WUSTL School of Engineering News

Engineering professor gets Gates Foundation grant for work in global health

Beth Miller — 2013-05-21 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tae Seok Moon, PhD, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled “Programmed Killing of Parasite Eggs by Probiotic Organisms.”

Tae Seok Moon

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Moon’s project is one of the Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 grants announced May 21 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To receive funding, Moon and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of four critical global heath and development topic areas that included agriculture development, neglected tropical diseases and communications. Applications for the next round will be accepted starting September 2013.

Moon’s project addresses parasite infection in people in developing countries. While there are drugs to help kill parasite worms and eggs in the body, there is no long-term strategy to prevent disease transmission. Moon has proposed to engineer probiotic bacteria that would be added to donated foods, reproduce in the intestine where parasite eggs are produced, and come out of the body with the eggs in waste.

The probiotic bacteria contain a genetic circuit, or a computer, which distinguishes the outside conditions from those in the human body. Once the bacteria come out of the human body with the eggs, the genetic circuit triggers a “suicide bomb,” killing the parasite eggs and the bacteria in the process, eliminating any potential harm to humans or to the environment.

Moon, who joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in July 2012, directs his research toward creating programmable cells that process multiple input signals and produce desirable outputs for real-world applications. An expert in the design and construction of genetic circuits, he aims to build synthetic gene circuits to control and improve cellular processes.

Combining his research experiences with more than five years of experience in the biotechnology industry, he envisions his career as transforming biology research from an “observation” approach to a “synthesis-based engineering” activity to address energy, environment and health issues.

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 800 people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. 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 the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 120 full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 700 graduate students and more than 19,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

Bear Cub grants foster entrepreneurship

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-16 00:00:00

Joe Angeles

Jung-Tsung Shen, PhD, is one of five WUSTL scientists recently awarded a Bear Cub grant. Shen is developing a photonic switch, pictured on his computer screen, that is much faster, smaller and more energy efficient than other switches now used to support broadband communications.

Scientists are natural problem solvers, full of innovative ideas. But moving those ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace can be difficult, even for those with an entrepreneurial bent.

In part, that’s because federal research dollars typically don’t support the proof-of-concept studies needed to demonstrate the feasibility of a promising new technology or diagnostic test. And while most scientists feel right at home in the laboratory, they often struggle to develop a successful pitch or execute a business plan.

To fill the gap, Washington University’s Bear Cub program provides university scientists with funding to help commercialize their discoveries. Beginning this year, scientists who are funded through the program also have access to business mentors and other hands-on assistance to develop their technologies.

“We want our faculty and students to have every opportunity to commercialize their technologies,” says Bradley Castanho, PhD, director of the university’s Office of Technology Management. “Part of that means creating an atmosphere where scientists are supported and encouraged in their efforts to become entrepreneurs, while also helping to make funding available so they can move their discoveries beyond the lab.”

The university recently announced a new round of Bear Cub funding, with $204,000 going to five scientists:

David Beebe, PhD, the Janet and Bernard Becker Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, is developing a way to prevent the formation of cataracts in patients undergoing retinal surgery. To repair the retina, surgeons must remove a portion of the vitreous gel that fills the eye, a process that exposes the lens to oxygen and increases the likelihood of cataracts.

Working with colleagues at Purdue University who developed a novel biological polymer, Beebe will evaluate whether the polymer can preserve the remaining vitreous gel and restore its properties to prevent cataracts from forming. He is now proposing to test the polymer in animal models, with the goal of developing a sterile synthetic polymer powder that could be mixed with sterile saline and infused into the eye at the end of retina surgery. Annually, some 300,000 patients in the U.S. alone could benefit from the technology, the researchers have estimated.

Joseph Gaut, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology, has developed a test for the early detection of acute kidney injury, a complication that can occur in critically ill patients and in those undergoing heart bypass surgery. Some 700,000 U.S. patients undergo heart bypass surgery every year, and one-fourth of them develop kidney damage, which leads to longer hospital stays and deaths, in some cases.

The test developed by Gaut and his colleagues is based on a kidney-specific protein that is elevated in the blood soon after acute kidney damage occurs, typically several days before currently available tests. The researchers will evaluate whether the protein can accurately diagnose early kidney damage in animal models and in heart bypass patients, which would enable earlier treatment.

Michael S. Hughes, PhD, research associate professor of medicine, is working with John E. McCarthy, PhD, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics, and Samuel A. Wickline, MD, professor of medicine, to develop an imaging technology that captures certain aspects of electromagnetic and acoustic waves and converts that information into an image.

Rather than being based on wave energy, however, the image measures the entropy, or disorder, in an object and can detect features that are not picked up by ultrasound, CT scans and other conventional imaging. Entropy imaging could potentially have wide applications in medicine and be used to identify defects in materials used by the aerospace and other transportation industries or in heavy manufacturing. Another possible application is in security scanning to detect potential threats and in remote surveillance.

Eric Leuthardt, MD, associate professor of neurological surgery, has designed a monitor to noninvasively detect obstructions in vascular grafts and shunts. The monitor uses a nanoscale flow sensor that can be integrated into an implantable shunt or graft. Both can narrow over time and become obstructed, leading to life-threatening complications.

For example, about one in 500 babies is born with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid on the brain. It is most often treated surgically by inserting a shunt that diverts the fluid to another area of the body. But symptoms of pain in the head, even something like a headache, can lead doctors to order CT scans, nuclear medicine studies and sometimes exploratory surgery to determine whether the pain is related to an obstruction.

The sensor Leuthardt has developed can be activated by light to measure the flow rate of fluids through grafts and shunts, and he plans to test the device in animal models.

Jung-Tsung Shen, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering, has developed a photonic switch that is orders of magnitude faster, smaller and more energy efficient than other switches typically used to support the information superhighway. In the future, demands for broadband signal transmission and processing will require ultra-fast and extremely low-energy optical switching and modulation rates that aren’t possible with current approaches.

The switch designed by Shen and his colleagues uses artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, that exhibit exceptional optical properties not easily observed in nature. In addition to telecommunications, the switch also could be used in high-resolution medical imaging and in semiconductor manufacturing. Bear Cub funding will allow Shen to further develop and test the switch.

Washington University teams each win $50,000 Arch Grants in startup competition

Beth Miller and Melody Walker — 2013-05-14 00:00:00

Four startup companies with ties to Washington University in St. Louis have received $50,000 each in the Arch Grants 2013 Global Startup Competition designed to stimulate and support the early-stage entrepreneurial community in St. Louis.

The winning companies are: Sparo Labs, a medical device company founded by two engineering undergraduate students; Juristat, a software company that targets litigators and founded by three alumni; LipoSpectrum LLC, a life science company providing R&D labs with advanced biological lipid-analysis co-founded by an Olin Business School Executive MBA alumnus; and MMBiosensing LLC, which invented a new method of detecting the bio-markers of heart attack and founded by a WUSTL postdoctoral research associate.

The companies were among 20 companies chosen from 40 finalists, trimmed from more than 700 entrants, vying for the $50,000 grants of unrestricted funds. The grants also come with networking and mentoring opportunities and other free services, including legal, accounting, marketing, cloud computing and mentoring support.

Recipients also get access to St. Louis’ angel investment network, the opportunity to be a part of the downtown St. Louis startup community and an opportunity for a $100,000 follow-on grant from Arch Grants.

The win is the latest in a string of awards for Sparo Labs, headed by Andrew Brimer and Abigail Cohen, who are both graduating May 17 from the School of Engineering & Applied Science with bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, respectively.

In April, the team won $25,000 in the engineering school’s inaugural Discovery Competition. In February, the team won $30,000 in the 2013 Olin Cup Competition sponsored by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Last summer, the team won first place in two national engineering competitions, resulting in $15,000 in prizes.

Brimer and Cohen have spent nearly two years developing the product and a prototype that empowers patients to quantitatively track and proactively manage asthma, cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and other respiratory diseases via seamless integration with smartphones, tablets and computers — ultimately implementing low-cost diagnostic and monitoring spirometry worldwide.

Most spirometers cost between $1,000-$2,000, making them unaffordable for hospitals and clinics in the developing world. However, the Sparo Labs device costs about $8. The low cost could allow health-care providers in developing countries to purchase the spirometers, which are specially designed for accuracy and durability despite their price.

Sparo Labs has filed for a patent and is preparing the product for clinical trials and FDA approval.

Juristat collects electronic lawsuit case data from state and federal court databases. The company uses a proprietary system to index this data into a single dynamic searchable database. Its product can provide more than 150 unique pieces of litigation intelligence, such as the probability of success on motions and appeal or metrics of an attorney’s experience within a practice area or specific court. Users can then quickly search and produce predictive models allowing lawyers to design the best litigation and marketing strategies.

Juristat was co-founded by CEO Drew Winship, JD, formerly a trial lawyer for the Brown & James law firm and an alumnus of Washington University School of Law; Robert Ward, a developer for Beck Automation; and Jordan Woerndle, an analyst for the Neuroinformatics Research Group at the School of Medicine and an alumnus of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. Kent Syverud, JD, dean of Washington University School of Law, is on the advisory board for Juristat.

LipoSpectrum LLC co-founder and CEO Milind Sant, with a doctorate in organic chemistry and an executive MBA from Olin Business School, is employing patented technology developed at Washington University in this bioscience company. The technology, called Multi Dimensional Mass Spectrometry Shotgun Lipidomics (MDMS-SL), provides enhanced, state-of-the-art lipid analysis from biological samples of all types, including plants, animals and humans. Many fields can benefit from detailed molecular level lipid analysis, including cardiovascular, diabetes, obesity, cancer, autoimmune and neurological diseases, nutrition, agriculture and bio-fuel (algae).

MMBiosensing LLC, founded by Amos Danielli, a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Lihong Wang, PhD, in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has invented and patented a proprietary method of detecting the biomarkers of a heart attack with significantly higher sensitivity and greatly reduced testing time compared to competitors. The company is developing the technology into a point-of-care device that will greatly reduce emergency room wait times and costs to patients and providers, and improve patient outcomes. The company also won $50,000 in the 2013 Olin Cup competition.

The company’s leadership staff – Abu Abraham, Robbie Garrison, and F. Gabriel Santa Cruz – are all graduates of the Olin Business School.

I-CARES announces 2013 funded research projects

2013-05-14 00:00:00

The International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) has announced the award winners for its 2013 Call for Proposals.

As part of its mission, I-CARES awards seed funding to WUSTL faculty undertaking innovative and collaborative research in the broad areas of renewable energy and sustainability through an annual call for proposals.

This year, special emphasis was placed on projects related to climate change.

I-CARES has awarded 12 projects with 25 Washington University faculty from five schools: Arts & Sciences, the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the School of Medicine.

For a full list of winning projects and the faculty members involved, visiticares.wustl.edu/research/Pages/Projects.aspx.

I-CARES supports a network of national and international researchers all with a focus on renewable energy, the environment and sustainability, extending beyond Washington University’s seven schools. With the addition of the 2013 research awardees, I-CARES now supports 99 individual researchers across 71 projects.

Engineering undergrads create game-changing asthma management device

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-05-15 00:00:00

http://youtu.be/zBGm83pNxuo

Engineering students Andrew Brimer and Abigail Cohen discuss their project, Sparo Labs, which recently won the $25,000 prize in the Washington University in St. Louis of Engineering & Applied Science's inaugural Discovery Competition. Sparo Labs results from an award-winning project to develop a low-cost, pocket-sized spirometer to measure lung function in patients with chronic respiratory diseases.

An estimated 300 million people in the world suffer from asthma. That number is expected to grow to more than 400 million by 2025. While diagnosis and treatment in the United States is accessible, people living in the developing world have a much more difficult time.

Thanks to a new product being developed by engineering students at Washington University in St. Louis, those millions of people may have new hope.

Andrew Brimer, senior majoring in mechanical engineering, and Abigail Cohen, senior majoring in biomedical engineering, have created a new portable and low-cost spirometer, which they hope will revolutionize the way asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases are diagnosed and treated.

Through creation of this device their company, Sparo Labs, can empower patients to connect with their doctors in tracking and managing asthma, cystic fibrosis, COPD and other diseases through seamless integration with mobile devices.

The team has spent more than a year and a half developing a spirometer that conquers issues of high cost and difficulty of use, drawing on the expertise and hard work of a number of fellow
students and advisors.

Most spirometers cost between $1,000 and $2,000, making them unaffordable to hospitals in the developing world. However, the Sparo Labs device will cost just $8. In addition to the low cost, the Sparo design does not require calibration, which has been a big hurdle to personal use of spirometers.

Sparo Labs is drawing quite a bit of attention, having won this year’s $30,000 Olin Cup top prize, the $25,000 top prize in the inaugural Discovery Competition sponsored by the School of Engineering & Applied Science and a $50,000 Arch Grant.

All told, including off-campus competitions, the team has earned more than $150,000.

Brimer and Cohen say they owe much of their success to the nurturing entrepreneurial spirit at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The university is doing a great job promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship on all levels, from the ‘back of a napkin ideas’ that can be pitched at an IdeaBounce, to the Olin Cup or Discovery Competition that help foster more developed or mature projects into real companies with serious funding,” Brimer says.

"Washington University's focus on entrepreneurship has allowed us and other students the ability to get valuable feedback and funding to help turn ideas into viable companies with large potential for impact," Cohen says.

The pair has received mentorship from the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Hatchery entrepreneurship course at Olin Business School and from Mario Castro, MD, director of the Asthma and Airway Translational Research Unit at the School of Medicine.

“The culture of innovation and entrepreneurship continues to grow at Washington University,” says Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center. “The innovation and entrepreneurship initiative is one of the pillars that guides the university’s vision. All students may participate in entrepreneurial coursework and co-curricular programs are open to both student and community entrepreneurs.”

“This is an exciting time for innovation and entrepreneurship at Washington University,” Harrington says. “We continue to see new cross-campus collaborations and relationships with the community that grow the culture and the support system for entrepreneurs.”

Engineers in training

2013-05-09 00:00:00

Sid Hastings (2)

Ritenour High School’s Draye Harris (above) launches a plane on behalf of his team during the annual Boeing Engineering Challenge at the Washington University in St. Louis Athletic Complex Field House May 3. Harris was among 100 area high school students from six school districts on 25 teams visiting the WUSTL campus. The teams, assisted by engineers from Boeing Co., competed to determine which glider had the farthest flight, straightest path, longest hang time or highest quality of flight. Gliders with the most creative appearance and most creative engineering also were recognized. (Below) Members of Eureka High School’s “The Flying Pencils” accept an award for their glider. The event was the culmination of a six-month-long project that began in November when the students visited Boeing to receive instructions from a Boeing mentor along with materials for their hand-held gliders. “This competition really helps students think about the principles of flight and design,” Boeing mentor Tom Brandt said. “They might not all choose to go into the aviation industry, but it gets them thinking about other opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, and that is rewarding to us as mentors.” Boeing sponsored the design competition, with support from WUSTL's Alumni & Development Office; the Institute for School Partnership (ISP); and the School of Engineering & Applied Science. Boeing is a longtime supporter of K-12 education initiatives at WUSTL, including teacher graduate programs through the ISP.

Carter to lead international education and research in engineering school

Beth Miller — 2013-05-09 00:00:00

Dedric A. Carter, PhD, has been named associate dean for international education and research and professor of the practice in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Carter

In the newly created role, Carter will serve as ambassador-at-large for the McDonnell International Scholars Academy and develop international research partnerships with McDonnell Academy partners; develop graduate, professional certificate and summer programs for international students; and work with corporate partners to provide undergraduate and graduate practice opportunities abroad.

He also will provide support for entrepreneurship programs in the school, and as professor of the practice, he will begin teaching a course in fall 2013 emphasizing the role of scientists and engineers in policy formation.

For more information, visit here.

