD dissertation-equivalent a year” to maintain an academic position.

The three speeches will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Janet Holloway, senior vice president and chief of staff at Monsanto, a WUSTL alumna and a member of the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s National Council.

RSVPs for the symposium are requested at engineering.wustl.edu/greenrsvp. The symposium also will be broadcast live on the Internet at engineering.wustl.edu/symposium.

Obituary: Molloy, longtime engineering secretary, 81

2011-09-21 00:00:00

Mary C. Molloy, secretary and receptionist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science since 1981, died Sept. 3, 2011, following a brainstem hemorrhage. She was 81.

Molloy

So exceptional was her service that the department nominated her this year for the Gloria W. White Distinguished Service Award, established to recognize a non-academic staff member for their contributions to the university.

“Mary becomes the surrogate mom, aunt or grandmother to all our graduate students,” department Chair Philip Bayly, PhD, wrote in the nomination, “shepherding them through the milestones of graduate study. She is remembered fondly and visited often by our alumni and our retired faculty.

“As the first person to greet most visitors, she is gracious, welcoming and kind, presenting the best possible first impression,” Bayly continued in the nomination. “Mary is indomitable in body and spirit. She is our inspiration.”

“My mother drew great power from being amidst all the young people and such intellect at the School of Engineering,” says Molloy’s son Michael Molloy. “So she truly loved what she did each day. In Mom’s refusal to ever even entertain the notion of growing old, we all got to witness the artful mastery of aging.

“At age 81, Mary still worked full time at Washington University, walked three miles a day every day, rain or shine, headwinds or tailwinds, air temperature be damned and disregarded — and went to exercise classes two times a week,” her son says.

Mary Molloy was famous for riding her bicycle everywhere in Clayton.

“People seeing her on her routes each day always smiled as she rode by,” her son says.

“Mary was also an accomplished pianist who took music classes at Washington University — with all the study, time required, and rigor that implies — well past the age of 75,” he says.

“Mom knew more people than anyone I have ever seen,” he says. “Just about anywhere you took her — the grocery store, restaurants, botanical gardens — people of all ages would come up to her and say hello.”

Born July 12, 1930, in Oak Park, Ill., Molloy is survived by two daughters, Mary Ann Reddell and Mary Catherine Molloy; and four sons, Michael, Dan, Tom and Tim Molloy. A memorial mass was held Sept. 10 at St. Joseph in Clayton.

Those who knew Mary may request a copy of the eulogy from her son Michael Molloy by contacting him at mamolloy@swbell.net. Mention Mary Molloy in the subject line.

Washington People: Igor Efimov

Diana Lutz — 2011-09-16 00:00:00

David Kilper/WUSTL

Igor Efimov, PhD (right), the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and student Jacob Laughner work with a chamber used to study heart tissue treated with voltage-sensitive dyes that fluoresce with an intensity proportional to the transmembrane electrical potential of cardiac cells, allowing the scientists to map waves of electrical impulses as they travel through the heart.

More than 5 million Americans struggle with atrial fibrillation, a dangerous heart condition that can increase the risk of stroke and heart deterioration. While ventricular fibrillation can be treated successfully with implantable defibrillators, similar shock treatments for atrial fibrillation are intolerable for patients. Many say the atrial defibrillation is so painful that they would rather live with the risk of death than be shocked again.

Igor Efimov, PhD, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and a member of the Washington University in St. Louis community since 2004, is working to resolve that quandary. He and his research team are developing an implantable atrial defibrillator that restores the heart’s rhythm with low-energy shocks, an innovation that will make defibrillation relatively painless.

“Efimov is just amazing,” says Richard Schuessler, PhD, research professor of surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and longtime colleague. “(He is) one of the most creative people I know. Sometimes I’m actually afraid to talk to him because I’ll start off and all of a sudden he’ll say, ‘oh, oh, oh, did you see this article in Science, or ‘I’ve been talking to this guy and ...’ He is always bubbling with ideas.”

Childhood in Siberia

For Efimov, the journey to a major research institution in the heart of America began in the much cooler Siberian hinterlands of the Soviet Union. He grew up in a secret town in Siberia called Krashnoyarsk-26.

Stalin decreed the town be built after Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946. The speech put Stalin on notice that the Soviet Union and the West, allies during the war, were now on hostile terms.

The people of Krashnoyarsk-26 processed plutonium and built spy satellites.

“My hometown was created by Stalin’s decree,” Efimov says, “and so was my alma mater, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, whose creation was another side effect of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.

