Spring 2023 BU ENGineer magazine

CONVERGING ON SUSTAINABILITY

15 RANK AMONG PRIVATE GRADUATE ENGINEERING PROGRAMS IN THE U.S.*

EMBRACING THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE AND COLLABORATION.

20% TOP 20% OF ENGINEERING GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN THE U.S.*

$129 MILLION IN ENGINEERING-RELATED RESEARCH EXPENDITURES**

11 RANK IN RESEARCH EXPENDITURES PER FACULTY MEMBER AMONG PRIVATE ENGINEERING SCHOOLS**

147 FACULTY MEMBERS

20,948 LIVING ALUMNI

18 INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH CENTERS

STARTING WITH FOOD SCRAPS INSTEAD OF FOSSIL FUELS, AN ENG PROJECT AIMS TO MAKE MANUFACTURING GREEN AND LESS COSTLY.

3 Upfront 28 Research

message from the dean

Engineered for Impact

BY DEAN KENNETH R. LUTCHEN

example can be found in this issue’s cover story.

Almost immediately, we found that our culture—summed up in the phrase Great Minds Do Not Think Alike—became a magnet for attracting students and faculty from all backgrounds who want to work on societal challenges with colleagues from all disciplines and personal backgrounds. This required fundamental changes in the way we recruit many of our faculty and students, distinct from the ways of other engineering schools.

Last year, we recruited five junior faculty via a convergent search. Search committees were composed of faculty from all departments, as well as other schools at BU. The searches attracted extraordinary applicants who were explicitly looking for a place that embraced collaboration. Moreover, we found the top candidates were intellectually fearless, willing to take on the top challenges in our convergent research themes. You will meet the first five of these faculty in this issue.

The last issue of this magazine, in which we rolled out our groundbreaking strategic plan for the next 10 years, was the most well received of any issue in my 15 years as dean. Centered on the power of convergence—where people from multiple disciplines work as a team to innovate in research and education—the plan represents a breakthrough in how an engineering school operates. It is driven by an appreciation that society’s grand challenges cannot be solved by minds, however brilliant, all trained in a single discipline.

The most impactful solutions can be achieved only by embracing the power of synthesizing across disciplines—by convergence. To that end, we committed to creating a new kind of engineer and identified six research themes where we already had strength and where researchers from multiple fields were well positioned to make breakthroughs. One

We stood up a similar approach in recruiting doctoral students. Among those who applied to our traditional departments and degree programs, we identified a select few who expressed research interests along the lines of our convergent research themes. They, too, were intellectually fearless and we offered them new, highly prestigious, named convergent-themed fellowships. The first five arrived last fall and are highlighted in this issue.

Our strategic plan is not limited to research. We have also changed our undergraduate curriculum to embrace the concept of data science and hands-on design throughout the curriculum of all students. As PRISM, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education, noted in its summer 2022 issue, “Few programs have retooled their undergraduate curricula for the digital economy as dramatically as Boston University’s College of Engineering. . . . BU’s big-data shift builds on a decade of curricular trans-

formation, such as infusing makerspace and design experiences throughout the undergraduate engineering program.”

Connected to that is our strong and growing partnerships with industry. Companies are helping us identify the competencies they need for today and tomorrow, which is guiding our efforts to innovate our new data science and hands-on experiences in our curricula and makerspaces.

Of course, there is more to do. We will expand faculty recruitment to include convergent faculty at the senior level. And, central to our guiding principle are diversity and building a community inclusive of people from all backgrounds. We stay true to our mantra that Great Minds Do Not Think Alike, and we commit to creating solutions that benefit all of society, not just certain segments.

As we implement our strategic plan, we are reinventing engineering education, research, and partnership to society and building a college that is Engineered for Impact.

Centered on the power of convergence— where people from multiple disciplines work as a team to innovate in research and education—the plan represents a breakthrough in how an engineering school operates.

Endowment Funds Student Design Projects

COSTS

Since the college opened cutting-edge makerspaces eight years ago, student engagement with them has been strong—and getting stronger. While using these facilities has always been cost-free to students, often the materials and supplies needed for design projects have not been. Now, thanks to the generosity of the college’s industry partners and alumni, that burden has been lightened by a $1 million endowed fund that has been established to generate the income needed to cover those costs

When the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) opened in 2014, significant stu-

dent demand for access was immediate, and has increased in the years since. A similar phenomenon occurred following the opening of the Bioengineering Teaching and Entrepreneurship Center (BTEC) and the same is expected when the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC), now under construction, also becomes available.

Not only was demand strong among students for curricular and extracurricular projects, but faculty soon began taking advantage of these facilities for new and revamped courses and the facilities also support a number of Senior Capstone projects.

“The phenomenon of, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ was emerging at an extraordinary rate,” says Dean Kenneth Lutchen. “This was exactly what we wanted but hadn’t thought that all this initiative and innovation would require quite this extent of supplies associated with projects. A year ago, we realized our increase in expenditures was approximately $40,000 a year.”

Although not budgeted for it, departments pitched in—as did some student clubs—but the

AMAZON ROBOTICS FELLOWSHIP

IMPROVING THE LIVES OF THE DISPLACED

COVERS

OF SUPPLIES IN EPIC, BTEC

Students learn to use equipment at the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC). PHOTOGRAPH BY JAKE BELCHER

Now, thanks to the generosity of the college’s industry partners and alumni, that burden has been lightened by a $1 million endowed fund that has been established to generate the income needed to cover those costs.

students working on projects bore the cost as well. Seeking to alleviate this financial burden, the college began raising money for a $1 million endowed Student Design Fund to generate annual income for supplies.