Elson elected fellow of arts and sciences academy

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-05-03 00:00:00

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis faculty member Elliot L. Elson, PhD, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elson, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, is one of 186 Americans elected as fellows this year by the academy, an organization formed in 1780 to cultivate the arts and sciences and to recognize leadership in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs.

The academy has more than 4,500 members, including some 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. Fellows are selected through a competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made prominent contributions to their disciplines and society.

“I am delighted that a member of our outstanding faculty has received this tremendous honor,” said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “Dr. Elson is a dedicated scientist, and this recognition is well-deserved. This achievement demonstrates the good fortune we have had at Washington University in attracting premier faculty.”

This year’s new fellows and foreign honorary members will be welcomed during an induction ceremony Oct. 12 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Elson

Elson joined the faculty of Washington University as a professor in 1979. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, he is also a professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and an adjunct professor of physics in Arts & Sciences.

His research focuses on cellular motion, the movement and distribution of cell surface proteins and the forces that determine the shapes of cells. He and members of his lab also have studied artificial cardiovascular tissues, including their mechanical and electrical properties.

Elson and his lab members also are well-known for designing and building their own unique instruments to answer specialized questions. One such instrument evolved from a novel technique to measure molecular motion. Elson began developing the technique in the late 1960s, while a faculty member at Cornell University. Called fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), it has evolved into a sophisticated technology that has been widely adopted in labs around the world.

Elson, a St. Louis native, earned a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1964 and went on to postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1968.

In 2007, Elson received the Gregorio Weber Award for Excellence in Fluorescence Theory and Applications. The international award recognizes distinguished individuals who have made original and significant contributions to the field of fluorescence. Elson was honored with the Weber Award for his extensive research in fluorescence, including the development of FCS and his continuing work to refine and advance the technique.

Elson has authored more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has served on the editorial boards of several of these journals, including The Journal of Cell Biology, Biopolymers and Biophysical Journal. He is a member of the Biophysical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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.

Students' low-cost medical device wins inaugural Discovery Competition

Beth Miller — 2013-04-30 00:00:00

A low-cost medical device targeted at improving world health has taken the top prize in Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering & Applied Science’s inaugural Discovery Competition.

Sparo Labs took the largest prize of $25,000. The company’s plan stems from an award-winning project to develop a low-cost, pocket-sized spirometer, which measures lung function.

The team plans to further develop the product to prepare it for clinical trials. The end goal is to make the device available for individuals in the United States and other developed countries to better monitor lung disorders and for health-care providers in developing countries to better diagnose lung disorders such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders and cystic fibrosis.

Team members are Andrew Brimer, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering; Abigail Cohen, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering; Philip Thomas, a senior majoring in systems science and engineering and physics; Jon Koo, a senior majoring in environmental studies in Arts & Sciences and business; and Chris Cassidy, a senior majoring in finance and entrepreneurship.

“We are very proud of all of the students who participated in this competition,” said Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. “Each of the finalist teams showed exceptional maturity, insight and ambition in their proposals. We are very excited to see how their ideas progress. And next year, we will definitely continue this entrepreneurial activity, which has been generously supported by our engineering alumni. ”

“The students responded to this challenge with some very creative ideas,” said Dennis Mell, director of the Discovery Competition and professor of practice. “I can only hope that some of our future Discovery Competition teams can meet the high bar of achievement set by these teams.”

In the final team presentations April 17, each team was judged on how its members described the product or technology and identified customers, estimation of the market size and team dynamics.

Team BMC Protein, which is developing a new technology that uses the bacterial microcompartment as a platform for in-vivo protein expression, received a $10,000 prize. The team’s goal is to create a standardized and efficient way to produce recombinant proteins that will save scientists time. They plan to create a kit containing a carboxysome-producing strain of E. coli bacteria, along with a genetic tool that will assist scientists in producing proteins.

The team’s members are Andrew Ng, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; Benjamin Todd, a junior majoring in business; Brian Basco, a junior majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences; Caleb Ford, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; and Lucas Harrington, a senior majoring in chemistry in Arts & Sciences.

The Biliboyz/LumaCure team received a $5,000 prize for its proposal for a low-cost alternative to treating jaundice in newborns by creating a “biliblanket,” a small, glowing mat placed directly next to the infant’s skin, requiring much less power and cost than those currently used.

The team built a prototype that uses electroluminescent materials to transmit light, eliminating the need for expensive fiber optics, and to supply a low-cost, reliable and safe treatment for jaundice in newborns, particularly in the developing world.

The team’s members are Charles Wu, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; John Prewitt, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and biology; Huy Lam, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering; Matthew Speizman, a freshman biomedical engineering major; Yoga Shentu, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering; and Fangzhou Xiao, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering and mathematics in Arts & Sciences.

Team L3DC received $2,500 for its development of a self-assessment tool to measure symptoms of a tremor in patients with Parkinson’s disease. The software uses a small USB device from LeapMotion Inc. to create a quantitative method for 3-D measurements of a Parkinsonian tremor. This analysis will provide an easy measurement of the tremor that is useful for physicians to assess patients.

The product is expected to allow doctors to more easily track the progression of the disease over time as well as the patient’s response to drug treatments.

The team’s members are Matthew Johnson, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and electrical engineering; Vinoo Ganesh, a senior majoring in computer science; Ethan Green, a senior majoring in computer science and entrepreneurship; and Andrew Cowley, a senior majoring in electrical engineering.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science launched the Discovery Competition in September to promote new and innovative discoveries to solve challenges or needs.

The competition provides engineering undergraduate students the forum to explore their entrepreneurial interests with support from mentors, to use their creativity to develop solutions for real-world problems and to compete for financial resources that could help turn their ideas into businesses. The competition will be an annual event.

Teams were composed only of currently enrolled WUSTL undergraduate students, with at least one engineering student and at least one non-engineering student on each team. Students from all four undergraduate schools were represented on these teams and are encouraged to take part next year.

For more information, visit engineering.wustl.edu/discovery.

Off to the races: 2013 car revealed

2013-04-29 00:00:00

Whitney Curtis

Senior Matt Monson, a mechanical engineering major in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and chief engineer of the WU Racing Team, gives a big thumbs-up after helping to reveal the team's 2013 race car April 25 in Danforth University Center. Mechanical engineering junior Surjan Singh (far right), president of WU Racing, shows off the car to interested students. Each May, the WU Racing Team, including about 22 WUSTL students, participates in the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers competition at Michigan International Speedway, competing against 119 other schools from around the world. The competition evaluates all aspects of the prototype car, including on-track performance, marketability, manufacturing, engineering design and cost efficiency. "Team members gain valuable hands-on experience to complement what they learn in the classroom,” said team member Tyler Willibrand, senior mechanical engineering major. “These hands-on experiences are crucial after graduation and, I believe, make us the best up-and-coming engineers."

Women’s Society presents Switzer leadership awards, Danforth scholarship

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-04-29 00:00:00

Three already accomplished young women received awards recently from the Women’s Society of Washington University (WSWU).

At the society’s annual membership meeting April 17, leaders announced the winners of the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship.

The Switzer award was presented to Jennifer Head and Melany Lopez; the Danforth scholarship was presented to Margarita Tisza.

The Switzer award is presented to graduating seniors who have made a significant contribution during their undergraduate careers at Washington University in St. Louis and demonstrate the potential for future leadership.

The Danforth scholarship is a full-tuition scholarship awarded annually to an outstanding community college transfer student.

Mary Butkus

Harriet Switzer, center, talks with the 2013 Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award winners Jennifer Head, left, and Melany Lopez. The Women’s Society of Washington University bestowed the awards during its annual meeting April 17 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Head

Head is majoring in chemical engineering. She has been a top student and received several prestigious scholarships, in addition to her regular and varied involvement in community service.

Perhaps the project that made her stand out most, according to the leadership award committee, was her continued effort to improve conditions for children in Ethiopia.

Through Engineers without Borders, Head decided to work toward providing an adequate water supply for the Mekelle School for the Blind in North Ethiopia. After a campaign to raise awareness and funds, Head and other students along with faculty advisers traveled to the Mekelle School, ultimately repairing the water tower, installing a pump into a well and laying a water distribution network.

While working on this project, Head witnessed the devastating effects that vitamin A shortage has on Ethiopian children, causing blindness and increasing the mortality rate. She now plans to work to fortify local edible oils and flour with vitamin A. Head said she has won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue the vitamin A project and plans to spend nine months in Ethiopa next year doing so.

Head plans a career in global health and expects to pursue a master’s degree of public health in global environmental health at Emory University.

Lopez

Lopez, majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences, plans to become a doctor. During her undergraduate career, she has volunteered more than 2,500 hours with EST, the emergency medical technician student group on campus.

She has been an Annika Rodriguez scholar for four years and also has been a resident adviser.

She worked as a uSTAR (undergraduate student training in academic research) fellow in the cell biology and physiology lab of Associate Professor James Huettner, PhD, and they plan to submit their research results for publication soon.

Lopez was accepted in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program and worked last summer with David Clapham, MD, PhD, at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Lopez also has been involved with Global Brigades, a student-run volunteer group that travels to developing countries to provide medical care and other services.

Mary Butkus

Florence Pullen, left, of the Women's Society of Washington University, and society president Tara Lewis visit with Margarita Tisza, this year's Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship recipient. Tisza plans to pursue business degrees at WUSTL.

Tisza

Danforth scholarship recipient Margarita Tisza is completing her studies at St. Louis Community College-Meramec. She looks forward to pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting and in business administration at WUSTL.

Tisza has been an accomplished student as well as a student leader. She also works part-time and volunteers as a health care assistant with Paraquad, a nonprofit organization that provides services and advocacy for people with disabilities.

Membership in the Women’s Society is open to women of all ages from all backgrounds; WSWU does not require women to be associated with the university to join its organization.

Engineering professor working to help bridges withstand natural disaster

Beth Miller — 2013-04-30 00:00:00

The Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau, Mo., was used as a case study for a novel Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator developed by Chenyang Lu, PhD, and collaborators.

Structural control systems have the potential to help our civil infrastructure, such as bridges, roads and buildings, withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes or storms. However, traditional control systems based on sensors connected by wired networks are costly, labor-intensive and tend to break during disasters, when they are needed most.

Recently, engineers have begun to use wireless networks that are easier, cheaper and more resilient to structural damage, such as that wrought by earthquakes or hurricanes, as they are able to reroute data to still provide it at critical times.

Chenyang Lu, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, teamed with colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a unique system they call a Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator, a state-of-the-art, integrated environment that combines realistic simulations of both wireless sensor networks and structures.

They say it is a promising technology to control the structures based on real-time measurements from wireless sensors attached to the structures so they withstand natural disasters.

“The wireless sensor network community has sophisticated mathematical models to simulate these complicated dynamic behaviors of wireless, which have been tested in many environments,” Lu said. “The civil engineering community has developed structural models for studying structural dynamics. In our novel approach, we put these two together and integrated the simulation environment into one. We can simulate the physical aspects, or structure dynamics, and cyber aspects, or the dynamics of the wireless communication, in an integrated, holistic fashion.”

To demonstrate the simulator, the team set up realistic case studies of the integrated wireless control system on a bridge and a building. The case studies are the first high-fidelity, cyber-physical simulations of wireless structural control for large civil structures.

For the bridge case study, they looked at the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau. The cable-stayed bridge has a main span of 1,150 feet and carries up to 14,000 cars a day over the Mississippi River.

Cape Girardeau is in the heart of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the most active seismic area in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, encompassing southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, western Kentucky and southern Illinois.

Because the Cape Girardeau bridge does not have wireless sensors, the researchers used wireless traces collected from a solar-powered, wireless sensor network, deployed by Gul Agha, PhD, professor of computer science, and Bill Spencer, PhD, professor of civil engineering, both at the University of Illinois, on the Jindo Bridge in South Korea, which has similar design and dimensions as the Cape Girardeau bridge.

“We took the wireless properties from Jindo and added them to the physical properties of the Cape Girardeau bridge with integrated simulation,” Lu said. “The benefit of the cyber-physical simulator is that we can do it virtually.”

For the building case study, they used a benchmark three-story building model built by Shirley Dyke, PhD, professor of mechanical engineering and civil engineering at Purdue, as well as data from wireless traces from Charles W. Bryan Hall at WUSTL, to create the virtual integration.

Lu said the case studies shed light on the challenges of wireless structural control and the limitations of a traditional structural control approach, as well as the promise of a holistic cyber-physical co-design approach to design the wireless control system.

“We have built this integrated simulator that captures both the physical and network dynamics that really enable this research for large-scale wireless control systems that could not have been done in high-fidelity in the past,” Lu said. “In building this simulator, we hope that it has a long-lasting impact to encourage other researchers to do research in wireless cyber-physical systems.”

The team expects the research to result in a reduction in the life cycle costs and risks related to U.S. civil infrastructure. The team also plans to disseminate results throughout the international research community through open-source software (wcps.cse.wustl.edu).

###

Li B, Sun Z, Mechitov K, Hackmann G, Lu C, Dyke S, Agha G, Spencer B. "Realistic Case Studies of Wireless Structural Control." Presented April 11, 2013, at the ACM/IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation through the Cyber-Physical Systems Program.

More information about the project is available at bridge.cse.wustl.edu.

School of Engineering announces 2013 distinguished alumni

2013-04-26 00:00:00

The School of Engineering & Applied Science celebrated top alumni during the 2013 Alumni Achievement Awards dinner April 18 at the Coronado Ballroom in St. Louis.

The school presented Alumni Achievement Awards, one Young Alumni Award and the Dean’s Award.

Alumni Achievement Awards went to:

T. Alan Hurwitz, EdD, (BS ’91), president of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.;
James V. Leonard (MS ’66), senior technical fellow at Boeing Defense Space & Security; and
William Esco (W.E.) Moerner, PhD, (BS, BS, AB ’75), chair of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University.

The Young Alumni Award was presented to U.S. Army Capt. Joel Graves (BS ’06).

The Dean’s Award was presented to Frank Yin, MD, PhD, outgoing chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and the Stephen F. & Camilla T. Brauer Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

Also honored with an Alumni Achievement Award was Zachary Lemnios (MS ’79), vice president of research strategy at IBM, who was not able to accept his award in 2010.

For the full list of awardees and their accomplishments, go to engineering.wustl.edu/alumniawards.aspx?year=2013.

Hatchery course helps fuel student start-up companies

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-04-26 00:00:00

St. Louis is becoming widely recognized as a hub for entrepreneurship. Students at Washington University in St. Louis are taking advantage of the close proximity to great resources by starting their own business ventures, with the help of a variety of on-campus clubs, competitions and a groundbreaking class.

Mary Butkus

Abby Cohen and Andrew Brimer, co-founders of Sparo Labs, pose with the Olin Cup after winning the top prize in this year's entrepreneurship competition.

The Hatchery, offered by Olin Business School but open to all students, both undergraduate and graduate, is one of the university’s capstone entrepreneurship courses.

It was one of the first business courses in the country to use multidisciplinary team collaboration, mentoring and coaching to support students as they launch enterprises while in college.

Enrolled students can work on their own social or commercial venture ideas or partner with community entrepreneurs to develop theirs.

“The Hatchery is fortunate to have the support of the St. Louis entrepreneurship community for the benefit of the students,” says Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship and one of the course teachers.

“Students are connected with business consultants, subject matter experts and industry leaders to help develop their plans, and a judging panel of entrepreneurs and early-stage investors help evaluate the final results.”

The course is proving quite successful.

“Typically, more than 50 percent of student-initiated ideas are actually launched, an unusually high statistic that speaks to how extraordinarily entrepreneurial Washington University students are,” Holekamp says.

“The course is great because it is structured in a way that provides you with enough guidance that you don’t feel like you’re completely on your own, but enough freedom that you truly learn through experience,” says sophomore Arts & Sciences student Jolijt Tamanaha.