Efimov earned a master’s degree in experimental nuclear physics at the Institute.

“After I got my degree,” he says, “I typed my last name in PubMed and I got hits on papers in elementary particle physics that had hundreds of authors. I realized that I would be part of such huge teams it would be difficult to make a personal contribution. So I decided to go into biology instead,” he says.

He had never supposed he might emigrate. Not only had he grown up in a secret town, he had been trained in control theory relevant to intercontinental ballistic missile systems guidance in exchange for exemption from the draft. “I never thought they’d let me leave,“ he says.

But in 1991 there was a putsch in Russia, and that changed everything. “I defended my dissertation on Christmas Day, 1991,” Efimov says. “After that it had to go to some state agency for ratification, which arrived in March 1992. A month or two later Yeltsin disbanded the KGB and opened the borders.”

“I immediately started applying for postdoctral postions in the United States and Europe,” Efimov says.

“I took the first position I was offered,” he says, “and we left with two suitcases and all my savings, which was 800 rubles. At the exchange rate of the time, they were worth six or seven dollars.” He bought the airline tickets with money from a revolving slush fund set up by recent Russian expatriates to help other Russians.

After appointments at several other universities, he arrived at WUSTL in 2004. He also has secondary appointments in cell biology, physiology, radiology and medicine in the School of Medicine.

The heart: a highly complex electrical device

Efimov’s research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, a term that includes a large number of very different conditions.

One of the most frightening, however, is ventricular fibrillation, or V-fib, in which the muscle in the major pumping chambers of the heart quiver uselessly instead of pumping rhythmically.

How could this happen? The answer hinges on the fact that cardiac muscle cells have the ability, usually reserved for nerve cells, to initiate an action potential, or traveling wave of electrical activity, on their own.

While this ability is normally suppressed, when something goes wrong, it can lead to electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then stopping. When an entire chamber of the heart is involved in these “re-entry circuits,” it quivers chaotically and is said to be fibrillating.

Because this is not simple behavior Efimov is understandably skeptical that it will yield to simple treatments.

Reductionism never gets there from here

In an editorial in a recent issue of Circulation Research, he remarks that cardiac physiology has long been seduced by reductionism, the idea that a system can be understood by understanding its parts.

He dates the shift toward reductionism to 1952, when Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley described action potentials in the squid giant axon.

Drilling down, cardiovascular physiologists focussed on the heart, then heart tissue, than myocytes, then ion channels in myocytes.

But, Efimov says, the simpler things got, the more complex they became. Ion channels have many isoforms and subunits, and unexpected auxiliary proteins. They are also part of complex signaling pathways activated by a diverse array of electric and mechanical stimuli.

Worse, therapies based on this reductive approach consistently haven’t panned out.

“I believe it is becoming obvious to pretty much everyone in the field that we have to move toward integration now,” Efimov says. “We have to take all this knowledge and create a systemic, holistic understanding of the heart if we are going to deliver on our promises.”

This is the lodestar by which he tries to chart the course for his laboratory.

One of his innovations is to study cardiovascular problems in human hearts rather than in the hearts of mice, the most popular animal model in cardiophysiology.

He has established connections with local institutions that supply his lab with human hearts. The hearts are either diseased ones removed from patients undergoing heart transplants or “non-failing” hearts that have been donated for research but are considered unsuitable for transplantation.

Using voltage-sensitive dyes his lab creates maps in which invisible waves of electrical potentials sweeping across the heart’s chambers are rendered as vibrantly visible waves of color.

Although the program is only three years old, the work has already demonstrated that human hearts are quite different from those of mice. (See “New study calls into question reliance on animal models in cardiovascular research.”)

Maria Efimov

(From left) Igor Efimov, with his daughter Maria; wife Tatiana, a molecular biologist; and son Andrew.

Another target of Efimov’s research is atrial fibrillation. Again Efimov has looked for a therapy that treats the whole heart, not just its parts.

Ventricular defibrillators have been implanted in patients for 30 years, and clinical studies show they save lives. But patients with atrial fibrillation are conscious when their hearts are shocked and the shocks are painful beyond endurance.

Efimov’s team has devised a painless implantable defibrillator that “unpins” destructive electric circuits in the heart by delivering low-energy shocks to their “anchor points.”

He has founded a company called CardiaLen to develop the defibrillator and if everything goes as planned, the defibrillator will enter stage I clinical trials in about a year.