“First, we turned to our industry partners,” Lutchen explains. “PTC and

Amazon Robotics came through with a total of $275,000 to anchor the fund. Then, generous and engaged alumni interested in enhancing the student experience stepped up. This semester, we completed the quest and reached the $1 million goal.”

Ramachandran an APS Fellow

Distinguished Professor of Engineering Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE, Physics, MSE) has been named a 2022 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) for foundational contributions to the study of structured and singular light and their applications. The APS is the premier organization whose membership spans the worldwide physics community.

Ramachandran is a photonics pioneer who designed the first optical fiber capable of transmitting data encoded in light that travels in a corkscrew path. Sending data this way—known as the orbital angular momentum degree of photons—was thought to be impossible until Ramachandran and colleagues demonstrated it in a landmark 2013 Science paper. His technol-

ogy, which he has continued to refine since, promises to boost internet bandwidth by at least 25 times today’s capacity.

“It is now clear that his fiber designs will be part of the backbone of tomorrow’s internet,” Ramachandran’s nominator wrote to the APS, adding that Ramachandran has also developed the first all-fiber STED microscope, record (kW) power level sources emitting topologically complex beams, and engineerable optical activity isotropic media.

“I am honored and humbled to join the select group of exceptional physicists fortunate enough to be designated a fellow by the prestigious APS,” says Ramachandran, “and I am particularly gratified that APS also endeavors to recognize, in addition to

One of those alumni donors is Daniel Maneval (ENG’82), who made the lead gift to the fund with his wife Edna Chow Maneval, who also holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering. A key reason they champion the Senior Design Fund is to support undergraduate exposure to experiential learning; the fund will help students gain the practical experience that will distinguish BU engineers as they enter the workforce.

“It’s great to see continued enthusiasm among students in BTEC and EPIC,” says Daniel Maneval, a consultant in the early research and development of biopharmaceuticals and a member of the college’s West Coast Alumni Leadership Council. “Hands-on experience differentiates engineers from theorists. The Senior Design Fund provides flexibility for the college and provides students with technological expertise and hands-on experience for what’s next. It will help them define what they want to do.”

Other major donors to the Senior Design Fund include Nirav Arvind Dagli (ENG’92,’96); Mikhail Gurevich (ENG’07, Questrom’12); Kimberly E. Samaha (ENG ’89) and Richard D. Reidy (Questrom’82).

—MICHAEL SEELE

fundamental contributions to the field of physics, achievements that lie at the interface of fundamental and applied science.”

Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE, Physics, MSE).

The $1 million endowed fund will bring down the cost of supplies at facilities such as the Bioengineering Teaching and Entrepreneurship Center (BTEC).

Lifting Up Leaders

ROBOTICS STUDENTS EARN AMAZON DAY ONE FELLOWSHIP

This year, two students arrived at ENG as Amazon Day One Fellows. As fellows, students gain mentorship, internship and career opportunities as part of a program launched in 2021 boosting the diversity and quality of the robotics engineering workforce

Asbel Fontanez (ENG’22) and Priscila Rubio (ENG’24) are pursuing master’s degrees in Robotics & Autonomous Systems. Along with a dozen other exceptionally talented fellows across seven universities, they will receive funds covering tuition, living expenses and other costs. Fontanez and Rubio are BU’s first Amazon Day One Fellows, with Amazon committed to supporting two incoming students a year going forward.

Hailing from a range of technical and cultural backgrounds, this year’s cohort includes master’s students in robotics, engineering, computer science and related fields at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Northeastern, and Worcester Polytechnic

Institute. Amazon Day One Fellows are also offered internships and networking opportunities with fellows and faculty at participating institutions.

Before coming to BU to study electrical engineering, Fontanez was lead programmer for his high school’s robotics team. At ENG, he added a concentration in machine learning, getting a jump on graduate-level robotics courses. He completed his master’s coursework in December and now works a co-op at Amazon Robotics headquarters in North Reading.

Besides becoming the best engineer he can be in the medical robotics field, Fontanez hopes to one day establish a nonprofit centered on STEM education. “One thing I’ve learned is, don’t be greedy with your opportunities. Use them to help others coming up behind you,” he says. “So, students who would never have the chance to mess around with a CNC or a 3D printer because of where they live—I want to give them the opportunity to do that.”

While earning a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, Rubio coauthored a National Institutes of Health study on the activation mechanism of A3 adenosine receptors and also interned at Northrop Grumman, where she helped design mechanical ground support equipment for the Minotaur rocket.

After graduating in 2021, she worked as a mechanical engineer for a medical startup, where she used her budding mechatronics expertise to design, test and extend the capabilities of surgical instruments. Rubio will take part in an Amazon

internship this summer and hopes, eventually, to build the next Mars Rover.

“The fellowship program is very powerful because it advances engineers from underrepresented backgrounds,” she says. “I don’t have anybody in my family who’s an engineer—I’m the first. Having the mentorship from Amazon is really going to help me in my career. It opens up so many possibilities.”

Last summer, Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist Tye Brady (ENG’90) met with Fontanez, Rubio and the other Day One fellows during a weeklong summit at the new Amazon building in Boston’s Seaport District, where he explained the origin of the fellowship’s name.