Tamanaha and a team of fellow undergraduates founded Farmplicity, which provides a path for local farm producers to sell fresh goods directly to St. Louis restaurants.

“Ken Harrington (managing director of the university’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and course instructor has put us in contact with so many amazing people, including many chefs and restaurateurs in St. Louis, who helped us flush out our concept,” Tamanaha says.

“At Washington University, our main goal is to have students experience the uncertainty that surrounds entrepreneurial activity,” Harrington says. “The Hatchery is one of several capstone courses where they learn to take action and have impact. Once this happens, they become ‘entrepreneurial’ for life.”

“I think the Hatchery is a fantastic course for those interested in entrepreneurship,” says senior Andrew Brimer, studying mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Brimer and Abby Cohen, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering, used the Hatchery to help hone their business, Sparo Labs. Their award-winning team, which includes students from Olin Business School, is developing a low-cost spirometer, a device that measures lung function. While most of these devices cost between $1,000 and $2,000, Sparo Labs is developing a model that will cost around $8.

“The course forces you to understand all the facets of a business venture and you never stop learning,” Brimer says. “The university is doing a great job promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship on all levels, from the ‘back of a napkin ideas’ that can be pitched at an IdeaBounce, to the Olin Cup or Discovery Competition that help foster more developed or mature projects into real companies with serious funding.”

“The Hatchery really helped us find mentors,” says senior Farmplicity team member Lauren Ortwein, majoring in marketing and operations and supply chain management at Olin Business School. “When you have a whole organization like the Skandarlaris Center helping connect you with local entrepreneurs, opportunity after opportunity presents itself to you when you put in the hard work.”

‘Be a sponge’ and other advice to help students succeed at summer internships

Steve Givens — 2013-04-23 00:00:00

As students begin to leave campus for the summer, many will head off to internships, hoping to add to their classroom experiences and enhance their future opportunities by immersing themselves in the real world of work.

It’s a great way to spend the summer, said Mark Smith, Washington University in St. Louis’ associate vice chancellor for students and director of the Career Center, but to get the most out of the experience, it’s imperative that students have a clear plan.

“An internship can be the start of a great career, a way to make some money, a way to find out what you really like — and don't like — a way to confirm and fulfill your passions,” Smith said. “But you need to have a plan and the people you work with and for need to know about it.”

Essentially, Smith said, it comes down to these questions: What do you want to know about yourself, the industry in which you are working, and the function you are performing? And what can you can learn by the end of the summer and incorporate into your career planning and course choices when you return?

Smith offers four tips that will help make a summer internship more meaningful and productive.

1. It’s essential to communicate upfront to your supervisors what kinds of experiences you want to have before the end of the internship.

“Don't assume that the people you are working with will automatically know what you want,” Smith said. “You need to communicate the learning experiences and exposure you'd like to get in this very short time frame. Don't let past interns determine your summer. Your needs and goals are unique to you. Be professional, be clear, and don't give up. Most everyone at your firm is inclined to want to see you have a positive experience. Let them know what that experience looks like from your perspective.”

2. Find informal ways to meet others within the organization.

“Grab some coffee with folks you don't work directly with,” Smith said. “Set up lunches every week with people who are interesting to you, outside of your area. People love to talk about their work and careers — their achievements, their challenges, where they want to go next, and what they would recommend to you. By doing these things you will stand out, build a network of associates, and most importantly, learn what you need to know about where you want to direct your career passions when you return to school.”

3. Set high expectations and make the most of the experience, especially in the first four weeks.

“Be a sponge,” Smith said. “Do more than expected. Contribute in ways outside of the scope of the role they gave you. It will open opportunities that they, and you, hadn't considered at the beginning of your program. If you don't do this at the start, and you wait for the internship to evolve, you won't optimize your learning experience.”

4. Keep a journal and ask yourself questions such as:

• Do I really like working for this size of an organization?
• Is this type of organization the best way to start off my career?
• Would I want to spend eight hours a day working with people who do this kind of work?
• Would I be happy starting my career in a rigid culture that pays well, but which doesn't offer me the personal independence I am used to?
• Is it critical to get a graduate degree to be promoted in this industry?
• Where do those around me get their personal and professional satisfaction?
• How do professionals in this organization keep up with all the new developments?
• How do you get promoted in this industry?
• Which are the best organizations in this industry? Why are they the best?

Smith emphasizes that upfront planning and hard work are the keys to a successful internship.

“Every summer thousands of interns realize, too late, what they could have experienced, if they only communicated at the beginning what they wanted, and given 110 percent from Day One,” he said.

Alvarez-Cohen to deliver Ninth Annual Ryckman Lecture

Beth Miller — 2013-04-17 00:00:00

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, PhD, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the Ninth Annual Ryckman Lecture at 1:30 p.m. Friday, April 19.

Alvarez-Cohen, the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor and past chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, will speak on “From Individuals to Community: A Molecular-Based Systems Approach to Understanding Bioremediation.” The lecture, in the Stephen F. and Camilla T. Brauer Hall, Room 12, is free and open to the public, though RSVP is requested.

Her research areas include environmental microbiology and ecology, biotransformation and fate of environmental contaminants, and developing molecular and isotopic techniques for studying microbial ecology of environmental microbial communities. She teaches courses in environmental microbiology, environmental engineering and biological process engineering, and has co-written an undergraduate textbook titled Environmental Engineering Science.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science inaugurated the Rick and Betty Ryckman Lecture Series in 2003 to promote environmental engineering science education. This series pays tribute to De Vere W. “Rick” Ryckman, who was the founding director of Washington University’s environmental engineering science program, and his wife, Betty Ryckman, who generously opened her home to the many students of this program and their families.

In the mid-1950s, Ryckman built a top program in the new field of environmental engineering. He died in 2004.

WUSTL wins 2013 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals

2013-04-03 00:00:00

This year, a team from Washington University in St. Louis won the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals. A video below captures the elaborate machine in action.

Named for the late cartoonist and inventor, the annual competition challenges college students to design a machine that uses the most complex processes to complete a simple task. Goldberg’s popular cartoon series depicted complex gadgets performing easy tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.

Devices in the competition must complete the task with a minimum of 20 steps. The WUSTL students designed a contraption that hammers a nail with maximal inefficiency.

Team members are: Amy Patterson and Harison Wiesman, sophomore and junior physics majors in Arts & Sciences, and Grace Kuo amd Alexa Lichtenstein, sophomore electrical engineering and senior mechanical engineering majors in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The competition was held March 30 at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio.

For more information, visit rubegoldberg.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxbyL6AkohA&feature=youtu.be

Winning Rube Goldberg contraption hammers a nail with maximal inefficiency. Not only did the contraption, constructed by a four-member team, take the top prize this year, it also won in the Best Single Step category. Two steps actually tied for the award: "Post-It Slinky" and "Pouring Coffee." For those of you who couldn't quite place it, the voice at the end is the Staple's "Easy Button."

Two environmental activists to give sustainability lecture April 10

Julie Kennedy — 2013-04-08 00:00:00

Two prominent environmental thinkers and activists will address climate change, biodiversity and pollution during an upcoming lecture at Washington University in St. Louis.

The lecture, titled “To Hell in a Handbasket? The Global Environment and Sustainability,” is free and open to the public. It will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium. The primary sponsors are University College — the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences — and the International Affairs program in University College.

Adjunct instructor Anukriti Hittle, the driving force behind the lecture, suggested Robert Repetto and Daniel Tunstall as speakers because of their long history of environmentalism.

Tunstall

“These two speakers have a long-term and deep understanding of the issues that plague our world today,” said Hittle, who teaches in the International Affairs and Environmental Studies programs and advises students on environmental and sustainability careers through The Career Center.

“Not only are they scholars, they are activists. I suggested Bob Repetto because he is a pioneer in environmental economics and Dan Tunstall because he has worked with indicators of sustainability since the Nixon administration.

Repetto

“When our students hear about these complex and intractable issues, they want to know what they can do. I know that these two speakers can help answer this question, as well as inspire by example.”

Repetto, author of America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward, has combined an academic career as an economist at Harvard, Yale and the University of Colorado with a leadership role in environmental policy as vice president of the World Resources Institute.

Tunstall worked on statistical policy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and he directed the information program at the World Resources Institute until his retirement in 2011.

The lecture is part of a larger daylong symposium on sustainability issues. The other events include a lunch and discussion with guests and selected students and faculty, and short presentations for students about sustainability careers.

Other sponsors include the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability; the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies; the International and Area Studies program; the Environmental Studies program; the Office of Sustainability; and the College of Architecture.

The event grew out of Hittle’s professional association with the two speakers and University College’s interest and programs in international affairs, sustainability, global leadership and management. The symposium also reflects a universitywide commitment to sustainability and global issues.

For more information, call (314) 935-6700.

Trustees grant faculty promotions, tenure

2013-04-01 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, 2013, unless otherwise noted.

Appointment with tenure

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, PhD, as professor in the humanities in Arts & Sciences

Roch Guérin, PhD, as professor of computer science

Azad Bonni, MD, PhD, as professor of neurobiology, effective Dec. 6, 2012

Fumihiko Urano, MD, PhD, as associate professor of medicine, effective March 1, 2013

Promotion with tenure

Roya Beheshti Zavareh, PhD, to associate professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences

Jeffrey G. Catalano, PhD, to associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences

Shefali Chandra, PhD, to associate professor of history in Arts & Sciences

Todd R. Decker, PhD, to associate professor of music in Arts & Sciences

Brett D. Hyde, PhD, to associate professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences

Matthew D. Kerr, PhD, to associate professor of mathematics in Arts & Sciences

Liviu M. Mirica, PhD, to associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences

Frédéric P. Moynier, PhD, to associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences

Jamie L. Newhard, PhD, to associate professor of Japanese in Arts & Sciences

Alexander Seidel, PhD, to associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences

Paul T. Shattuck, PhD, to associate professor of social work

Mariagiovanna Baccara, PhD, to associate professor of economics in the Olin Business School

Young-Shin Jun, PhD, to associate professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering

Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, to associate professor of computer science and engineering

Robert Brophy, MD, to associate professor of orthopedic surgery, effective March 1, 2013

W. Todd Cade, PT, PhD, to associate professor of physical therapy, effective March 1, 2013

Joseph Corbo, MD, PhD, to associate professor of pathology and immunology

Michael J. Gardner, MD, to associate professor of orthopedic surgery, effective March 1, 2013

Andrew E. Gelman, PhD, to associate professor of surgery (cardiothoracic surgery), effective March 1, 2013

Chyi-Song Hsieh, MD, PhD, to associate professor of medicine

Sanjay Jain, MD, PhD, to associate professor of medicine

Conrad C. Weihl, MD, PhD, to associate professor of neurology, effective March 1, 2013

Kathleen Y. Wolin, ScD, to associate professor of surgery (general surgery), effective March 1, 2013

Granting of tenure

Jianxin Bao, PhD, as associate professor of otolaryngology, effective Dec. 6, 2012

Richard Grucza, PhD, as associate professor of psychiatry, effective Dec. 6, 2012

Mark James Miller, PhD, as associate professor of medicine, effective Dec. 6, 2012

Sarah K. England, PhD, as professor of obstetrics and gynecology, effective March 1, 2013

Faces of Hope rally readies campus for Clinton Global Initiative University

2013-03-28 00:00:00

The Faces of Hope rally -- complete with drummers, video remarks by Chelsea Clinton and the announcement of Washington University in St. Louis' $30 million commitment to sustainability -- helped excite the WUSTL community as the campus prepares to host Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) April 5-7.

CGI U is an annual meeting bringing together students and youth, experts and celebrities to discuss and work to solve pressing global challenges. To learn more about CGI U, including student projects, events and related programming and the important work WUSTL faculty, students and staff are doing, visit cgiu.wustl.edu.

james byard

Students who have committed to completing projects as part of CGI U gathered at Washington University's Danforth University Center to showcase and explain their plans to WUSTL community members during the Faces of Hope rally and celebration. The rally was also a zero-net waste event, with students using laptops instead of posters to explain their ideas. To learn more about students' commitments to action, visit cgiu.wustl.edu.

james byard

Members of the Crash Band drum line and the WUSTL cheerleading squad provide a rousing start to the campus' annual Faces of Hope event celebrating civic engagement and community service by WUSTL faculty, students and staff. This year's event focused on projects students are developing as part of CGI U, from helping St. Louis youth improve their neighborhoods to installing a wind turbine in Nicaragua.

james byard

Washington University Executive Vice Chancellor for Administration Hank Webber announces the university's $30 million Energy Conservation Investment during the Faces of Hope rally. "The inspiring work of our faculty, staff and students is helping to solve pressing global issues," he said. Amanda Moore McBride, director of the Gephardt Institute for Public Service, and Student Union President Julian Nicks also made remarks. Nicks encouraged people to make small changes in their own lives, such as taking shorter showers, saying such steps added together can have a meaningful impact.

james byard

Students explain their CGI U projects to Amanda Moore McBride, right, chair of the WUSTL CGI U effort, during the Faces of Hope rally. About 200 WUSTL students have committed to completing projects that address one of CGI U's focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation and public health.

james byard

Students make their pledges to sustainability during the Faces of Hope rally. The display offers a visible sign of the university's "Less is More" campaign, a new initiative that encourages individuals to take simple steps such as turning off lights when they're not needed and recycling as much as possible.

WUSTL engineer helping unravel mystery of traumatic brain injury

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-03-28 00:00:00

The American Academy of Neurology issued new guidelines last week for assessing school-aged athletes with head injuries on the field. The message: if in doubt, sit out.

Phil Bayly

With more than 3 million sports-related concussions occurring in the U.S. each year, from school children to professional athletes, the issue is a burgeoning health crisis.

While concussions may not be difficult to diagnose initially, the longer one waits, the more difficult treatment can be.

The efforts of a researcher and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science are helping to unravel the many mysteries of traumatic brain injury.

“There’s and urgent need to understand the problem of traumatic brain injuries, for the sake of athletes, military personnel and accident victims,” says Philip Bayly, PhD, the Lilyan and E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

“Anyone who has met someone who’s had a head injury knows how scary it is, and how frustrating it is that we know so little about the causal pathways, and thus the best therapeutic opportunities,” he says.

Bayly, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, researches the mechanics of brain injury. He recently received a $2.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to better understand traumatic brain injuries.

Head injuries, concussions and the resulting trauma have been in public discussion recently as the National Football League (NFL) deals with a lawsuit regarding head injuries by about one-third of living former NFL players. The league is accused of not providing information connecting football-related head injuries to brain damage, memory loss and other long-term health issues.

Bayly’s team is working on ways to measure 3-D relative motion between in the brain and skull and estimate strain during mild head acceleration. Bayly hopes computer simulation can teach researchers about the basic physics of brain injury and ways to develop new approaches to prevention and therapy.

“Our studies provide experimental data on how the brain actually responds mechanically in response to mild external loads,” Bayly says. “This is especially critical to developing useful computer simulations, to make sure they reflect reality.
These simulations will in turn be used to design new equipment, evaluate rule changes in sports and determine exposure thresholds or diagnostic tests.”

Computer simulation is important in creating animal models that can be used to develop diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, he says.

“Understanding mechanical deformation in traumatic brain injury is also essential to anyone studying brain trauma by exposing cultured brain cells to mechanical stress,” Bayly says. “We need to understand how much stress to apply and in what directions.”

How can athletes minimize their risks?

“From a mechanical standpoint, they should avoid repeated high head accelerations,” Bayly says. “Head-to-head collisions and collisions with head-to-ground are clearly to be avoided.”

Bayly says to truly protect athletes, new rules need to be instated.

“I would actually advocate for eliminating sports like boxing, in which injury-level accelerations are known to occur routinely. More research is needed on sports where the threshold is less clear.”

There is where Bayly and his colleagues come in.