“If I could find a way to pay for it I would quit my job and go be a post-doc in his lab,” Schuessler says.

Fast facts about Igor Efimov

In his suitcases brought from Russia: Clothes, but also pots and pans. At the time, he says, Russians were under the impression they had to bring dishes, pots and pans when emigrating.
Where he first celebrated Christmas: Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. The Russian expatriate community there throws a proper Russian Christmas, complete with Ded Moroz and Snegurochka.
Favorite meal: Borscht. How predictable is that, he says, adding that borscht is actually Ukrainian but his wife is Ukrainian and she does it perfectly.
Strangest treatment for heart disease encounterd: In the 1950s, some doctors would open the patient’s chest, scratch the heart with a file and staunch the bleeding with asbestos powder. “Unfortunately it didn’t work very well,” he says.
Service to Russian community: Columnist for Russian newspaper Gzt.ru, the online version of the Moscow newspaper Gazeta; member of the board of directors of russiandoctors.org, which sponsors medical missions; and president of the Russian American Science Association, which encourages peer-reviewed research on the Western model in Russia.

WUSTL students return from International Experience in China and Hong Kong

2011-09-07 00:00:00

Bethany Klemetsrud tests a solar cell at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Klemetsrud, a student at the University of Minnesota, was a participant in the 2011 International Experience in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, tests a solar cell at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Klemetrud participated through a National Science Foundation program and was a student while at WUSTL of John Fortner, PhD, assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering.

In the 19th century, it was the World Tour, an occasion to behave badly on another nation’s soil.

In the 20th century, it was the year abroad, during which students did elsewhere pretty much what they had been doing at home.

But in the 21st century — at least at Washington University in St. Louis — it is the International Experience, a heady mix of energy technology, environmental policy and globalization that introduces students to the tough challenges facing the world they will soon inherit.

The International Experience in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering allows undergraduates to study energy science at top universities in another country. Each year’s class has a theme based on the interests of the coordinating faculty members, says Ruth Chen, PhD, professor of practice in chemical engineering, who directs the International Experience.

This year, the program, which took place this past summer, was led by Chen and Cynthia Lo, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering.

The goal of the International Experience is to extend to undergraduates some of the benefits of WUSTL’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy, an innovative program that brings students from overseas universities to St. Louis for doctoral or professional degree programs.

Each year, the students visit different members of the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environment Partnership (MAGEEP), a consortium of 28 universities and corporate partners working together in energy, environmental and sustainability research and education.

This trip included visits to five member universities: Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University, and City University of Hong Kong.

In addition to the 14 WUSTL undergraduates who participated in the program, there were 10 students from other universities who received National Science Foundaton (NSF) funding to work in research programs at WUSTL for the summer. They participated in the International Experience as part of the NSF’s program Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU). Venkat Subramanian, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, recruited 10 NSF-REU students to the group.

This year, the group went to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong metropolitan area to learn about solar energy, biofuels, wind energy, air pollution and health, green building codes, and green energy practices in the financial sector.

Shenzhen is a major city in southern China that lies just north of Hong Kong. China’s first Special Economic Zone, it was a small village in the early 1970s and is now one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

Hong Kong is one of two special administrative regions of the People’s Republic of China (the other is Macau). As one of the most densely populated areas in the world, it is also the world’s most vertical city.

Omnipresent and compelling motivation for environmental engineering: air quality at Shenzhen, China, one of the cities the students visited.

This metropolitan area is a microcosm of the promises and problems of globalization. Awareness of environmental problems is growing in Hong Kong in particular, where pollution is aggravated by geography and the built environment.

Hong Kong is exploring wind farms, third-generation solar cells and biomass as alternatives to traditional energy sources. Unfortunately, more than 80 percent of the city’s smog comes from other parts of the Pearl River Delta, including Shenzhen.

Part of the International Experience is immersion in the host culture. Here, WUSTL students and students from Chinese University of Hong Kong practice their chopstick skills by trying to pick up green marbles.

In many ways, Hong Kong is much further along than the United States, Chen says. “Environmental sustainability and a focus on alternative energy are built into the university curriculum,” she says, “because China’s reliance on coal has become a health issue and a quality of life issue.”

She was deeply impressed by the insistence and urgency with which professors encouraged students to tackle environmental problems. The message was driven home every time students stepped outside and their eyes began to sting, she says.

This was the fourth year for the International Experience.