“On your first day of a new job, you’re excited; you’re motivated,” says Rubio. “You’re willing to work and to innovate. So you should approach every day as day one.”

Upon completing their Amazon internships or co-ops, the Day One fellows will likely score job offers within Amazon, but are not required to work there.

“There are no strings attached to this fellowship,” explains Fontanez. “The bigger goal is to create great leaders in this space. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where those leaders end up. As long as they’re better leaders in the space of robotics, then robotics is going to be better overall.”

Tye Brady (ENG’90).

Asbel Fontanez (ENG’22). Priscila Rubio (ENG’24).

Fontanez hopes to one day establish a nonprofit centered on STEM education.

Pros Who Know Bolster EPIC Lessons

PRODUCT DESIGN & MANUFACTURE STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM INDUSTRY SPEAKERS

It’s one thing to design a pump that works. It’s quite another to choose the right materials, components and manufacturing processes to ensure that thousands of identical pumps can be made efficiently, cost-effectively and safely.

That’s why BU’s Product Design & Manufacture curriculum features a steady stream of expertise in the form of guest speakers drawn from industry, including from corporate sponsors of the BU Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC).

“There’s an entire process that happens after design,” says Professor of the Practice Steve Chomyszak (ME), who has years of design and manufacturing experience under his own belt. “It’s good for my students to hear from people in industry who have expertise in all these aspects of the process and can interject all of these details throughout the course. The speakers help bolster what I teach and give the course added credibility.”

For example, this fall, in the course Manufacturing Processes for Design and Production, Chomyszak’s master’s degree students—who are tasked with redesigning a basic pump for various applications—got a guest lecture from Jim Wilson, principal engineer at GE Aviation, on geometric dimensioning and tolerance, “the universal language that engineers use on their manufacturing drawings,” says Chomyszak.

Brianna Mikolich, a product training manager at aPriori Technologies, showed students how to use her company’s software to predict the cost of every component of their pump given a host of variables. “It teaches them the impact of their design decisions,” Chomyszak says. “Decisions made early have consequences later on, and it can get super expensive to change your mind the further you go down the process.”

Toner Plastics CEO Steve Graham spoke about injection molding, which students

are also gaining hands-on experience with in EPIC. The cutting-edge facility “has just been a tremendous asset to the class,” says Chomyszak.

And Don Loughlin, senior technical director at Procter & Gamble, visited the class to discuss how to set up a production line. “He did a great job of relating this all back to the customer,” says Chomyszak. “What value does this component bring to the customer? That’s something I’m constantly harping on in my own lectures.”

EPIC Director and Professor of the Practice Anna Thornton (ME) hosted a guest lecture series at EPIC this fall, and she, too, appreciates it when a speaker dispenses advice that happens to echo her consistent lessons: “The students realize, ‘Oh, wait, the reason Professor Thornton is

Anna Thornton (ME) is director of EPIC.

always talking about this is that it’s relevant to industry. She’s not just teaching this out of a book.’”

Beyond technical skills and general principles, Thornton hopes that hearing about professionals’ evolving careers—and staying in touch with them after the semester—will help manufacturing students navigate their own journeys.

“I try to bring in speakers who talk about their arc,” says Thornton. “Where did they start? What were their job titles along the way, and how did they leverage their experience from each job to get the next job? How did they use their network? What risks did they take? What projects did they take on that they think got them that next promotion? That’s what makes you a successful person in industry.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

“The speakers help bolster what I teach and give the course added credibility.”

Students in the program learn how to design a product to be made optimally not just once but thousands of times.

Prestigious Metcalf Chair Awarded to David Boas

The Boston University Arthur G. B. Metcalf Chair, recognizing an internationally known scholar in mathematics, science, or engineering, has been awarded to Professor David Boas (BME, ECE). The professorship, which is for a fiveyear renewable term, provides support for research and scholarship

“I am, of course, quite honored to be recognized by BU in this way for the work that I have done,” says Boas, who directs the BU Neurophotonics Center. “It also means a great deal to me that BU has the trust in me to use this professorship to help further enrich the BU community. I’ll take this as a new challenge going forward.”

“David [Boas] is among the elite world leaders in all of neuroengineering and neu-

roscience,” Kenneth Lutchen, dean of ENG and a professor of biomedical engineering, wrote in nominating Boas for the Metcalf Chair. “David combines neuroscience, bioengineering, photonics and optics, imaging science, computation and data science all to transform our understanding of brain structure and function” to develop treatments for diseases.

Boas developed high-resolution imaging of cerebral blood flow, advancing

medical understanding of ailments from migraines to strokes, while also developing complementary “robust measurements” of oxygen flow to the brain, Lutchen wrote.

In a discipline dependent on numbers, numbers sum up Boas’s accomplishments, the dean added: his research has garnered 49,000 citations, including more than 300 papers with more than 10 citations each.

Boas has also begun working with the new BU Center for Brain Recovery (CBR), whose mission is to bring together multidisciplinary teams to look for new ways to prevent, treat and cure brain disorders such as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. In one CBR project, Boas is using his wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to monitor people’s brain activity outside of the lab.

“BU has a growing number of faculty with expertise in neurorehabilitation, and also has great strength in the neurosciences and neuroimaging,” says Boas. “This new center will leverage all of this expertise to address a timely problem that our collective knowledge and tools are enabling us to tackle.”