“We need to do the research to find out what kinds of repeated accelerations are responsible for producing the degeneration seen in chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” he says.

Engineering breakthrough may answer host of medical questions

Beth Miller — 2013-03-25 00:00:00

A Washington University in St. Louis biomedical researcher has discovered a way to use light and color to measure oxygen in individual red blood cells in real time.

The technology, developed by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, could eventually be used to determine how oxygen is delivered to normal and diseased tissues or how various disease therapies impact oxygen delivery throughout the body.

The research is published March 25 in PNAS Online Early Edition.

Red blood cells deliver oxygen through arteries, capillaries and veins to the body’s cells and tissues. To date, the state-of-the-art device for measuring the amount of oxygen in the blood is through a device that clamps onto the index finger called a pulse oximeter. However, this measures only the oxygen level in the body’s arteries, so it doesn’t give a full picture of oxygen metabolism.

The new technology that Wang developed, called photoacoustic flowoxigraphy, uses light in a novel way that allows researchers to watch red blood cells flowing through tiny capillaries, the smallest of the body’s blood vessels at about the width of one red blood cell.

“By firing two laser pulses of different colors at a red blood cell 20 microseconds apart – nearly simultaneously – we hit the same red blood cell at almost the same location, so we get signals back at both colors,” Wang says.

“That allows us to figure out the color of the red blood cell at any given moment. By watching the color change, we can determine how much oxygen is delivered from each red blood cell per unit of time or distance. From there, we can determine the average oxygen delivery per unit length of capillary segment.”

Wang and his colleagues were able to watch the red blood cells choose which direction to travel when they encountered a “fork” in the capillary, called bifurcation. The cells travel in bunches to where oxygen is most needed in the body at that time, he says.

http://youtu.be/3gXkH4zmUSY

Lihong Wang, PhD, developed a technique that allowed him to see red blood cells flowing through capillaries in real time. Here, the red blood cells encounter a “fork” in the capillary, so they go in the direction in which the most oxygen is needed.

And although the cells travel very quickly, the speed of the device — 200 Hertz, or 20 3D frames per second — allows the researchers to see the cells in real time. In comparison, a film at a movie theatre moves at 30 Hertz, fast enough that they eye can’t see the individual frames.

“Photoacoustic flowoxigraphy is considered an engineering feat, enabling oximetry at the most fundamental level, namely, the single-cell level,” Wang says.

Wang says this technique has applications for further biological studies as well as in the clinical setting.

“There are many biomedical questions that this technology could answer: How would cancer or diabetes change oxygen metabolism? How would cancer therapy or chemotherapy affect oxygen level?” he says. “We’d like to see if we could use this technique to monitor or predict therapeutic efficacy.”

Getting the technique into the hands of researchers is the next step, Wang says. He and his colleagues would like to license the technique to a company that would move it forward to make it available to biologists and physicians for applications.

###

Wang L, Maslov K, Wang LV. “Single-cell Label-free Photoacoustic Flowoxigraphy In Vivo.” PNAS Online Early Edition, March 25, 2013.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants R01 EB000712, R43 HL106855, R01 EB008085, R01 CA134539, U54 CA136398, R01 CA157277 and R01 EB010049.

University’s Commitment to Action brings $30 million to advance sustainability

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-03-27 00:00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4R5GKfHUUg&feature=share&list=PLb9ODR3vzQJM-ZkBw7DngUgJU8enswKkw

Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration, discusses the $30 million dollar sustainability commitment Washington University is making as part of its Clinton Global Initiative University efforts. The ambitious plan involves returning the university to 1990 emissions levels despite a doubling in size of the campus and its Medical School.

As part of its Clinton Global Initiative University efforts, Washington University in St. Louis has announced a major institutional commitment to action around the important issue of sustainability.

Webber

“Human health and environmental sustainability are inextricably linked,” said Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration. “As a university community, one of the most important things we can do is consume less. Consuming less reduces greenhouse gas emissions; cuts down on fossil fuel consumption; and positively impacts air and water quality, public health, climate patterns, agricultural production and more.”

As such, Washington University is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent by 2020, reverting to 1990 levels.

To advance this goal, the university has established an Energy Conservation Investment of $30 million that will enable the university to accelerate investments in:

greater energy efficiency
improved heating and cooling
better waste management

Students, faculty and staff are committing to consume less as part of the university’s “Less is More” campaign.

Taking simple actions such as turning off lights and recycling as much as possible, combined with the institutional investment, will result in lower emissions and preservation of natural resources.

While the university has accomplished much in recent years to reduce its environmental impact, these commitments strengthen the institution’s resolve to push this initiative to the next level.

“Society expects great universities to provide leadership on critical social issues and to be very wise stewards of our resources,” Webber said. “Our sustainability work does both.

“We’re showing how as a $2.3 billion economic engine, we can significantly reduce our environmental impact, and we can do so in a way that’s also economically viable. That frees up resources to invest in our primary missions of teaching, research and patient care.”

Sustainability at WUSTL

Washington University in St. Louis is a national leader in sustainability, a core priority that runs through all aspects of the campus community, operations and the university’s work as a leading research and teaching institution.

The university already has made great strides in the area of sustainability. While the university’s square footage has more than doubled since 1990, to 11.5 million square feet from 5.7 million square feet, the university has reduced its overall energy usage by 4 percent during this time.

Sixty-eight percent of waste was diverted from landfills in 2012 and the university has amassed more than $109 million in avoided energy costs since 1990.

Washington University is the hub of an international laboratory, training leaders while creating and nurturing ideas aimed at forging a more sustainable future. Significant global partnerships are helping to address issues of energy, environment and sustainability through international collaborative research efforts.

For more information, visit sustain.wustl.edu. For more information about the Clinton Global Initiative University, visit cgiu.wustl.edu.

Wang to use NSF grant for study of oxygen consumption in cells

Beth Miller — 2013-03-20 00:00:00

When scientists study cells, they need to know how much oxygen each cell consumes to determine its metabolism. However, existing technology limits this study to groups of cells, not individual cells. Lihong Wang, PhD, plans to change that.

Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study oxygen consumption rates of individual cells using photoacoustic microscopy, a novel imaging technology he developed that uses light and sound to measure change.

“When you image a group of cells, you assume all cells are identical, but they are not — cells are heterogeneous and consume oxygen differently,” said Wang, who also is affiliated with the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “We will measure oxygen consumption on a per-cell basis, but measure many cells at the same time, giving us high specificity and a high-speed, high-yield throughput. As a result, we will be able to rapidly map distributions of cellular metabolism.”

Wang and his collaborators will use hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen, as a biocompatible sensor to determine oxygen consumption. Hemoglobin changes color when oxygenated or deoxygenated. The color change is too slight to see using conventional microscopy, confocal microscopy or two-photon microscopy, but photoacoustic microscopy is exquisitely sensitive to color change, Wang said.

“Once cells are loaded into a matrix of wells, all we have to do is to use light-induced ultrasound to sense the color of hemoglobin next to each well,” Wang said. “The rate of change in color of hemoglobin is used to compute the consumption rate of oxygen by each cell.”

The proposed technology can lead to further understanding of a wide range of biological systems, from single cells to ecosystems, Wang said. Potential applications include gauging cellular health and metabolic state for stress response and in toxicity studies. Environmentally, oxygen-linked respiration is the main sink of organic matter in nature, and it can be considered as a fundamental component of global element cycling. Differences in oxygen uptake within complex natural communities can lend insights into the use of energy sources in the environment, as well as into primary production.

Wang is collaborating with Jun Zou, PhD, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University.

A leading researcher on new methods of cancer imaging, Wang has received more than 30 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of more than $38 million. His research on non-ionizing biophotonic imaging has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, NSF, the U.S. Department of Defense, The Whitaker Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Wang and his lab were the founders of a new type of medical imaging that gives physicians a new look at the body’s internal organs, publishing the first paper on the technique in 2003. Called functional photoacoustic tomography, the technique relies on light and sound to create detailed, color pictures of tumors deep inside the body and eventually may help doctors diagnose cancer earlier than is now possible and more precisely monitor the effects of cancer treatment — all without the radiation involved in X-rays and CT scans or the expense of MRIs.

In September, he received one of 10 NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards from among 600 applicants. The award supports individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering — and possibly transforming — approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. He also has received the NIH FIRST, the NSF’s CAREER Award, the Optical Society’s C. E. K. Mees Medal and IEEE's Technical Achievement Award for seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.

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Kelleher receives Sloan Research Fellowship

Beth Miller — 2013-03-20 00:00:00

http://youtu.be/c3iPrqVeh2E

Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, the Hugo F. & Ina Champ Urbauer Career Development Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has developed Looking Glass, which she created to help kids learn the basics of computer programming through the creation of open-ended animated stories.

Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, has received a prestigious research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Kelleher is the Hugo F. & Ina Champ Urbauer Career Development Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

The two-year, $50,000 fellowship supports early-career scientists and scholars in science, mathematics, economics and computer science. Fellows may use the funds for equipment, technical assistance, professional travel or trainee support.

Candidates must be nominated by a department head or another senior researcher. Fellows are selected on the basis of their independent research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become leaders in the scientific community through their contributions to their field.

Kelleher’s interest in broadening access to programming began as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. In working with girls in middle school, she found that making programming easier was not enough.

To get girls to engage with programming, Kelleher created a programming system, called Storytelling Alice, which presented programming as a means to the end of creating animated stories. She found that Storytelling Alice greatly increased interest in programming: 51 percent of participants using the program in her study snuck extra time to work on their programs.

But she also found that many children in the United States don’t have access to a computer science class before college.

When she joined the Washington University faculty in 2007, Kelleher began work on Looking Glass, a programming environment that explores a variety of mechanisms to support kids learning to program without the support of a teacher or classroom setting.

Similar to Storytelling Alice, Looking Glass users write programs to create animated stories that they can share through an online community, where they become potential learning aids.

To allow users to learn new things from shared programs, Kelleher and her research group have built tools that enable users to select animations of interest and remix them into their own programs; explore unfamiliar program behavior; automatically generate effective tutorials based on the selected code; and harness potential help from expert mentors.

While ensuring that the next generation of kids can apply the tools of computing to tomorrow’s problems remains an important goal, Kelleher also is interested in making programming tools for professionals. She and her group have created a version of Looking Glass that enables physical and occupational therapists to create games for stroke rehabilitation.

“Since each individual’s recovery is unique, the environment gives therapists the ability to build a game specifically designed for that patient’s needs,” she said.

Kelleher will use the funding from the Sloan Foundation to continue researching how to make computer programming accessible to everyone.

Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants to support original research and broad-based education related to science, technology and economic performance; and to improve the quality of American life. It is interested in projects that it expects will result in a strong benefit to society.

Past recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships have gone on to win 38 Nobel prizes, 14 Fields Medals and eight John Bates Clark awards.

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Faces of Hope campus rally to kick off Clinton Global Initiative University

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-03-20 00:00:00

People around campus have been considering their personal commitments to action since it was announced that CGI U would be coming to Washington University in St. Louis. Above, engineering students Brittany Edwards, left, and Sara Fletcher are committed to alternative energy research. To view a gallery of commitments to action from WUSTL faculty, staff and students, visit the Washington University Facebook page.

Install a wind turbine in Nicaragua. Create a mobile app to help illiterate women in Pakistan access health and education information. Teach youth in distressed St. Louis neighborhoods leadership skills to improve their communities. Help people in China quit smoking. Get veterans to train horses for therapy use. Provide HPV vaccines to youths in Uganda.

These are just a sampling of the detailed and far-reaching projects Washington University in St. Louis students have committed to accomplishing as part of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), which will hold its annual meeting on campus in April.

The Faces of Hope event on Wednesday, March 27, is an opportunity for the WUSTL community and friends to come together and get ready for CGI U.

UPCOMING CGI U PROGRAMMING:

6 p.m. March 25, January Hall, Room 110. Screening of Precious Knowledge documentary
2 p.m. April 5, Wilson Hall, Room 214. "Debt and Inequality" lecture, Louis Hyman, author of Borrow: The American Way of Debt. 3:30 p.m. April 6, Former President Bill Clinton and Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, hold the closing plenary session of CGI U.

- RSVP for Faces of Hope here.

- Stay tuned for watch party information.

- Visit cgiu.wustl.edu for the latest event and schedule updates.

Learn about more than 50 of the 118 projects that students have committed to for CGI U. Hear university leaders’ announcement of a major institutional commitment to action, and find out how you can be part of the WUSTL-CGI U effort that starts on campus next month.

Faces of Hope is an annual event at WUSTL, hosted by the Gephardt Institute for Public Service, that celebrates the faculty, staff and students’ civic engagement and community service. The rally provides a chance to learn more about particular service projects under way and network with like-minded community members.

Faces of Hope will run from 4:30-6 p.m. in the Danforth University Center’s first- and second-floor common areas. Attendees can support the WUSTL commitment by signing a pledge and choosing a giveaway item. To receive a giveaway, people must pre-register here by Friday, March 22.

Recognizing CGI U’s commitment to protecting the environment, the Faces of Hope gathering plans to be a zero-net waste and energy event.
The 200 students’ commitments address at least one of the five focus areas of CGI U: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation and public health.

Here are just a few examples:

Claire Christensen, a senior majoring in economics in Arts & Sciences, aims to raise $10,000 to install a wind turbine in Sumu Kaat, Nicaragua. One turbine could provide 1,500 kilowatt hours of energy a year to 10 homes. Christensen plans events that would serve dual roles as fundraisers and educational efforts to teach people about climate change and the importance of sustainable development both in the United States and abroad.

Medical student Mengyang Sun plans to provide HPV vaccines, which protect against cervical cancer, to everyone, male and female, between 9 and 26 years old residing in Gulu District in northern Uganda. Cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women in developing countries. Rather than focusing on screening and early detection, as many efforts do, Sun’s project strives for cancer prevention through mass vaccination.

Closer to home, De Andrea Nichols, a graduate student in social work, proposes D*Serve, a program to empower young people in north St. Louis to turn around their neighborhoods by teaching them skills in design and civic leadership, offering lessons and projects in areas such as architecture, communications and public art.

To learn more about CGI U, including student projects, events and the important work WUSTL faculty, students and staff are doing today in CGI U’s five focus areas, visit cgiu.wustl.edu.

Co-sponsors for Faces of Hope are Dell Inc., WUSTL’s Office of Sustainability, Dining Services and Bon Appétit’s Eco-to-Go Program, and student initiatives Net Impact, Tote Green and the Student Union’s Green Events Commission.

New faculty join School of Engineering

Son, 25 Sar 2013 19:22:59 CST

Nine new faculty members have joined the WUSTL School of Engineering & Applied Science this academic year. That marks the largest number of newly recruited faculty to join the school.

The new faculty members’ expertise ranges from biomedical to electrical, and energy to mechanical engineering. Read more to learn about their backgrounds and what each of them brings to the engineering school.

CGI U announces 2013 speakers; new CGI University Network to fund student commitments

2013-03-05 00:00:00

Among the featured speakers:

Chelsea Clinton, board member, William J. Clinton Foundation; Stephen Colbert, host and executive producer of ‘The Colbert Report’ on Comedy Central; Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe, founder, the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation; Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO, Square Inc.; co-founder and executive chairman, Twitter Inc.; Salman Khan, founder and executive director, Khan Academy; Michael Sherraden, founding director, Center for Social Development and the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis; Jada Pinkett Smith, actress and advocate, Don’t Sell Bodies; and Muhammad Yunus, chairman, the Yunus Centre, will speak on pressing global challenges at CGI U 2013, to be held April 5-7 at Washington University in St. Louis.

For a full list of speakers visit http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25060.aspx. For more information visit: http://cgiu.wustl.edu.

Former President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton announced the program and featured participants for the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) to be held at Washington University in St. Louis April 5-7.