In the inaugural year, 2008, students traveled to Beijing to study air-quality science just as the Chinese government was trying to bring down pollution levels for the 2008 Olympic Games. In 2009, they traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to learn about nanotechnology, and in 2010 they went to Mumbai, India, to learn about the environmental challenges in a country where wood, dung and agricultural waste are still used for heating and cooking. In 2012, program participants will study in Brazil.

The class isn’t the standard semester abroad. The students take pre-program seminars in the spring to bring them up to speed on the technology theme and to introduce them to the language and culture of the host country. During the summer trip, they alternate lectures with tours.

Students visit the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen. Most of the art in the room was hidden from the Chinese government from the 1940s through the 1980s at considerable risk to the owners. The calligraphy on the far wall is an enlargement of an undated letter Mao Zhedong wrote to a friend.

This year, students toured Dupont Apollo in Shenzhen, which makes windows with thin-film photovoltaic cells embedded in the glass, and visited China Light and Power, whose sheer scale, Chen says, gave you an impression of the environmental difficulties the region faces.

They were addressed by a Merrill Lynch executive, WUSTL alumnus Albert Ip, on Hong Kong’s role as an international finance center and visited the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., the biggest bank in Hong Kong, where they learned about efforts to reduce energy costs by managing water use and cultivating rooftop gardens.

Some students stay on to complete internships at local universities or businesses. This year, there were five internships: three at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, working on second-generation solar cells; one with Dupont Apollo, working on photovoltaic windows; and one at Emerson Network Power in Hong Kong.

Karen Mok, a WUSTL junior majoring in environmental studies reacts to the voltage difference between palm prints made of two different materials at ElectriCity, the visitors' center at Castle Peak Power Station, the largest coal-fired power station in Hong Kong, constructed in the 1980s to meet high growth in Hong Kong's electricity demand. Standing next to her is Andrew Spitz, a WUSTL junior majoring in energy, environmental and chemical engineering.

During the trip, the students summarize what they have learned in presentations for the students and faculty of one of their host universities. “We have outstanding students and they were able to deliver good presentations to their local hosts,” says Chen, with the relief every teacher feels when students perform well under pressure.

This fall, the students will produce a joint video, prepare individual Power Point presentations and write a 30-page research paper or participate in a project to teach middle-school students how to make solar cells.

But it’s not all work. This year, the students visited Splendid China Folk Village, a theme park in Shenzhen, the Po Lin Monastery, Lantau Island, Hong Kong Night Lights and a dragon boat festival.

Next year, when the International Experience goes to Brazil the theme will be biofuels, Chen says. “The following year we are thinking of going to Queensland, Australia, to study environmental engineering applications and watch clean coal technology demonstrations,” she says.

Interested students can download an application at eece.wustl.edu/undergraduateprograms/Pages/Brazil.aspx.

For more information about the program, email Ruth Chen at ruth.chen@wustl.edu.

“Clean energy, the environment and globalization are such important issues for this university,” Chen says, “and these trips combine all three issues. The students who have had this international experience come home better equipped to steer our society in a direction that will be beneficial to us all.”

Dangerous arrhythmia analyzed in a heartbeat

Tony Fitzpatrick — 2011-08-31 00:00:00

Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI) can map a life threatening cardiac arrhythmia noninvasively, during a single heart beat.

Just one second, one heartbeat.

That’s what is needed for a new, noninvasive functional imaging technology to record data for locating the source in the heart of a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia (VT).

VT is an abnormal, fast beating of the heart, which, if ignored, can lead to ventricular fibrillation, which causes some 400,000 cases of sudden death yearly in the United States alone.

The technique, developed by a Washington University in St. Louis scientist, is called Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI). It combines computerized tomography (CT) with 250 electrocardiograms recorded by electrodes placed on a vest across a patient’s torso to map the source and pattern of VT in the heart and determine the kind of VT irregularity.

Using a special algorithm, ECGI can generate movies of the distinctive VT excitation waves, radiating like the wake caused by a pebble dropped into a pool, or rotating like a tornado, from recordings of multiple heartbeats.

While a wealth of information can be deduced from ECGI analysis of just one heartbeat, multiple heartbeats up to minutes long are often imaged to reveal even more about the nature of the arrhythmia.

Yoram Rudy, PhD, the Fred Saigh Distinguished Professor of Engineering, professor of biomedical engineering and of medicine and director of the Cardiac Bioelectricity and Arrhythmia Center (CBAC) at WUSTL, developed ECGI, first publishing on the technique in 2004.