Boas received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. — RICH BARLOW, ANDREW THURSTON

PHOTOGRAPH. TOP, BY DANA

J. QUIGLEY; BOTTOM, BY JAKE BELCHER

IMAGING PIONEER ALSO JOINS NEW BU CENTER FOR BRAIN RECOVERY

David Boas (BME, ECE), director of the Neurophotonics Center.

The ergonomic, wearable fNIRS technology that David Boas developed enables researchers to monitor blood flow in the brain while the wearer walks about and engages in ordinary activities outside the lab.

Center on Forced Displacement Will Address the Global Refugee Crisis

For millions of people, the definition of home is complicated. According to UN estimates, more than 100 million people globally have been pushed from their homes due to war, disaster, violence, discrimination or other circumstances, the highest level of displacement ever recorded. Some remain displaced in their home countries and many others, in lands foreign to them

“Forcibly displaced people often are very vulnerable and have no way of getting their voices heard,” says Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE), who studies refugee and migrant health.

As the global refugee crisis worsens,

crossing borders has been met with increasing hostility and stigma, often putting displaced people in perilous positions after they’ve already experienced difficult journeys.

Tackling the global crisis head-on, Zaman and CAS Professor Carrie Preston founded the new University-wide Center on Forced Displacement (CFD) to improve the lives of—and give voice to—displaced people around the world.

The center will study the impact of border policies on countries with high numbers of migrants (like Mexico and Serbia); risk factors on health in refugee camps and settlements; and the impacts of climate

change on displaced communities, health and medicine, and voice and identity.

“This problem is truly universal and we need ideas that really span the disciplines on campus,” says Zaman.

The CFD founders make a dynamic, if unlikely, duo. With Zaman’s expertise in antimicrobial resistance and global health and Preston’s in theater, performance and gender studies, their partnership brings a multidimensional perspective to the issue of forced displacement—and that is exactly their aim. Under their direction, the work of the center will span disciplines to make the quality of life for refugees and asylum seekers better.

A Syrian refugee camp outside Athens.

According to UN estimates, more than 100 million people globally have been pushed from their homes due to war, disaster, violence, discrimination or other circumstances, the highest level of displacement ever recorded.

“Displacement is a risk that can bind us across identities,” says Preston, who is also director of Kilachand Honors College. “One of the binding features of being human is we all long for something we think of as home—and at the same time, we are all at risk of being displaced.”

Zaman came to the US in 1996 after growing up in Pakistan. Witnessing xenophobia and discrimination against Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and against Muslim

communities in the United States, motivated him to specialize in refugee medicine and health. Since starting his lab at BU in 2009, he has written dozens of articles and three books on the subject, including Migration and Health (University of Chicago Press, 2022), coedited with SPH Dean Sandro Galea.

Zaman is particularly enthusiastic about offering more opportunities for research in engineering, math and medicine, fields that are not typically included in displacement and refugee studies. His lab looks into improving medications and testing pharmaceuticals available in refugee camps and he developed a portable device that detects counterfeit medications called PharmaChk. Now, he continues to investigate medical supply chains in forcibly displaced communities, which often lack adequate capacity to diagnose, manage and treat illnesses. CFD research will look at how antibiotics are distributed by mapping the supply chain in refugee settlements and identifying ways to supply high-quality medicines, limiting unnecessary antibiotic use, and reducing the threat of antibiotic-resistant infections.

“We need new technology, we need ethical guidelines for new technologies, we need new solutions across the board,” Zaman says. “Hopefully, we can really make an impact in the lives of people.”

One group of displaced people that is not clearly recognized under the law are

climate refugees, people leaving their homelands due to climate change who are escaping their inability to grow crops and fleeing disasters like drought, flood and storms. To add to emerging research about climate change and migration, CFD leadership plans to explore how communities themselves react and respond to environmental displacement.

“Right where we’re sitting can eventually be underwater because of climate change,” Preston says from her office in the Back Bay—a neighborhood projected to be susceptible to sea level rise if fossil fuel emissions remain at their current rate. The UN’s refugee agency has released guidance recognizing that climate change will make the lives of displaced populations worse, especially in poorer regions.

Zaman and Preston will bring in experts from research areas across the University as well as from neighboring and international institutions. The center will also offer students hands-on experience through class trips and research opportunities, and, with the help of student researchers, seeks to complete an oral history project that amplifies the voices of displaced people and indigenous communities in the US.

“We really think about how we can make a positive impact and a difference in the lives of people,” says Zaman, “by turning research into tangible solutions, actions and policies.” —

JESSICA COLAROSSI

An Ezidi refugee camp in Sinjar, Iraq.

Zaman is particularly enthusiastic about offering more opportunities for research in engineering, math and medicine, fields that are not typically included in displacement and refugee studies.

Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE). PHOTOGRAPH, TOP, BY LEVI MEIR CLANCY ON UNSPLASH; BOTTOM BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

Paschalidis New Director of Hariri Institute

The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering has a new director. Distinguished Professor of Engineering Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE) is overseeing the institute’s move into a new building (the largest on the Charles River Campus), the Center for Computing & Data Sciences

The appointment adds to his already impressive portfolio. Paschalidis previously directed BU’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), which researches and designs intelligent data systems. He cowrote the proposal that won BU a matching state grant for the University’s new RASTIC robotics lab, which will enable more undergraduate and master’s students to research and test next-gen robots and artificial intelligence.

The Center for Computing & Data Sciences, which opened this year, represents BU’s planting the flag in a field that is remaking academic disciplines—and society. Among Hariri’s neighbors in the building will be the new Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and the College of Arts & Sciences departments of computer science and of mathematics and statistics.