CGI U will bring together more than 1,000 college students worldwide with innovators, thought leaders and civically engaged celebrities to make Commitments to Action to address the most pressing challenges facing their campuses and communities in areas such as education, environment and climate change, human rights, poverty alleviation and public health.

More than $400,000 in funding will be available for students to carry out their commitments made at CGI U, primarily through the newly established CGI University Network of 33 colleges and universities that have committed to support, mentor and provide seed funding to student innovators and entrepreneurs from their respective schools.

“The schools that have joined the CGI University Network are supporting student commitment-makers to create positive change across the globe,” said Bill Clinton. “This year, CGI U will bring together more than 1,000 college students representing all 50 states and six continents to explore concrete ways to build a better tomorrow. I look forward to working with the young leaders who come to Washington University in St. Louis this April with their enthusiasm and their ideas.”

“It’s inspiring to witness the power of CGI U students, whose energy, ideas, optimism and determination continually expand the possibilities for public service,” said Chelsea Clinton, who serves on the board of the Clinton Foundation. “By joining an extraordinary community of young people, thought leaders and experienced entrepreneurs, students attending CGI U 2013 will have the opportunity to make real contributions and forge connections that last a lifetime.”

Washington University in St. Louis was chosen to host this year’s CGI U because it is recognized as an international leader in preparing young people to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

This year’s program will address issues throughout CGI U’s five focus areas: Education, Environment and Climate Change, Peace and Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation, and Public Health through sessions including:

• Getting Off the Ground: Stories of Starting Up, in which a panel of budding and veteran entrepreneurs will share their personal stories, setbacks and key lessons in launching a business or organization;
• A Better Future for Girls and Women: Empowering the Next Generation, which will bring together practitioners and pioneers to explore the tangible ways in which young people can continue to build a better future for girls and women around the world; and
• Solutions Without Borders: Working With Unlikely Allies, which will convene notable entrepreneurs and policymakers who are proving the necessity of cooperation over conflict.

For the complete schedule, visit cgiu.org/meetings/2013/agenda.asp.

For more information on CGI U or the CGI University Network, visit cgiu.wustl.edu or cgiu.org. For inquiries, email cgiu@clintonglobalinitiative.org or call (212) 710-4492.

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Additional information:

CGI University Network
CGI University Network schools have agreed to provide more than $300,000 in total funding to CGI U student commitment-makers. Schools that have joined the CGI University Network to date include Alverno College; Arizona State University; Avicenne Private Business School; Babson College; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Brown University; the College of William and Mary; Cornell University; Duke University; Johnson C. Smith University; Middlebury College; Northeastern University; Rollins College; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; St. Cloud State University; Simmons College; Southern Methodist University; Parsons The New School for Design; the Ohio State University; the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy; Tufts University; Tuskegee University; University of Arkansas, Clinton School of Public Service; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; University of Delaware; University of Houston; University of Miami; University of the Pacific; Washington University in St. Louis; Westfield State University; and Widener University.

Resolution Social Venture Challenge
In addition, the Resolution Project is offering $100,000 in seed funding for CGI U 2013 students through the Resolution Social Venture Challenge, a competition designed to support student-launched social ventures that are sustainable and have a measurable impact. Students selected to compete in the Social Venture Challenge will exhibit their commitments at CGI U and have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges. Winners will be announced at the end of the CGI U meeting.

Up to Us Competition
CGI U, Net Impact and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation launched the Up to Us Competition to increase financial awareness among young people. From Jan. 21–March 1, 11 teams of CGI U participants campaigned to educate and engage their campuses on America’s debt crisis and how it will impact their future. A $10,000 cash prize will go to the team with the winning campaign, to be announced at CGI U. The Up to Us Competition judges include Chelsea Clinton; former White House Chief of Staff and former Co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Erskine Bowles; former U.S. Sen. and former Co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Alan Simpson; and anchor of ABC’s “This Week” and “Good Morning America” George Stephanopoulos.

Commitments to Action
Building on the Clinton Global Initiative’s successful model of convening Fortune 500 CEOs, heads of state, the most effective NGOs and civil society to address the world’s most pressing challenges, President Clinton launched CGI U to engage the next generation of leaders from around the world. As with participants at all CGI meetings, CGI U students must make a Commitment to Action: a new, specific and measurable student initiative that addresses a pressing challenge on campus or beyond.

Media information
Press registration is now open to members of the media. To apply, complete the form at cgilink.org/YE3ZA5.

The deadline to apply for press credentials is 5 p.m. ET Tuesday, April 2. ET. Journalists may apply for credentials on site, but pre-registered media will be given priority. For questions about press registration, email: press@clintonglobalinitiative.org.

Follow us on Twitter at @CGIU and @ClintonGlobal or on Facebook at Facebook.com/CGIUniversity for meeting news and highlights. The event hashtag will be #CGIU.

Engineers Week inspires current and future engineers

2013-03-04 00:00:00

The annual Engineers Week, held Feb. 25-March 2, featured activities ranging from a paper airplane contest to a lecture by cast members of the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” television show.

Engineers Week aims to increase the visibility of the School of Engineering and Applied Science on the Danforth Campus, offer collaboration between various engineering groups and promote interaction between students, alumni, faculty, staff and engineering professionals. It’s also a time for some creative learning and fun on the part of the students.

More information is available at engineering.wustl.edu/engineersweek.

http://youtu.be/7ip4Ub90CwsStudents gathered in Lopata Hall Gallery for the inaugural WUChurn Butter Sculpting Competition Feb. 27. The competition was part of Engineers Week 2013 at the university. Video by Clark Bowen.

James Byard

A group of engineering students watches the battlebots competition, sponsored by the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering. Students built the remote-controlled robots and then battled to decide an eventual champion.

whitney curtis

Engineering students participate in a game of Nerf Gun Capture the Flag Feb. 25 in Lopata Hall. The annual Nerf gun competition is a great way for students to relax and have some fun doing it.

james byard

Junior Ammar Zahid makes his toss during the Paper Airplane Competition in Lopata Gallery.

sid hastings

A student shows off his EnWeek 2013 T-shirt.

sid hastings

Team Mantequilla works on its butter sculpture under the watchful eye of Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.

Sid hastings

Students (from left) Erin Humphries, Ethan Lynch and Jennifer Head, part of the team For Butter or For Worse, work on their sculpture.

Bayly, team get $2.25 million grant to study brain mechanics

Beth Miller — 2013-02-22 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis engineering researchers have received a five-year $2.25 million grant to better understand traumatic brain injuries in efforts to improve methods for prevention and treatment.

Bayly

Philip Bayly, PhD, the Lilyan and E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, is principal investigator for the grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The grant will allow Bayly and his research team to develop 3-D computer models of brain biomechanics that will give researchers and clinicians a better understanding about what happens to the brain during traumatic brain injury. Previously, Bayly and his research team measured brain motion and mechanical properties of the brain in 2-D.

“We are concerned about everyone who hits their head,” Bayly says. “It’s not only a factor for NFL players, but anyone who’s had a traumatic brain injury is at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease and potentially other neurological disorders. We’re also concerned about basketball players or soccer players who also get concussions, so it’s a widespread problem.”

With the new funding, the team plans to get a 3-D picture of the strain throughout the brain during low-level normal head motions. To do so, researchers will measure 3-D relative motion between the brain and the skull and estimate strain in live human and cadaver brains during mild head acceleration. In addition, they plan to assess the effects of residual stress on the human brain and compare 3-D displacement and strain fields to the computer models.

“The world is going to learn about the basic physics of brain injury, but also develop approaches to prevention and therapy, through computer simulation,” he says. “It’s really hard to simulate the brain because it’s really complicated. The necessary ingredients for good simulations are materials, the structure, how the materials are put together and data for validation. That’s what we’re providing.”

The team also is providing the opportunity to check the simulations through image-processing techniques so other researchers can take that data and validate the simulations.

Bayly says it’s very difficult to study brain biomechanics without models.

“When you’re moving around, your brain is suspended,” he says. “The suspension of the brain in the skull is really important. We found that when you’re moving your head normally, and even in mild concussions, it’s probably not the impact of the brain against the skull that provides most deformation. It’s probably the brain working against the suspension inside that’s producing most of the deformation.”

By studying chronic traumatic brain injury in football players, other researchers have found that the concentration of nerve damage or protein accumulations near blood vessels may be due to the mechanical effects of blood vessels restraining the tissues.

“This is an example where understanding mechanics can give insight into mechanism and potential therapeutic strategy,” Bayly says.

Bayly is working with Jerry L. Prince, PhD, the William B. Kouwenhoven Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and KT Ramesh, PhD, professor of mechanical engineering, both at Johns Hopkins University; as well as Dzung Pham at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

Watching molecules grow into microtubes

Beth Miller — 2013-02-22 00:00:00

Sometimes the best discoveries come by accident.

A team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, headed by Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, unexpectedly found the mechanism by which tiny single molecules spontaneously grow into centimeter-long microtubes by leaving a dish for a different experiment in the refrigerator.

Self-assembly, a process in which a disordered collection of components arrange themselves into an ordered structure, is of growing interest as a new paradigm in creating micro- and nanoscale structures and functional systems and subsystems.

This novel approach of making nano- and microstructures and devices is expected to have numerous applications in electronics, optics and biomedical applications.

Once Singamaneni and his research team, including Abdennour Abbas, PhD, a former postdoctoral researcher at Washington University, Andrew Brimer, a senior undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering, and Limei Tian, a fourth-year graduate student, saw that these molecules had become microtubes, they set out to find out how.

To do so, they spent about six months investigating the process at various length scales (nano to micro) using various microscopy and spectroscopy techniques.

The results were published in the journal Small.

“What we showed was that we can actually watch the self-assembly of small molecules across multiple length scales, and for the first time, stitched these length scales to show the complete picture,” Singamaneni says. “This hierarchical self-organization of molecular building blocks is unprecedented since it is initiated from a single molecular crystal and is driven by vesicular dynamics in water.”

The team used small molecules p-aminothiophenol (p-ATP) or p-aminophenyl disulfide added to water with a small amount of ethanol. The molecules first assembled into nanovesicles then into microvesicles and eventually into centimeter-long microtubules. The vesicles stick onto the surface of the tube, walk along the surface and attach themselves, causing the tube to grow longer and wider. The entire process takes mere seconds, with the growth rate of 20 microns per second.

http://youtu.be/vo_S_9XfFfEA team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, headed by Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, unexpectedly found the mechanism by which tiny single molecules spontaneously grow into centimeter-long microtubes by leaving a dish for a different experiment in the refrigerator.

“While it was exciting to watch the self-assembly of these molecules, we are even more excited about the implications of the self-assembly of such small molecules,” Singamaneni says. “This mechanism can be used to load the vesicles with the desired macromolecules, such as proteins, antibodies or antibiotics, for example, and build microtubes with a biological function.”

“We hope that once we can co-assemble some functional nanostructures along with these small molecules, then these molecular assemblies can have applications in biological sensors and chemical sensors,” Singamaneni says.

# # #

Abbas A, Brimer A, Tian L, d’Avignon D, Hameed A, Vittal J, Singamaneni S. "Vesicle-Mediated Growth of Tubular Branches and Centimeter-Long Microtubes from a Single Molecule." Small. Early online publication Dec. 16, 2012.

Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office and Army Research Laboratory.

New device better traps viruses, airborne pathogens

Beth Miller — 2013-02-22 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis engineering researchers have created a new type of air-cleaning technology that could better protect human lungs from allergens, airborne viruses and ultrafine particles in the air.

The new air cleaner uses a novel corono-soft X-ray system that enhances charging efficiency and captures particles at high efficiency. Difficult-to-charge particles are readily charged and trapped in the electrical field. Due to high ion concentrations and an oxidizing environment, organic species are readily converted to carbon dioxide. A nanostructured catalyst coating destroys the toxic particles.

The device, known as the SXC ESP, was created by a team led by Pratim Biswas, PhD, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

A recent study of the device, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, found that it could help to prevent respiratory and viral infections and inhalation-induced allergic reactions more efficiently than existing filter-based systems.

Asthma, a chronic respiratory disease that can be triggered by inhaling allergens, pollen, pet dander and other particles, is one of the most costly health-care expenses in the United States at more than $50 billion.

“Because many people in developed countries spend the majority of time indoors, properly maintaining indoor air quality is an absolute necessity to protect public health,” Biswas says.

The new device incorporates soft X-ray irradiation as a component of the electrostatic precipitation process currently used to remove large particles from airflows. By incorporating the soft X-ray enhanced electrostatic precipitation technology, the researchers were able to ensure very efficient charging of the particles over a broad range of sizes and their capture in the SXC ESP.

They exposed mice with compromised immune systems to the downstream air stream passing through the unit that contacted infectious viruses, allergens, anthrax, smallpox and other particles in the air. The sensitive mice survived, indicating that the SXC ESP was very effective in removing these biological agents from the air.

“Traditional air cleaners can trap viruses or other toxic particles in the filter, where they linger and grow,” Biswas says. “This device finds the virus or toxic particle or bioterror agent and inactivates it in one application.”

Ultimately, this technology could be incorporated into stand-alone air cleaners or scaled for use in aircraft cabins, offices and residential HVAC systems. It also could be used to clean up a diesel engine or power plant exhaust.

Michael Gidding, who is expected to graduate in 2013 with an MBA, a bachelor’s in chemical engineering and a master's in energy, environmental and chemical engineering, and Daniel Garcia, a May 2012 chemical engineering graduate, have teamed up to scale up this technology for commercial use. Their startup, Aerosol Control Technologies (ACT), is based on the patented process Biswas developed.

There are many applications for the technology in the coal industry, Gidding says, from dust control and safety at the mine to flue-gas treatment at the power plant.

Gidding and Garcia are working on a prototype to be tested as a diesel particulate filter substitute.
____________________________________________
Kettleson E, Schriewer J, Buller M, Biswas P. "Soft X-ray Enhanced Electrostatic Precipitation for Protection Against Inhalable Allergens, Ultrafine Particles and Microbial Infections." Applied and Environmental Microbiology. February 2013.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH U54 AI05716003) to the Midwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research and Saint Louis University startup funds.

Engineers Week to feature Edward Jung and Mythbusters

Beth Miller — 2013-02-21 00:00:00

Engineers Week 2013 is packed with a variety of events celebrating engineers.

The week, founded by the National Engineers Week Foundation, begins Monday, Feb. 25, and is designed to increase the visibility of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at the university, collaborate between various engineering groups and promote interaction among students, alumni, faculty, staff and engineering professionals.

At Washington University School of Engineering & Applied Science, events range from a Golden Mouse Hunt and Penny Wars that go on all week, to the ASME Battlebot Competition, other games and competitions; food; networking opportunities; and a WU Racing Car Showcase.

In addition, Edward Jung, founder of Intellectual Ventures, will present “Innovation EcoSystems” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 26, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium. Jung founded Intellectual Ventures after leaving Microsoft Corp., where he was chief architect and adviser to executive staff. At Intellectual Ventures, Jung also is chief technology officer, setting strategic technology direction for the company. An avid inventor, he holds more than 200 patents worldwide and has more than 1,000 patents pending.

The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters television show will hold an interactive presentation at 2 p.m. March 2 at Graham Chapel for WUSTL students, faculty and staff. The show uses the laws of engineering, physics and biology to bust hundreds of myths.

For a complete schedule of activities, go to engineering.wustl.edu/engineersweek.

WUSTL leaders urge action on sequester threat

Elizabethe Holland Durando — 2013-02-21 00:00:00

Wrighton

Echoing recent concerns regarding the “fiscal cliff,” Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

University leaders including Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Larry J. Shapiro, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, say they are deeply troubled by the potential impact of a “sequester” and the harm it would bring to education, health care, scientific research and innovation and the economy.

“Our leaders in Washington must make a critical decision that will have far-reaching consequences for America’s colleges and universities and the federal dollars they depend upon," says Wrighton, who sent a letter expressing his concerns to Missouri's congressional delegation earlier this week.