Now, publishing in the Aug. 31, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine, Rudy and his collaborators in the Washington University departments of biomedical engineering and medicine, report the first systematic study of 25 cardiology patients with VT using ECGI to map noninvasively, beat by beat, the mechanisms and processes of VT in humans.

Co-authors WUSTL’s Yong Wang, PhD, postdoctoral research associate in radiology who was a PhD student in Rudy’s biomedical engineering lab, and Phillip S. Cuculich, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, contributed equally to the study and are members of CBAC, an interdisciplinary center whose goals are to study heart rhythms and their disorders (cardiac arrhythmias) and to develop new tools for their diagnosis and treatment in the prevention of disabilities and cardiac death.

The other co-authors are Junjie Zhang; Kavit A. Desouza, MD; Ramya Vijayakumar; Jane Chen, MD; Mitchell N. Faddis, MD, PhD; Bruce Lindsay, MD; and Timothy W. Smith, DPhil, MD.

Saves hours of mapping

The heart, among other things, is an electric marvel. The 25 VT patients were scheduled to undergo catheter ablation to correct their electrical defects, but first underwent ECGI imaging.

The imaging correctly found the VT origin and categorized the two VT mechanisms, one called focal, comprising a mass of abnormal cells, the other re-entry, in which excitation waves become circular, forming a closed loop called a re-entry circuit.

In each mechanism, the heart’s pacemaking activity is seized from its natural, normal site in the sinus node. Rudy and his collaborators showed that the abnormal excitation patterns of VT often began in scar tissues that were tell-tale signs of previous heart attacks.

The study is a breakthrough in the analysis and treatment of arrhythmias in general — VT specifically — because it is noninvasive, fast and can map electrical activity on the entire heart surface in one heartbeat.

Current noninvasive diagnosis of heart rhythms relies on the conventional ECG, which employs 12 electrodes on the body surface.

The ECG can only provide general information about the global heart electrical activity. To locate the source of VT in the heart, a patient must endure up to several hours of invasive mapping using an electrode-carrying catheter that is inserted into the heart and moved as a roving probe to obtain sequentially electrical recordings from many points.

Once the arrhythmia source has been located, ablation is performed to eliminate this source and stop the arrhythmia.

In the state-of-the-art protocol, ECGI would far more quickly find the source and type of VT, saving hours of mapping.

In the future, it is hoped that experimental techniques such as gamma knife radiosurgery and high-frequency ultrasound, under study for noninvasive ablation of cardiac tissue, might be used with ECGI, paving the way for total noninvasive treatment of VTs.

‘Tool that opens the door’

ECGI can locate the source of cardiac excitation in the heart with an accuracy of about 6 millimeters. In contrast, the conventional ECG provides only global information.

As Rudy explains: “The big difference between the two is that the ECG measures the reflection of the heart’s electrical activity far away from the heart on the torso surface. In the process, resolution is lost.

“ECGI gets far closer,” Rudy says. “Imagine a car coming toward you at night from far away. You see only one light. But as it gets closer and closer, you start to resolve the two headlights and their location in space. It’s similar here. With ECG, you’re far on the body surface and get only a global view instead of the real local details on the heart surface.

“ECGI is a treasure for basic medical research. It is a tool that opens the door to study the electrical functioning of the heart and arrhythmia mechanisms in people with various (hereditary and non-hereditary) cardiac disorders.

“Clinically, it is promising as a diagnostic tool that could guide therapy of cardiac arrhythmias, and because it is noninvasive, it could also be used as a follow-up tool to evaluate progression of the disorder and the results of therapy,” Rudy says.

“Someday it might help to identify patients at risk of developing VT, so that preventive measures can be taken before sudden death occurs.

“Nobody can imagine medicine today without noninvasive imaging. If you have a suspicious backache, you often get an MRI. Yet nothing like this has existed for cardiac arrhythmias, which, as our population ages, are becoming more and more common.

“There should be many ECGI revelations and applications in the future.”

Exploring engineering

2011-08-09 00:00:00

Whitney Curtis

St. Louis-area high school student Anjali Fernandes creates a wind turbine during the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s “Explore Engineering” program July 26. The new program, which grew out of a conversation between students who belong to the National Society of Black Engineers and Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Spencer T. Olin Professor, seeks to give underrepresented groups exposure to engineering and to the university. Among other activities, students participated in hands-on projects in biomedical engineering, renewable energy and web-application design. Ruth Okamoto, PhD, senior research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, organized the day’s activities.