“Putting all of these groups under the same roof, I think, will further facilitate interactions,” Paschalidis says.

Beyond the move, he says he has three priorities as the institute’s new leader, the first involving forging closer ties to the School of Medicine. “I feel—and I think the University agrees—that we have not leveraged as much as possible the fact that we have a medical school,” he says. “And I think there’s much more that can be done” to arrange collaborations between engineers and computer scientists and doctors—those who do research as well as healers on the hospital ward. “There is a lot of activity these days around AI and health,

AI and medicine, automation, new sensing technologies that would improve the way we can sense on a daily basis what happens, identify diseases, find new biomarkers.

“I want to increase the interaction between the people who are doing the science, the technology, and the algorithms, and the people who are in medicine and health.”

A second initiative will be to maintain “the service aspect of Hariri” to BU professors, including the institute’s fellows program, which provides research support to

junior faculty and to students. That support also brings different disciplines together in “community-building activity,” he says.

The third will be to continue “focused research,” that is, “internal funding mechanisms for encouraging groups at the University to coalesce around a specific field” in yearlong research teams. “The main objective is to form teams that will then have enough cohesion and enough preliminary work so that they can go out, write a proposal [for competitive grant funding] and be successful.” —

RICH BARLOW

Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE).

Coskun to Lead CISE

Dean Kenneth Lutchen has announced that Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) will become the next director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), replacing Distinguished Professor of Engineering Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE), the new director of the Hariri Institute (see opposite page)

An active presence within CISE for more than a decade, Coskun has done research that includes high-performance computing, embedded systems, and energy-efficient computing; she has nearly 5,000 citations and an h-index of 33. Currently deputy editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, she also has served

terms as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design.

Coskun has received several prestigious accolades and honors, including the IBM Faculty Award (IBM Global University Program Academic Award), the Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA); several IEEE best paper awards, and served as an invited participant at the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

As interim associate dean for educational initiatives during the past year, Coskun oversaw the design and implementation of several key initiatives promising to advance the school’s capacity to infuse data science throughout the undergraduate curriculum.

“CISE has great strengths in the traditional areas of information and systems engineering, with core strengths in robotics and autonomous systems, optimization,

information sciences, stochastic systems, machine learning, and AI, among several other areas,” Lutchen wrote in an email to the ENG community. “Eventually, these advances must be implemented on a variety of computer systems that integrate software with hardware for specific applications. Ayse is an expert in computer systems and has the potential to open new vistas for systems while leading existing areas of world-class excellence.”

“I’m excited to take on this opportunity,” says Coskun. “If you think about a research center, it’s really a catalyst, bringing together people with different expertise to build something bigger. My goal in my new role at CISE is to continue this center’s strong tradition of collaborative research around the topic of intelligent systems, while fostering growth in the broader area of computer systems, and to make sure we have a coherent, unified center where all these different researchers are supported well and can interact and collaborate.”

Ayse Coskun (ECE). PHOTOGRAPH

“I’m excited to take on this opportunity,” says Coskun. “If you think about a research center, it’s really a catalyst, bringing together people with different expertise to build something bigger.”

THE RIGHT FORMULA

SHE WAS TOLD WOMEN CAN’T DRIVE. NOW SHE DESIGNS TOP-SPEED RACECARS.

BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

When Anna Saad (ENG’20) arrived in Boston, she had never taken the wheel of an automobile. In fact, she was forbidden from driving—by royal decree.

The daughter of a Dutch mother and an Argentinian father, Saad was born and raised in Saudi Arabia during a time when women were legally banned from driving. Fortunately, her parents had brought her up to believe there was nothing she couldn’t do, and when she came to BU to study mechanical engineering, she was reunited with two older brothers, also in school in the area, who taught her to drive on the roads outside Boston.

But more than driving, what really revved Saad’s engine was designing and building racecars.

“That first week, I saw Terrier Motorsport, then known as BU Racing, had set up the frame of a car they were building,” Saad recalls. “Something clicked, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

She joined the club, which was developing an open-wheel, single-seat electric vehicle that they hoped would some year hold its own against collegiate rivals in events such as timed laps and acceleration at the annual Formula Hybrid competition.

By sophomore year, Saad was head of the club’s bodywork and aerodynamics subteams. “We were building the nose and front part of the car out of fiberglass, working with composite materials,” she says. By junior year, Saad was club president and taking as many aerodynamics electives as she could, even adding summer classes. “I was applying what I was learning to a real-world project.”

On a cold day in early spring of Saad’s senior year, Terrier Motorsport tested their auto, which they nicknamed “Stella,” on Cummington Mall. It was a success. “We were only allowed to go 25 miles an hour, but just having it start and work and move was really a big deal and super satisfying,” Saad says.

The club was confident heading into the big meet. Unfortunately, COVID-19 spoiled those plans. The competition never happened.

But the following year, Saad landed just the job she wanted and had spent years preparing for. Now in Italy, she is a junior aerodynamics engineer—on a career track—for a Formula One (F1) racing team, tweaking and testing one of the world’s fastest regulated road-course racecars.

“Formula” refers to the rules followed by all of the elite open-wheel, single-seat cars that compete in the Grands Prix, a season of professional races held on both loop courses and closed public roads all over the world. Saad’s team is sponsored by machine tool maker Haas.