"These dollars represent lost opportunity for the nation. Students will find it more difficult to attend educational institutions of their choice. Scholars will find it harder to receive support for ground-breaking research. But ultimately, it will be our long-term national economy and security that will suffer without a well-trained workforce ready to invent and utilize ideas and technologies for the future.”

Shapiro

Says Shapiro: “Such significant reductions in spending would have sobering consequences for our health, our economy, our future. These cuts would delay life-saving treatments, cost jobs and deliver a blow to this country’s global competitiveness.”

Wrighton and Shapiro encourage Washington University’s faculty, students, staff, alumni and others to examine what is at risk and share their concerns with legislators.

To that end, the two are encouraging people to consider signing an online petition launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that urges the White House and Congress to achieve a bipartisan budget compromise that avoids sequestration and “moves the country on to sound fiscal footing without sacrificing our nation’s crucial investments in science and technology.”

The petition goes on to say: “Almost every national priority — from health and defense, agriculture and conservation, to hazards and natural disasters — relies on science and engineering. As another fiscal cliff approaches, placing a significant burden on federal research and development investments, as sequestration would do, is nothing less than a threat to national competitiveness. Support for science is support for economic growth, innovation, and technological progress.”

If sequestration occurs, the AAAS projects that federal research and development funding will be reduced by about $54 billion by 2017. Such cuts would do significant damage to scientific research and would eliminate jobs and stall innovation, the organization warns.

The AAAS, through its “Speak up for Science” petition, is urging researchers, professionals, students and others, especially those in science, technology, engineering and math fields, to sign the petition by Tuesday evening, Feb. 26. The AAAS will submit the petition Wednesday, Feb. 27, to legislators and the White House.

To access the petition, follow this link.

New mobile app helps students track campus shuttle

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-02-18 00:00:00

Joe Angeles

Vinoo Ganesh, left, a senior in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, explains the mobile app he developed, “WUSTL Circulator,” to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton in his office on Jan. 24.

An engineering undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis helped create and launch a mobile app that helps students track the campus circulator shuttle.

Vinoo Ganesh, a senior and computer science major in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, developed the real-time tracking app, titled “WUSTL Circulator.” The app also shows the circulator’s route and stopping points along with a full schedule that students can browse.

Ganesh developed the application in collaboration with staff from the university’s Parking and Transportation Services and Information Services & Technology departments.

Ganesh says he took a class on building apps for iPhones and was looking for a way to translate that knowledge into a real-world project. Several friends on campus suggested that knowing when the circulator shuttle will arrive would be a big help.

“The reason I did this is a service to the Wash U students,” he says. “All the administrators got completely behind the effort.”

John Bailey, assistant director of Student Technology Services in the IS&T department, coordinated the effort and worked closely with Ganesh on the project.

“Vinoo’s idea and prototype app were fantastic, but there was a fair amount of additional back-end work to be done,” Bailey says.

The university needed to purchase and install GPS units on the shuttles, set up a server application to feed location data to the app and extensively test it, he says.

Parking and Transportation provided funding for the project, which allowed the university to purchase the necessary GPS units and associated data plans. IS&T provided the server infrastructure to drive the app.

Oliver Jones, a graduate engineering student and a student staff member in the Student Technology Services division, was instrumental in developing the server mechanisms that collect GPS data and feed it to the app.

As with other student-developed university mobile apps, Ganesh partnered with IS&T during the publication process. IS&T has established guidelines and procedures for reviewing and publishing student-developed apps and already has helped publish 11 apps that were developed in part, or more, by students, Bailey says.

The circulator app for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices went live on Jan. 23 and is available for free through the iOS app store. An Android version also is in the works and could be ready in coming weeks. Jones is working on that project as well.

As an indication of the app’s demand and popularity, Apple’s stat tracking tool indicated the WUSTL Circulator app had 1,102 downloads on its first day of availability – three to four times the typical number for the first day of a new WUSTL app, Bailey says. By now, it has been downloaded more than 2,300 times, he says.

Ganesh says it’s great to add publishing an app to his résumé, but he also hopes to encourage other student developers to pursue their ideas, saying the university’s support was instrumental in helping his project succeed.

Parking and Transportation hopes the WUSTL Circulator app encourages more people to use the shuttle and improves the experience for regular student riders.

Building engineers of the future

Beth Miller — 2013-02-12 00:00:00

Every Tuesday afternoon, an undergraduate from Washington University’s School of Engineering & Applied Science heads back to middle school.

Nick Okafor leads the after-school Young Engineers Club at Brittany Woods Middle School in University City. N’Desha Scott, a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, started the club last fall as a way to reach out to middle school students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Students at Brittany Woods Middle School learn engineering principles through an after-school Young Engineers Club led by Washington University undergraduate Nick Okafor (right).

The club is part of the university’s Institute for School Partnership, which works with local school districts to encourage measurable increases in student success through curriculum development, instruction and assessment support and professional development for teachers.

The institute has been supporting STEM activities in elementary, middle and high schools for more than 20 years. Through the institute, Washington University undergraduate and graduate students offer tutoring or after-school interest clubs and enrichment programs at schools throughout the community.

Each week, six or seven Brittany Woods students participate in the Young Engineers Club. Scott developed a curriculum for the semester based on what she is learning in her engineering classes, with some modifications.

“We have to explain it to them on a middle school level, so we really have to know it,” Scott says.

Scott says she created the group out of her interest in teaching and working with kids and in sharing what engineering offers.

“I think it’s important that they are exposed to engineers,” she says. “They hear about doctors and lawyers, but they don’t really hear about engineers. It’s important to show them what an engineering career could do for them. I always try to bring our lesson back to things they use every day, so they can see that engineers have a hand in all of these things.”

Each week, the group has a different lesson and hands-on activity, for which the institute provides supplies. One activity involved building a bridge out of paper that was strong enough to support a shoe. A lesson in speed and velocity allowed students to create rockets with balloons and string. Another lesson in bionics led to students recreating a hand using only cardboard, straws, string, paper and tape.

“We analyzed what nature created and tried to make it with other materials,” says Okafor, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering. “Then we had a group discussion about what they would fix to make it work better. It’s great to see their minds going.”

“We try to get them to think about things such as what makes a hand move,” Scott adds. “This really challenges their way of thinking,” she says.

Scott and Okafor want to reach the whole person, so they also work to build students’ self-esteem with a positive affirmation:

I can do whatever I set my mind to do.
I can be whatever I set my mind to be.
I choose to learn, to succeed, and to help others.
Every day and in every way, I get better and better.
I am unique, I am awesome, and I believe in me.

The students have memorized the affirmation, and each week, a different student leads the group in reciting it, says Andrea Holmes, community and school liaison with the institute.

“This club is not just for doing activities, but for helping the students to identify their strengths and what the possibilities are,” Holmes says. “That is so important at this age level. The Washington University students have given them a sense of empowerment through the time they have spent with them.”

Holmes says feedback from Brittany Woods administrators has been very positive and that Scott and Okafor have been an invaluable resource.

“I know the Washington University Engineering curriculum is extremely intense,” she says. “I can’t express enough how wonderful it is that N’Desha and Nick are willing to sacrifice their time to pay it forward and to give to the next generation. They truly have a heart for these students.”

Although a class scheduling conflict kept Scott from leading the club this spring, she hopes to return in the future.

“Passing the torch of this club, my original idea, to Nick this semester is leaving a small legacy, a sharing of my love for science and engineering, some evidence of an impact,” Scott says.

Engineering’s Shen receives CAREER Award from NSF

Tony Fitzpatrick — 2013-01-29 00:00:00

Jung-Tsung Shen, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation.

Jung-Tsung Shen

The awards support junior faculty who model the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Nineteen Washington University faculty have received CAREER awards.

Shen, the Das Family Distinguished Career Development Assistant Professor, received a five-year, $400,000 grant to study the mechanisms for enhancing optical nonlinearity in subwavelength metallic nanostructures.

Results of the research will benefit optical science, providing mechanisms to enhance and tailor the optical nonlinearity to create multi-functional nonlinear optical materials that will have potential applications for ultracompact optoelectronics, ultra-fast telecommunications, and high-resolution optical imaging beyond the diffraction limit.

The nanostructures Shen studies are artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, that have extraordinary optical properties. Metamaterials are a new class of manmade structures that exhibit exceptional optical properties not easily observed in nature. Specifically, Shen has devised a class of nanostructured metamaterial that can enhance the optical nonlinearity by orders of magnitude.

The structure consists of a series of metal strips stacked somewhat like the slats of a Venetian blind, but with a much smaller spacing. The structure can focus the incident light beam to propagate through the very narrow channels between the metal strips so that strongly confined electromagnetic energy can be created in the channels.

By placing normal (but weak) nonlinear materials, such as silicon, germanium or copper chloride, in the channels, Shen showed that the optical nonlinearity of the structures is greatly enhanced.

Metamaterials with enhanced optical nonlinearity enable remarkable optical phenomena, such as efficient changing the color of incoming light, or using a light beam to switch on/off of another light beam.

“Metamaterials with strong optical nonlinearity could do wonders such as transforming incoming red laser light to green color,” Shen says. “We’re coming up with artificially engineered materials that have extraordinary optical responses. This can enable shrinking the size of present optoelectronic devices, for instance, and making possible energy-efficient optical devices. Moreover, such a new class of structures could also provide a way to control light in a ultrafast manner — a capability that is crucial for future demands for broadband communication and signal processing.”

Genes provide clues to gender disparity in human hearts

Beth Miller — 2013-01-23 00:00:00

Healthy men and women show little difference in their hearts, except for small electrocardiographic disparities. But new genetic differences found in hearts with disease ultimately could lead to personalized treatment of various heart ailments, Washington University in St. Louis researchers say.

Igor Efimov

Generally, men are more susceptible to developing atrial fibrillation, an irregular, rapid heartbeat that may lead to stroke, while women are more likely to develop long-QT syndrome, a rhythm disorder that can cause rapid heartbeats and sudden cardiac death.

While prior studies have clearly established differences in the development of heart disease between men and women, very few studies had looked at the molecular mechanisms behind those differences in human hearts.

Igor Efimov, PhD, the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and a former doctoral student, Christina Ambrosi, PhD, analyzed 34 human hearts looking for genetic differences that might explain gender differences in heart disease.

The team took advantage of the unique opportunity at the university to obtain failing human hearts at the time of transplantation from Barnes-Jewish Hospital and non-failing hearts unsuitable for transplantation from Mid-America Transplant Services, a St. Louis-based organ procurement service.

The team screened for 89 major genes in electrophysiology, ion channel subunits, calcium handling proteins and transcription factors important in cardiac conduction and in the development of arrhythmia and the left atria and ventricles in human hearts.

“What was striking in this study is that we expected very large gender differences in expression of genes in the ventricles, but we did not find such differences,” says Efimov, also a professor of medicine, of radiology and of cell biology and physiology at Washington University School of Medicine. “Unexpectedly, we found huge gender differences in the atria.”

The results showed that women with failing hearts have a weaker system of gene expression than men — males showed overall higher expression levels of nearly all of the 89 genes than women.

Women showed particularly lower atrial expression levels of several important genes encoding for potassium channels, including Kv4.3, KChIP2, Kv1.5 and Kir3.1. In fact, the atria of women with heart disease had less than half of the KChIP2 mRNA than atria in men.

Results of the research were published in PLOS ONE.

Efimov says while there are still many questions that need to be answered to explain these molecular differences, one factor that could be contributing to the difference is estrogen.

“When women have the highest levels of estrogen, they are least vulnerable to arrhythmia — women are protected by estrogen,” he says. “But after menopause, women develop atrial fibrillation at the same rate as men. We don’t understand this and need to study this in humans.”

Another potential factor is circadian rhythm, Efimov says.

“Humans are much more likely to die suddenly from heart disease early in the morning, between 5-7 a.m.,” he says. “In the cardiac system in mice, it has been shown that there is an oscillation of gene expression, so certain genes expressed at 5 a.m. could be different by threefold at 5 p.m.”

Efimov says the study on human hearts is unique to Washington University, as much cardiac research elsewhere is done mostly in animal models. In the future, the team would like to expand the research into pediatric hearts, taking advantage of Washington University’s leading pediatric heart transplant program to learn more about pediatric physiology.

# # #

Ambrosi C, Yamada K, Nerbonne J, Efimov I. Gender Differences in Electrophysiological Gene Expression in Failing and Non-Failing Human Hearts. PLOS One. Jan. 23, 2013.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (R01-HL114395) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R-01-HL085369).

Embedding with startups to study entrepreneurship

Neil Schoenherr and Melody Walker — 2013-01-15 00:00:00

Washington University’s business, engineering and law schools are collaborating on a new course in 2013 that will embed students in the center of the thriving entrepreneur community in downtown St. Louis.

Students will trade their campus classroom for working space at T-REx, a new St. Louis tech incubator that offers startup companies affordable offices in the historic Railway Exchange Building.

As part of the new course, Washington University students will engage in consulting projects for resident entrepreneurs at T-REx to better understand the inner workings of growing a business from the ground up.

“Student projects will range from revenue modeling and pricing strategies to marketing and competitive analysis,” says Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at Olin Business School. “The results will ultimately benefit both the startups and the students who are studying entrepreneurship.”

The course will be open to undergraduates and graduate students in Washington University’s business, engineering and law schools.

Holekamp and Ron King, PhD, director of Olin’s Center for Experiential Learning (CEL), will co-teach the course at the school’s office/classroom space at T-REx.

“This course is very unique at Washington University and nationwide,” explains King who is a senior associate dean and the Myron Northrop Professor of Accounting at Olin. “The students will work closely with the entrepreneurs, guided by faculty experts over the course of the semester. It’s a win-win situation for students and entrepreneurs.”

Of the 45 companies currently leasing space at the T-ReX incubator, many count Washington University alumni among their founders and employees. (See OlinBusiness magazine feature story on alumni at T-REx.)

Entrepreneurship courses are popular at Washington University and attract students from multiple disciplines. In fact, professors encourage students with diverse backgrounds and majors to form teams when planning a business.

Nick Benassi, associate dean at Washington University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, collaborated on the design of the new course. “This innovative partnership with the business school is opening up exciting opportunities for our students to experience entrepreneurship firsthand and be a part of the thriving St. Louis startup community that is creating new ventures with global impact,” Benassi says.

The engineering school holds a competition for undergraduate students to promote the discovery of entrepreneurial solutions for global challenges.

Benassi sees the convergence of multiple disciplines around innovation and entrepreneurship as part of a larger and necessary trend of interfacing talents to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

“The law school is very excited to be a part of this initiative,” says Hillary Sale, JD, the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law at the law school and professor of management at Olin Business School. “We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues at the business and engineering schools to provide unique educational opportunities for our students to work with the growing entrepreneurial community in St. Louis.

“The partnership is another example of our commitment to professional practice opportunities for our students and underscores the benefits of developing critical skills while working in interdisciplinary teams.”

Pairings of student teams and companies will be announced at the start of the course this month.

Entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis

Entrepreneur magazine ranked Washington University No. 5 in undergraduate programs and No. 6 in graduate programs. Degrees in entrepreneurship are offered at the undergraduate and graduate level in the business school; WUSTL’s Brown School offers a master’s degree in social entrepreneurship in conjunction with Olin Business School. A minor degree in entrepreneurship is an option for all undergraduates at WUSTL. The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies manages two annual business plan competitions: the Olin Cup for commercial ventures and the YouthBridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition. The School of Engineering and Applied Science launced its Discovery Competition this fall with the goal of promoting new and innovative solutions for real-world problems and allowing students to compete for financial resources that could help turn their ideas into businesses. The winning team will be awarded $25,000.

Faculty Achievement Award nominations sought

2013-01-16 00:00:00

Nominations are being accepted for Washington University’s annual Faculty Achievement Awards, known as the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award and the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award.