Naturally, driver skill plays a role in race results, but an enormous amount of work goes into iterating and rebuilding the cars from one meet to the next in order to gain any edge. As a test engineer, Saad spends half the week in the office, designing new surfaces and geometries for the car, and the other half in the wind tunnel testing those changes on a 60-percent-size scale model of the Haas vehicle.

“It’s the nature of F1,” says Saad. “You’re swapping out pieces and moving them a tiny bit, reshaping the car by millimeters at a time and seeing if that’s worth however many tenths of a second per lap, and you just cycle through that all year long. It’s the perfect foundation to learn because I’m physically doing the changes and seeing the results live.”

Saad thrives at that fast pace. “It’s a demanding environment,” she says. “There’s no room for mistakes. It just pushes you to another level. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.”

The female proportion of the F1 workforce, while growing, is still stubbornly small, but Saad says she has never considered her gender to be a professional barrier.

“I wasn’t allowed to drive a car; now I build them for a living,” Saad says. “I had supportive parents, and their message was always so clear to me that regardless of what’s around you, if there’s something you want to do, you can go do it.”

“There’s no room for mistakes. It just pushes you to another level. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.”

Former Terrier Motorsport president Anna Saad (ENG’20) is now an aerodynamics engineer for Haas Formula 1 in Italy.

Sure, you love your furry friends and you buy them food they’ll love. But how healthy is that food? That tin of cat chow or bag of doggie treats? Turns out, they’re often labeled in a way that can fool even the smartest and most ardent animal devotees.

Michael Landa (ENG’88) wants you to think about how you’d feed your pets if they were elite athletes of the animal kingdom. A trained engineer and former varsity swim captain, Landa has been a business strategist in fields from high-tech sales to Hollywood, and now he runs Nulo, a fast-growing pet food brand that puts a premium on nutrition.

Landa grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. He walked the family dog, a Boxer named Max, during the rare moments when he wasn’t swimming competitively or studying.

Boston University awarded Landa a full swimming scholarship. Between logging 33 miles a week in the pool and traveling for meets, Landa had to be good at time management. Now factor in coursework. For two years he juggled

both BME and premed studies, while for the last two (when he was the swim team captain and MVP) he majored in electrical engineering.

“It taught me to be incredibly disciplined, and to think critically about everything,” says Landa. “That’s one of the most important skill sets you can get, and it’s served me well in my career.”

Landa started his career in high-tech sales, and with an aptitude for seeing the big picture, he quickly moved into business strategy, joining GE in San Francisco for several years. When the job required him to move to Milwaukee, he went to Hollywood instead. At Sony Pictures, Landa worked on the success-forecasting model that helped the studio decide whether to green-light films such as Men in Black and My Best Friend’s Wedding Next, Landa did strategic planning for Universal Studios.

In 2001, Landa had a vacation coming up. While looking for a dog sitter for Max II, he struggled to find one who inspired confidence. So, instead of flying, Landa took Max II with him on a road trip to Colorado. Mulling this situation during a long stretch through the Utah desert, Landa hit upon a business idea that became The Pet Staff, Inc., a dog walking and pet sitting service with professional standards.

Landa eventually hired 200 sitters who made up to 12,000 pet visits a month— from walks to overnight stays—across greater Los Angeles. With highly trained staff and the first web-based scheduling system for pet care, the company earned a reputation for reliability among their clientele, which included studio heads, production folks, and on-screen talent such as Marisa Tomei (CFA’86, Hon.’02), Cybil Shepherd and Andrew McCarthy.

It was while running The Pet Staff that Landa discovered an epidemic of obesity and diabetes among domestic animals. “We were getting slammed with the demand for sitters who could give insulin and shots related to diabetic dogs and cats,” he says.

“That’s when the engineer in me came out,” Landa recalls. “I said, ‘There’s a root cause. Something is not right with the food supply.’ So, I started digging,” meeting with animal nutrition scientists and learning how the industry worked. “Within two weeks, I had picked up my life in Los Angeles and moved to Austin, Texas.” Landa launched Nulo in 2010.

Many big brands load up their pet foods with carbohydrates, though they obscure that fact with clever marketing and packaging that suggests a healthier diet, Landa says. “Pet foods do not follow human standards for labeling, as ingredients are listed by weight before cooking. If consumers were better informed as to a food’s nutrient composition as fed, they would likely avoid most popular brands on the market.”

With Nulo, Landa says, “I want every food we formulate to be high in meat, low in carbohydrates, and low-glycemic, as fed to the animal, because that’s more species-appropriate for dogs and cats. They’re not little kids, as much as we want them to be. They’re carnivores.”

“My engineering background allowed me to collaborate with nutritional formulators, because I speak their language,” Landa says. “We spent time iterating, iterating, iterating until we got the perfect platform.”

Above all, Landa says, “If I won’t feed it to Max the 4th and Yogi,” his two current black Labs, “I’m not going to sell it to somebody else.”

Still a regular swimmer and hiker, Landa reached out to athlete friends and fellow pet owners such as five-time Olympic gold medalist Aaron Peirsol to recruit brand ambassadors. The roster now includes 23-time gold medalist Michael Phelps (who also invested in Nulo) and former NFL linebacker Ryan Kerrigan.

“Athletes understand how premium nutrition positively impacts their performance,” says Landa. “And this philosophy translates to their pets.”

That message has clearly resonated with a growing segment of pet owners. Nulo dog and cat foods are sold across the US and in seven other countries, and it’s one of the top-selling brands in specialty pet supply stores in major cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver, to name a few. Nulo’s company has grown to 75 employees (all of whom are free to bring their dogs to work), and Landa has racked up honors such as Austin Business Journal’s “Best CEO in Austin” and Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

Why are people so passionate about their animal companions?

“They make us happy, and they never complain,” says Landa. “They’re just a constant force of goodness, and I think people welcome that in their lives.”

A trained engineer and former varsity swim captain, Landa has been a business strategist in fields from high-tech sales to Hollywood, and now he runs Nulo, a fast-growing pet food brand that puts a premium on nutrition.

IN THE TAKI

TRASH

WITH FOOD SCRAPS AND OTHER ORGANIC INGREDIENTS, A BU BIOREACTOR PROJECT MODELS SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING

BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

It’s a kind of vessel where different ingredients are combined. The resulting broth percolates and, in time, produces a solution to a societal problem, whether the product is a line of cells that kill cancer, bacteria that decontaminate water, or plant-derived alternatives to petroleum-based plastics and fuels.

That description fits an actual container system called a bioreactor—and it’s a fair picture of the convergent approach in synthetic biology. In a bioreactor, the ingredients are cells and nutrients—for example, the byproducts of food scraps. In a convergent—that is, collaborative and cross-disciplinary—project, the ingredients are ideas and expertise.

So perhaps it is no surprise that, as part of a federal push for more and better bioreactors, the Boston University College of Engineering has been tapped for help. Because at ENG, convergence is the way things are done. Arguably, the college’s synthetic biology research is exhibit A.

MOVING BEYOND FOSSIL FUELS

A bioreactor is a key component of biomanufacturing. Instead of smokestacks pumping toxins into the atmosphere, biomanufacturing makes use of naturally occurring microorganisms and processes to make things—not just medicines and gene therapies, but also cleaner and greener materials, machine oils, detergents, fuels, fabrics, fragrances and even foods. It has the potential to revolutionize industry while dramatically cutting carbon emissions.

But, to realize that vision, biomanufacturing needs to be scaled up. In the United States in particular, the sector needs to grow significantly if we’re to avoid supply chain disruptions and security breaches.

That’s why Schmidt Futures and the US Department of Defense have awarded a $3 million grant to a team of researchers from ENG, Capra Biosciences, Inc. and other collaborators to make a smarter, more efficient bioreactor. From ENG, the project is led by Assistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE), Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE, BME) and Associate Professor Ahmad “Mo” Khalil (BME).

A prototype of Capra Biosciences’ biofilm reactor. Sustainable feedstocks are continuously circulated through the reactor and converted into useful chemical products, such as retinol, by the cells in the biofilm. Capra is working with BU to develop and integrate advanced sensor technologies into the reactor and to use BU’s eVOLVER platform as a tool to optimize reactor performance.

eVOLVER’s electronic modules and series of pumps and valves precisely control fluid flow and culture conditions.

J. QUIGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY

The public, private and academic entities involved are part of a consortium called BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), which is aimed at making domestic biomanufacturing safe, sustainable and economically viable. Khalil, Yazicigil and Densmore are working with Capra Biosciences to refine and replicate the startup’s reactor technology on a grand scale.

Capra has developed a new kind of continuous flow bioreactor using biofilm, essentially a layer of slime hospitable to bacteria. The goal is to produce cosmetics, as well as lubricants for motors and other machinery, from biological rather than petrochemical sources. “We want to engineer organisms to help us make products sustainably and cost-competitively,” says Capra cofounder Andrew Magyar, “so consumers won’t have to decide, ‘Do I want the sustainable option or the cheap option?’”

Making the business feasible will require automation and novel quality-control and security measures. The trio from BU— combining their backgrounds in genetic engineering, electronics and automation—has proposed an innovative bioreactor design that checks all those boxes.

“This kind of convergence of disciplines is amazing,” says Magyar. “It is the future in terms of where advances in biotechnology are coming from, and BU is definitely at the forefront.”

A TECHNOLOGY EVOLVES

Khalil began his career as a mechanical engineer, but today he is better known as a pioneer of synthetic biology. In particular, Khalil’s team builds molecular “circuits,” and they have translated these insights into gene circuit engineering platforms that enable the programming of human cells, such as immune cells, for a new generation of cellular therapies that might one day be used to combat diseases such as cancer. (See sidebar.)

“We like to ask the simple yet bold questions, ‘What if we built it?’ and ‘What can we learn from this process?’” says Khalil. “That inverse approach to the study of biology forces one to question prevailing assumptions, and it can lead to surprising results.”

Rabia Yazicigil (ECE), Mo Khalil (BME) and Doug Densmore (ECE, BME) are collaborating on a secure, efficient and replicable bioreactor.

“WE WANT TO ENGINEER ORGANISMS TO HELP US MAKE PRODUCTS SUSTAINABLY AND COSTCOMPETITIVELY, SO CONSUMERS WON’T HAVE TO DECIDE, ‘DO I WANT THE SUSTAINABLE OPTION OR THE CHEAP OPTION?’”

A Step Closer to Cancer-Killing Cells

A BU-led team has forged a set of powerful tools for building synthetic gene circuits that enable precise and customizable control of human cells, such as immune cells, for cancerkilling and other therapeutic functions. This tool kit might help accelerate the clinical adoption of synthetic circuits and realize the potential of emerging gene- and cell-based therapies.