The Compton Award is given to a distinguished member of the faculty from one of the six Danforth Campus schools and the Cori Award to a faculty member from the School of Medicine.

All full-time, active Washington University faculty members are eligible to receive the Faculty Achievement Award. Any full-time, active member of the faculty may submit a nomination to the Advisory Committee. The nomination packet should include:

• A nomination letter detailing the rationale for the nomination;
• The nominee’s curriculum vitae;
• Three supporting letters from individuals acquainted with the nominee’s contributions as a scholar/researcher and teacher.

The ideal candidates for the Faculty Achievement Award will show excellence in both the research and the service/teaching domains. While outstanding achievement in research and scholarship are weighed most heavily, the awardee must also show a strong record of service to the university and respected accomplishments in teaching, whether that be in the classroom, in mentoring or in other pedagogical capacities.

The deadline to submit nominations is Friday, Feb. 15. Submit nominations and supporting letters to Gerhild S. Williams, PhD, vice provost and associate vice chancellor, at Campus Box 1080 or by email at gerhildwilliams@wustl.edu.

The awardees will be announced this spring. The recipients will receive their awards and give presentations of their scholarly work during a ceremony in December. At the time of these presentations, the awardees will each receive a $5,000 honorarium.

Robert P. Mecham, PhD, a pioneering cell biologist, and Nancy L. Morrow-Howell, PhD, a leading national scholar in gerontology, received Washington University’s 2012 Faculty Achievement Awards during a Dec. 1 event.

Mecham, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology, received the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award, and Morrow-Howell, the Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work at the Brown School, received the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.

An Advisory Committee will review nominations and make recommendations to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, who, with the Faculty Senate Council, established the awards in 1999.

To see a list of the Advisory Committee members, click here.

To see a list of previous award recipients, click here.

Discovery Competition narrows teams to six

Beth Miller — 2013-01-04 00:00:00

Washington University’s School of Engineering & Applied Science has selected six semifinalists to receive a $1,000 interim funding award and to go on to compete for a $25,000 grand prize. The engineering school launched the Discovery Competition in September to promote new and innovative discoveries to solve challenges or needs.

“I am extremely excited by the response to this first-time competition,” said Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. “With only a month’s notice, about 40 teams applied, and six will move forward with ideas that primarily focus on health-related needs, including those in developing countries. Our goal is to create and stimulate a culture of innovation and creativity among our undergraduates, and with this start, we are well on our way.”

Teams are composed of currently enrolled WUSTL undergraduate students, with at least one engineering student and at least one non-engineering student.

“The competition was designed to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit in students, and the tremendous response shows that students have some great ideas to solve the world’s problems,” said Dennis Mell, director of the Discovery Competition and professor of practice. “We are grateful to our alumni who provided the funding for the awards.”

The grand prize will be awarded in the spring.

The six semi-finalist teams are:

Biliboyz: The team has proposed a low-cost alternative to treating jaundice in newborns by creating a “biliblanket,” a small, glowing mat placed directly next to the infant’s skin, with much less power intensive requirements than those currently used. The team plans to build a device that uses electroluminescent materials to transmit light, eliminating the need for expensive fiber optics, and to supply a low-cost, reliable and safe treatment for jaundice in newborns, particularly in the developing world.

BMC Protein Expression: This team proposes to create a tool kit to produce proteins inside the safe environment of bacterial microcompartments (BCMs). They plan to build on existing research that produces BCMs in E. coli bacteria. The goal is to create a technology to make available to biotechnology labs, which can use it to express proteins, as well as to reduce the cost of producing pharmaceuticals and enzymes on an industrial scale.

Parkinson’s L3DC: This team proposes a self-assessment product that a patient with Parkinson’s Disease can use at home to accurately measure tremors. The product will be a software package that uses the Leap by LeapMotion Inc. to create a quantitative method for 3D measurements of Parkinsonian tremor. These assessment results would then be digitally available to clinicians to remotely monitor the patient and professionally assess the results.

Polysomnography: The team plans to increase accessibility to testing for sleep disorders, called polysomnography, by adapting and interfacing medical-sensing peripherals through the headphone input of smartphones. This technology could lead to the expansion of home patient monitoring for patients with sleep disorders or other disorders in the future.

Sparo Labs: Sparo Labs stems from an award-winning project to develop a low-cost spirometer, which measures lung function. The team plans to further develop the product to prepare it for clinical trials, with the end goal of the device being available for use in developing countries to better diagnose lung disorders such as asthma, chronic obstruction pulmonary disorders and cystic fibrosis.

Team Coyote: Project Coyote is envisioned as software for GPS-equipped portable navigation systems (primarily smartphones and car GPS devices) that uses sound to provide instant, intuitive, hands-free and eyes-free feedback to users. Building on existing GPS software, the user would turn on a “beacon mode,” connect headphones, and the software would play an audio cue that seems to come from their destination, allowing them to “follow” the sound to find their destination.

For more information, go to engineering.wustl.edu/discovery.

Brain Power

2013-05-09 00:00:00

MICHAEL c. PURDY (2)

Washington University alumnus Mark Wronkiewicz (BS '12) (above left) developed BrainCopter, one of the first brain-controlled applications for the iPad, while studying biomedical engineering. Mentor Eric Leuthardt, MD, director of the university's Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology, tries the application, which challenges players to use their thoughts to manipulate a flying brain icon past a variety of obstacles. Leuthardt's thoughts are monitored by the mini-EEG headset he is wearing, which is available commercially. The headset results are relayed to a receiver inserted into the iPad's charging dock. Wronkiewicz is now a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. (Below) Wronkiewicz's BrainCopter as it appears on the screen.

Webcams, crowd-sourcing compelling tools in measuring effectiveness of bike lanes, other open spaces

Leslie Gibson McCarthy — 2012-12-17 00:00:00

Joe Angeles

New research gives communities a novel way to measure the effectiveness of built environments like trails, greenways and parks.

A new study out of Washington University in St. Louis is one of the first to use technology to effectively measure the use of built environments — parks, greenways, trails and other man-made public areas — as a means to improve public health.

The study, “Emerging Technologies: Webcams and Crowd-Sourcing to Identify Active Transportation,” will be published Dec. 18 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Lead author is J. Aaron Hipp, PhD, assistant professor of public health at the Brown School.

“Obesity is costing the U.S. healthcare system $147 billion annually,” Hipp says. “We need to increase physical activity in this country and, by helping communities measure how effective cycling infrastructure, greenways, trails, parks and open space can be, we can both raise awareness and help communities build better environments,” Hipp says.

The research was conducted in a novel way, using publicly available outdoor webcams and crowd-sourcing.

“The team used webcam imagery and a crowd-sourcing approach to count people, bikes and cars, in rainy, foggy or crowded conditions where automatic methods fail and research assistants struggle due to weather and numbers,” says co-author Robert Pless, PhD, professor in the WUSTL School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The findings suggest that these two sources have great potential for capturing behavioral change associated with built environments.

Hipp

“This research can inform multiple fields, including public health professionals fighting the obesity epidemic, urban planners designing our public spaces to facilitate movement, and computer vision professionals seeking to improve machine learning for public safety,” Hipp says.

A web tool called the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS) — developed by Pless — gave researchers thousands of images from which to study. AMOS uses publicly available outdoor webcams and a custom web crawler to capture webcam images with a time stamp — one image per camera every half hour.

From there, the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website was used to crowd-source the image annotation and collect data. MTurk workers were paid one cent to mark each pedestrian, cyclist and vehicle in a picture. Each image was counted fıve unique times, a process completed in less than 8 hours.

“These pictures allowed us to go back in time and study a place that looked different from year to year,” Hipp says.

The study centered on an intersection in Washington, D.C., at Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 9th Street NW in June of 2009 and June of 2010, between which time a bike lane had been installed. The research found cycling activity in the area went up four-fold once the lane was built.

“Using a webcam works to capture activity,” Hipp says, “and adding the bike lane increased the amount of cyclists using it. Because Dr. Pless has an archive of these scenes, we were able to locate areas where the physical environment, design or even policy environment had changed.

“We can now crowd-source the images to understand if these design or policy changes are associated with human behavior changes in the same space.”

Hipp says this is about more than saving money and reducing a waistline. “Cycling or walking to work will reduce your carbon footprint by 20 percent,” he says. “Many potential wins are associated with increasing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. What is lacking is the evidence needed to convince communities and governments to spend the necessary money on improvements.

“There are literally tens of thousands of publicly available outdoor webcams throughout the world,” Hipp says. “And they can be an effective tool for researchers.”

Additional co-authors on the study are graduate students Deepti Adlakha and Bill Chang and Amy A. Eyler, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School.

‘Fiscal cliff’ would have major consequences, WUSTL leaders warn

Susan Killenberg McGinn — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:38:17 CST

If Congress and President Obama do not reach a compromise before the end of the year to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff,’ it will have major consequences on Washington University in St. Louis as well as other universities and colleges across the country, say WUSTL administrators.

Read Chancellor Wrighton's letter to the congressional delegation.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and other Washington University administrators have been actively working to impress upon the country’s leaders and the public what billions of dollars in looming tax increases and spending cuts in 2013 would mean to Americans’ health and to the economy.

Wrighton recently sent a letter to Missouri’s congressional delegation, including U.S. Senators Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt, as well as Illinois U.S. Senators Richard Durbin and Mark Kirk, expressing his concern if a compromise isn’t reached by the start of 2013.

In the letter, Wrighton wrote that “elements of the ‘fiscal cliff’ could impact our nation’s ability to educate the next generation of students, to provide life-saving cures and treatments to those in need, and to conduct the ground-breaking research necessary to maintain the nation’s continued leadership in science, scholarship, and innovation.”

Meanwhile, in an op-ed appearing in yesterday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Larry J. Shapiro, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the Washington University School of Medicine, wrote that cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be “devastating.”

Read full text of Dean Shapiro's commentary on potential “fiscal cliff” consequences.

“Some $600 billion of the planned cuts will come from non-defense programs, which will have dire consequences for our health and our economy,” Shapiro wrote. “That is because the cuts indiscriminately slash federal investment in medical research.

“This short-sighted solution to the nation’s deficit problem would significantly delay new, life-saving medical treatments. But what many people don’t realize is that the massive cuts also would put a chokehold on the creation of high-tech jobs and threaten U.S. global competitiveness.”

View a United for Medical Research (UMR) infographic detailing why looming cuts in research funds could put jobs and medical innovations at risk. Washington University is a founding member of UMR, which is one of several national research advocacy organizations.

Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, vice chancellor for research and the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology, has formed a Research Leadership Working Group to help maximize the continued success of research at Washington University.

Read Vice Chancellor Kharasch’s comments on sequestration risks in the WUSTL Federal Funding Newsletter.

The team is tracking broad institutional and national research issues and assessing their potential impact on the schools, faculty and research at Washington University.

The group also is developing communications about issues critical to the research community, such as the ongoing fiscal cliff discussions in Washington, D.C.

Kharasch recently sent to the research faculty on the Medical and Danforth campuses the first in a series of communications on federal funding issues.

In the newsletter, Kharasch encouraged WUSTL scientists to let their elected officials know their feelings about sequestration – large cuts to discretionary spending – which would have the most immediate impact on federal research.

In Wrighton’s letter to Missouri and Illinois elected officials, he reiterated his concern about the impact potential spending cuts would have on research, medical care and financial aid.

“While it is important to take a comprehensive approach to addressing this fiscal morass,” he wrote, “it is vital that any solution protect those core investments and tax provisions that help educate students, provide quality healthcare, and promote research and development — all of which enable enhanced national security, increased entrepreneurship and private investment, and economic competitiveness.”

Jun to use novel process to study nanoparticle formation

Beth Miller — 2012-11-06 00:00:00

Sunscreen contains nanoparticles to protect our skin by reflecting hazardous ultraviolet radiation from the sun. But what happens to those nanoparticles when you wash the sunscreen away?

Young-Shin Jun, PhD, is studying nanoparticles as they are growing in water. In this illustration, the colored spheres are nanoparticles in water. The images on the left are the images produced by X-ray scattering. Jun and her team have developed a novel process that allows them to study in real-time how nanoparticles are forming, both on a surface and in a solution, and what shape they are taking while in water.

Young-Shin Jun, PhD, has received a three-year, $382,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to determine the physical and chemical evolution of environmental and engineered nanoparticles in natural and engineered aquatic systems, such as wastewater treatment plants. But instead of starting at the end of the life cycle of nanoparticles, she’s starting at the very beginning — the early stages of nanoparticle formation.

The goal is to determine whether nanoparticle transformation in wastewater treatment will introduce more adverse effects on the quality of the effluent water from wastewater treatment systems, how these nanoparticles can be removed from the system or how they can be further used to better remove toxic contaminants.

“We have spent so much time looking at how to create a nanoparticle, and we didn’t think much about their toxicity or potential hazardous problems,” says Jun, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “If we understand nanoparticle formation in these environments, we can better fine-tune our design of nanoparticles to minimize any adverse effects in the environment. If we do understand well, we can use these nanoparticles in engineering to potentially alleviate climate change.”

The team also will look at nanoparticles released into the environment that react with rare earth elements and toxic compounds.

“This will help us understand the impact of the transformation of exotic engineered nanoparticles in natural and engineered aqueous systems, which can potentially create hybrid nanoparticles that we don’t yet understand well,” Jun says.

Because nanoparticles are so small — especially when they are just forming — only highly sensitive and in situ imaging devices and methods, such as electron microscopies, X-ray scattering, infrared spectroscopy and nanoscale mass spectrometry will allow researchers to see them.

Jun’s team will be the first to use novel techniques to measure the nanoparticle sizes and mineral phases while they are still growing in water.

“These nanoparticles are very fragile, and once you remove them from water, they dry out and change shape,” she says. “Since we are studying wastewater and environmental systems, we want to look at the particles in water so we can see what’s happening when they are in that environment and stop the reaction when we see it happening.”

Jun’s lab also has special tools that will allow them to see the nanoparticles as they are growing.

“Our research group is uniquely positioned to do this because we will use grazing incidence small X-ray scattering and atomic force microscopy, which will provide real-time information about the kinetics and mechanisms of nanoparticle nucleation and growth,” she says. “These tools are very sensitive, so we can even catch the moment when the particles first start to form.”

For broader impact, Jun and her research team will conduct education for and outreach to students from middle school through graduate school, particularly encouraging groups traditionally underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

They will develop a group of educational kits about water quality in collaboration with teachers from University City High School, Brittany Woods Middle School and the university’s Science Outreach Office.

Electric-vehicle chargers installed outside of Brauer Hall

Beth Miller — 2012-11-28 00:00:00

That’s not a new parking meter or air pump for your tires outside of Stephen F. & Camilla T. Brauer Hall — it’s a charging station for electric vehicles.

E. Brook Haley

The new electric car charging station outside Brauer Hall.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton; Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and Pratim Biswas, PhD, the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, will formally introduce the charging station at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29, in the parking lot outside of Brauer Hall, where two parking spots have been reserved for electric-powered cars.

Installation of the station, purchased by Washington University, stems from an independent study project by Elizabeth Mohr, a sophomore majoring in chemical engineering. Working with Biswas, Mohr did a lot of research and legwork before presenting the results.

“I learned a lot about electric vehicle charging stations and all of the features and different considerations that you have to look at when choosing one,” Mohr says.

The charging station can charge two vehicles simultaneously. Similar to the WeCar rental system, drivers of electric-powered cars will be able to register online with or visit Parking and Transportation Services and get a key fob with an RFID chip that they can hold up to a reader on the charger. Once recognized, the charging handle will unlock. Users may also call the toll-free phone number on the charging station to activate it. A full charge takes about four hours. There will be no cost to users.

“We hope that this will motivate our employees and students to drive electric vehicles to campus,” Biswas says. “In a few months, one of the WeCars available for rent will be electric-powered.”

The car-charging station is another step in the university’s commitment to sustainability and to use resources wisely in its operations. In addition, Brauer Hall is certified LEED Gold, a high rating by the U.S. Green Building Council for green building design and construction.

Phil Valko, director of sustainability, says the electric vehicles have the potential to reduce both carbon emissions and the reliance on fossil fuels for the transportation sector.

“Electricity is a currency,” he says. “You can create it using myriad different sources — coal, natural gas, sunlight, biomass, wind and other things,” he says. “Switching over to a currency-based form of transportation is important because it allows for flexibility and opens the door for renewables to power our vehicles.”

Another station is already planned for the Millbrook Parking Facility as part of the Bauer Hall building under construction. Depending on demand, the university may install additional charging stations in other parking locations, says Steve Hoffner, associate vice chancellor for operations.

While there are about 10 public stations within a 20-mile radius around the St. Louis metropolitan area, this is the second at a higher education institution; St. Louis Community College in Wildwood has four charging stations.

Mohr will collect data from the charging stations to compare with data from a gasoline-powered and a hybrid car. Preliminary analyses suggest that for the St. Louis region, common electric cars produce fewer carbon emissions than gasoline-powered cars that have a mileage of about 39 miles per gallon or less.

“We are doing this to connect to our research,” Biswas says. “We will get electricity from Ameren on the grid, but if we get sufficient resources, we might install a shed with solar panels and an energy storage unit, or battery system, to charge the station. The station also will be connected to the Internet, so people can see how much electricity is being used and how much it costs.”

Electric cars have several environmental benefits – they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants and reduce the dependence on imported foreign oil. Some even allow drivers to use their smartphones to track the battery’s charge and to save on energy costs by scheduling off-peak charging. Vehicles that run solely on electricity can run for up to 100 miles on a single charge, Biswas says, but only if the car is driven sensibly.

One of the drawbacks to an electric vehicle is the short battery life, Biswas says. But Venkat Subramanian, PhD, associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, is studying this with a $3.2 million grant to design a battery management system for lithium-ion batteries that will guarantee their longevity, safety and performance.

In conjunction with the Solar Energy Research Institute for India and U.S. (SERIIUS), a new $25 million initiative, the university with its partners, such as MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., expects to advance the use of solar energy systems. The university has also launched the Solar Energy and Energy Storage (SEES) initiative that will bring researchers together to work on renewable energy systems, coupled with storage, that will promote its use, deployment and development.

So BRIGHT, you need to wear shades

2012-11-20 00:00:00

Naveen Gandra

Nanostructures called BRIGHTs seek out biomarkers on cells and then beam brightly to reveal their locations. In the tiny gap between the gold skin and the gold core of the cleaved BRIGHT (visible to the upper left), there is an electromagnetic hot spot that lights up the reporter molecules trapped there.

Called BRIGHTs, the tiny probes described in the online issue of Advanced Materials on Nov. 15, bind to biomarkers of disease and, when swept by an infrared laser, light up to reveal their location.

Tiny as they are, the probes are exquisitely engineered objects: gold nanoparticles covered with molecules called Raman reporters, in turn covered by a thin shell of gold that spontaneously forms a dodecahedron.

The Raman reporters are molecules whose jiggling atoms respond to a probe laser by scattering light at characteristic wavelengths.

The shell and core create an electromagnetic hotspot in the gap between them that boosts the reporters’ emission by a factor of nearly a trillion.

BRIGHTs shine about 1.7 x 10¹¹ more brightly than isolated Raman reporters and about 20 times more intensely than the next-closest competitor probe, says Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Goosing the signal from Raman reporters
Singamaneni and his postdoctoral research associate Naveen Gandra, PhD, tried several different probe designs before settling on BRIGHTS.

Singamaneni’s lab has worked for years with Raman spectroscopy, a spectroscopic technique that is used to study the vibrational modes (bending and stretching) of molecules. Laser light interacts with these modes and the molecule then emits light at higher or lower wavelengths that are characteristic of the molecule,

Spontaneous Raman scattering, as this phenomenon is called, is by nature very weak, but 30 years ago scientists accidently stumbled on the fact that it is much stronger if the molecules are adsorbed on roughened metallic surfaces. Then they discovered that molecules attached to metallic nanoparticles shine even brighter than those attached to rough surfaces.

The intensity boost from surface-enhanced Raman scattering, or SERS, is potentially huge. “It’s well-known that if you sandwich Raman reporters between two plasmonic materials, such as gold or silver, you are going to see dramatic Raman enhancement,” Singamaneni says.

Originally his team tried to create intense electromagnetic hot spots by sticking smaller particles onto a larger central particle, creating core-satellite assemblies that look like daisies.

“But we realized these assemblies are not ideal for bioimaging,” he says, “because the particles were held together by weak electrostatic interactions and the assemblies were going to come apart in the body.”

Next they tried using something called Click chemistry to make stronger covalent bonds between the satellites and the core.

“We had some success with those assemblies,” Singamaneni says, “but in the meantime we had started to wonder if we couldn’t make an electromagnetic hot spot within a single nanoparticle rather than among particles.

“It occurred to us that if we put Raman reporters between the core and shell of a single particle could we create an internal hotspot.”

That idea worked like a charm.

A rainbow of probes carefully dispensing drugs?
The next step, says Singamaneni, is to test BRIGHTS in vivo in the lab of Sam Achilefu, PhD, professor of radiology in the School of Medicine.

But he’s already thinking of ways to get even more out of the design.

Since different Raman reporter molecules respond at different wavelengths, Singamaneni says, it should be possible to design BRIGHTS targeted to different biomolecules that also have different Raman reporters and then monitor them all simultaneously with the same light probe.

And he and Gandra would like to combine BRIGHTS with a drug container of some kind, so that the containers could be tracked in the body and the drug and released only when it reached the target tissue, thus avoiding many of the side effects patients dread.

Good things, as they say, come in small packages.

Mentors for Bear Cub Fund program to help WUSTL scientists commercialize discoveries

Caroline Arbanas — 2012-11-20 00:00:00

In recent years, more than $1.1 million funneled to Washington University scientists through the Bear Cub Fund program has helped move university technologies into the marketplace.

To encourage entrepreneurship, the Bear Cub Fund program is now providing more hands-on guidance and incorporating other changes to help university scientists commercialize their discoveries. The program supports innovative translational research not normally backed by federal grants. These types of studies are needed to help researchers demonstrate the commercial potential of their technology.

“Many scientists have expressed an interest in the Bear Cub program, but they aren’t quite sure how to present their ideas or develop a proposal,” says Bradley Castanho, PhD, who heads the university’s Office of Technology Management (OTM), which oversees the program. “We think providing mentors and hands-on assistance is essential to cultivating entrepreneurs, and we are tapping into the resources of the university’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.”

With the changes to the Bear Cub program, the application process now involves two stages. Initially, researchers will submit a short, one-page application and give a two-minute oral “pitch” about their technology. Scientists will have the opportunity to attend a training session to learn how to craft their pitch.

The initial Bear Cub application is due Dec. 10, and researchers will pitch their ideas at a competition in early January. Up to eight winners will each receive $1,000 to help draft a full Bear Cub proposal that will be due in February. A key component of drafting the final proposal will be working with a business mentor.

Outside organizations that foster entrepreneurship, including BioSTL, BioGenerator and InnovateVMS, will play an active role in the Bear Cub selection process and provide mentors who can offer their advice and expertise.

Since 2008, five start-up companies have been launched from Bear Cub-funded technologies. These start-ups feature a cross-section of university research in nanotechnology, cardiac imaging, cancer diagnostics, surgical mesh development and treatment for blood vessel injury following heart attacks or surgery.

“The rising profile of Washington University technologies continues to attract interest from potential investors and start-up companies,” Castanho says. “The Bear Cub program is one way we can identify academic research that has commercial potential.”

Bear Cub grants support scientists in proof-of-concept studies that are not typically funded by traditional sources but are key to generating commercial interest.

The five start-up companies founded around Bear Cub support since 2008:

Vasculox focuses on developing humanized antibodies to treat ischemia reperfusion injury, the tissue damage that can occur when blood flow is temporarily interrupted and later restored. The injury is a common problem following organ transplantation. Vasculox is based on research by William Frazier, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics.
CardioWise, based on technology developed by Michael Pasque, MD, professor of surgery, and Brian Cupps, MD, research associate professor of surgery, seeks to advance a novel MRI-based cardiac imaging and analysis technique to create highly accurate 3D models of the heart.
Retectix centers on creating a synthetic polymer mesh made of individual strands of nanofibers that could be used to repair injuries to the brain and spinal cord. The technology is based on the research of Matthew MacEwan, a Washington University MD, PhD student.
RadTargX focuses on developing novel therapies for cancer treatment using monoclonal antibodies. The company is based on discoveries by Dennis Hallahan, MD, the Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Professor of Medicine.
Acuplaq seeks to develop a new nanomedicine for the treatment of blood clots. The nanotherapeutic has the potential to detect abnormal clotting and deactivate thrombin, an essential clotting enzyme. The technology is based on research by Samuel Wickline, MD, the J. Russell Hornsby Professor of Biomedical Sciences.

In addition to these start-ups, three other Bear Cub technologies are being closely followed by a major pharmaceutical company and four others are closer to a working prototype, based on ongoing research and development.

In the past four years, Bear Cub funds have supported 26 projects, of which 15 have been completed. In all, the funding has supported emerging technologies in medical devices (5 projects); cancer therapy (3 projects); medical conditions (8 projects); diagnostics (5 projects); treatment of infectious diseases (3 projects), and imaging and data analysis software (2 projects).

Bear Cub funds are distributed by OTM through a competitive application process. To be eligible for submission, scientists must have filed with OTM an invention disclosure for their technology. Individual grants range from $20,000 to $75,000, and studies that are selected for funding must be completed within one year.

“The success of the Bear Cub program highlights the many ways in which academic institutions like Washington University can be engines of economic development,” Castanho says. “Commercializing new technologies not only benefits the university but has the potential to improve the lives of patients worldwide.”

In addition to start-ups that have emerged from Bear Cub-funded projects, eight additional start-ups have been formed in the past five years from Washington University research.

More information about the the Bear Cub Fund application process is available here. The one-page application is here.

Gruev receives grant to study, recreate mantis shrimp vision

Beth Miller — 2012-11-14 00:00:00

Mantis shrimp, aggressive, predatory sea crustaceans, have among the most sophisticated vision of all animals. A group of researchers, including Viktor Gruev, PhD, want to recreate that vision to make a specialized camera that could bring more precision to biomedical imaging and weapons targeting in defense.

A mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) defending its hole.

Gruev, assistant professor of computer science & engineering, is an investigator on a $3.5 million collaborative grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) that will allow them to re-engineer the eye of the mantis shrimp, or stomatopod, that live in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

The interdisciplinary team, which includes Gruev, two marine biologists and a physicist, will study the animal’s visual sensory system to learn how it processes information. By sharing principles among the three disciplines, the team aims to decode the inner principles of stomatopod vision to create more efficient design of sensors, imaging devices and analyzers.

Stomatopods have 20 different photoreceptor types, or functional input channels, in their eyes, including 12 channels for color. Gruev and the research team are interested in the mechanisms that function to reduce and analyze the 20 data streams.

“The mantis shrimp are very small creatures, but they have very sophisticated image processing,” Gruev says. “We want to know if we can mimic these sensors or design them to create a specialized camera that has multiple applications.”

In the first two years of the grant, Gruev will develop two underwater polarization sensitive imaging systems housed in an underwater casing that he will design. In the final two years, he will design and build a custom imaging system using silicon dies that mimics the visual image processing of the stomatopod eye. His lab will also design and build printed circuit boards to test the imaging sensor.

Gruev says the camera could be used in biomedical imaging to better detect healthy cells from tumor cells, as well as in military aircraft to find a target in hazy or foggy conditions.

Gruev’s lab has already developed a sensor that can capture polarization properties of light. He went to the Great Barrier Reef, where his colleagues have an underwater optics lab where they can study the stomatopods and test their vision. This project will build on his previous work.

Novel process to detect proteins could simplify kidney disease detection

Beth Miller and Jim Dryden — 2012-11-14 00:00:00

Detecting whether a patient will have acute kidney injury could become as simple as dipping a paper test strip printed with gold nanorods into a urine sample, a team of Washington University in St. Louis researchers has found.

Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of engineering, along with Evan Kharasch, MD, PhD, and Jerry Morrissey, PhD, at Washington University School of Medicine, have developed a biomedical sensor using gold nanorods designed to detect the elevation of the protein neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), a promising biomarker for acute kidney injury, in urine. Biomarkers are typically small molecules or proteins in the body whose concentration changes in response to disease or therapy.

Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, and the research team used a process called biomolecular imprinting to create the plasmonic biosensor. This process involves attaching the target proteins to the surface of the nanorods, then adding small molecules around the proteins to form a polymer layer around the outside of the nanorods. The target proteins are removed to leave cavities on the surface of the nanorods, which are the artificial antibodies. When the nanorods with the artificial antibodies are exposed to a substance, such as urine, that contains the target protein, those proteins settle into the cavities, similar to a puzzle piece fitting into a jigsaw puzzle.

“This highly promising and innovative technology offers the potential to bring kidney function testing to the bedside, with greater accessibility and diminished cost,” says Kharasch, the Russell and Mary Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. “In addition, this proof-of-concept assay may be much more broadly applicable to various types of clinical tests and biomarkers, enabling the creation of many new assays, more rapidly and more cost-effectively.”

Acute kidney injury, which occurs when the kidneys become unable to filter waste products from the blood, develops rapidly over a few hours or a few days. It is common in people who are hospitalized, particularly in those critically ill people or who have had heart surgery. To date, there have not been any sensors that can easily detect if a person will experience acute kidney injury.

“If we can find an inexpensive technology that could be used more efficiently, we can catch this much earlier and save a lot of lives,” says Singamaneni, an engineer in materials science and mechanical engineering. “Our goal is to be able to print this sensor on a piece of paper with an everyday inkjet printer so physicians and clinics have an inexpensive test available when they need it.”

To create the sensor, the team used a technique called plasmonic biosensing, which is capable of detecting very small quantities of biomarkers. However, natural antibodies have a short shelf life and are expensive and time-consuming to develop and apply, so Singamaneni and the team created artificial antibodies. To create the plasmonic biosensor, they used a process called biomolecular imprinting.

This process involves attaching the target proteins to the surface of the nanorods, then adding small molecules around the proteins to form a polymer layer around the outside of the nanorods. The target proteins are removed to leave cavities on the surface of the nanorods, which are the artificial antibodies. When the nanorods with the artificial antibodies are exposed to a substance, such as urine, that contains the target protein, those proteins settle into the cavities, similar to a puzzle piece fitting into a jigsaw puzzle.

“When you shine light on gold nanorods, the metal’s electrons get excited and start oscillating,” Singamaneni says. “There are two bands, or colors, of light in the gold nanorod’s spectrum that show what part of the light is being absorbed and scattered by the nanorod. When something sticks to the surface of the gold nanorod, it will shift the position of one of the bands and change the color. That color tells us if the protein biomarker has bound to the gold nanorod. Then we can measure the amount of biomarker by the amount of color change.”

The team plans to use its success using NGAL as the biomarker as a model for replacing natural antibodies with artificial antibodies for other proteins. In 2010, Kharasch and Morrissey, research professor of anesthesiology, found that the proteins aquaporin-1 and adipophilin were elevated in the urine of patients with the most common forms of kidney cancer.

# # #

Abbas A, Tian L, Morrissey J, Kharasch E, Singamaneni S. “Hot Spot-Localized Artificial Antibodies for Label-Free Plasmonic Biosensing.” Advanced Functional Materials. Advance online publication Nov. 2, 2012.

Funding for this research was provided by the Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs of the U. S. Department of Defense and by the St. Louis Institute of Nanomedicine and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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