“Gene- and cell-based therapies—in which cells are genetically modified to treat a disease or perform a therapeutic task—are poised to revolutionize medicine, but they also have significant limitations and need to be advanced,” says Associate Professor Ahmad “Mo” Khalil (BME), one of the study’s authors.

For example, in CAR T-cell therapy, a remarkable immunotherapy in which immune cells are genetically engineered with synthetic receptors that enable them to recognize and attack tumors, these immune cells can become overactive, often leading to toxicity and even death. That’s just one issue.

“Our argument is that we need platforms that allow us to develop clinically viable synthetic circuits to better control therapeutic cellular functions,” says Khalil. “This work is an attempt to fill that gap.”

Specifically, the team has developed a tool kit of programmable gene regulators they call synZiFTRs, short for synthetic zinc finger transcription regulators. Zinc fingers,

which occur naturally, are proteins that bind to DNA. Using them as the basis for synZiFTRs carries distinct advantages: they’re human-derived, so they’re less likely to be rejected by the human immune system; and they’re compact, so they can be delivered easily into cells.

Next, the researchers used the synZiFTRs to engineer a set of drug-inducible gene circuits. In other words, if a certain drug were administered, that would be a signal to activate the gene circuit and instruct engineered cells to carry out defined tasks, such as expanding their population or killing a kind of tumor cell.

To further the platform’s chances of future success in the clinic, the researchers picked drugs that had already been approved by the FDA, such as tamoxifen, which is used to treat breast cancer. And, they chose to focus on CAR T-cell therapy to establish a proof of principle for their new system.

It worked. In both in vitro and in vivo experiments, synZiFTR-regulated T-cells could be activated by the drugs to trigger desired cellular responses. “We can remotely activate the T-cells in an on-demand manner to trigger their antitumor activity,” says Khalil. “This was effective enough to eradicate a blood tumor in animal models.”

According to Khalil, the team—which includes Associate Professor Wilson Wong (BME), postdoctoral researcher Hui-Shan Li and Divya Israni (ENG’21)—is excited to provide this tool kit as a resource to the research community. “Even though we used CAR T-cells for our demonstration,” he notes, “these synZiFTRs are broadly applicable genetic parts, which can be used to develop genetic circuits for other scientific and clinical needs.”

A new synthetic tool kit developed at ENG promises advances in gene and cell therapy. The team includes Associate Professor Wilson Wong (BME), Divya Israni (ENG’21) and postdoctoral researcher Hui-Shan Li.

Capra especially wanted to work with Khalil because he’s developed a small-scale bioreactor system called eVOLVER, now in use in more than 50 universities. A customizable, automated platform that can remotely monitor and manage hundreds of cell cultures in real time for a variety of applications, this DIY open-source system is infinitely adaptable, allowing researchers to create custom automation tools for their own microbial experiments.

One of Capra’s objectives is to develop new methods for working with complex waste-based feedstocks—in other words, the material left over after bacteria break down manure and food scraps is what gets fed into a bioreactor—but a challenge with that kind of material is variability in its makeup. By running a slew of experiments with eVOLVER, Khalil will rapidly optimize the process, allowing different types of waste-based feedstocks to turn out a consistent level of product—in this case, retinol (vitamin A) to start with.

Khalil is adapting his invention to this work with a custom diffuser, precisely controlling fluid flow and culture conditions.

“By the end of 18 months, we want to have a fully automated biofilm reactor pilot plant that can continuously produce more than one kilogram of vitamin A per day,” says Yazicigil, but that will entail two more key stages.

SAFE AND SUSTAINABLE SENSORS

Yazicigil’s expertise is in electronics, but she is more than a dabbler in biology. Some of her recent work includes designing an ingestible capsule that monitors gut health with the aid of a tiny sensor that runs on ultra-low power.

For the BioMADE project, Yazicigil is adapting that technology to produce sensors that will float inside the bioreactor and measure the levels of PH, oxygen, glycerol, lactate and various organic acids. The sensors will even evaluate the electric potential of the biofilm.

“Traditionally, bioreactors are monitored with bulky instruments or complex probes that have to be inserted in holes in the

lid or side,” Yazicigil says. By contrast, her tiny sensors, running on mere nanowatt-level power, will wirelessly transmit the measurements in real time, allowing technicians to adjust the flow of nutrients as needed.

A crucial part of her task is making the communications secure, Yazicigil says, and her team is working with Capra to make security integral to the sensors. “We need to protect against communication attacks, like eavesdropping, or jamming attacks, which would impact communication between the sensors and the hub.”

“I have to tailor the sensor chips to fit the system needs of this bioreactor technology,” Yazicigil adds. “It’s an exciting project. It involves startups, defense, academia, biomedical and electrical and computer engineering. It’s powerful to bring these all together.”

DEMOCRATIZING SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

To truly scale up the modified eVOLVER, the operation will have to be moved to Densmore’s Design, Automation, Manufacturing and Processes (DAMP) Lab. An electrical engineer by training, Densmore has been working in synthetic biology research since

Mo Khalil’s eVOLVER is an automated platform that can remotely monitor and manage hundreds of cell cultures in real time for a variety of applications.

The novel chip Yazicigil has designed will enable tiny wireless sensors floating in the bioreactor.

2007 and is a natural fit for the BioMADE project due to his expertise developing electrodes for microfluidics and robotics for high-throughput testing.

The DAMP Lab is an advanced biofoundry that did double duty for a couple of years as a major part of BU’s award-winning Clinical Testing Laboratory, which processed up to 6,000 COVID tests of faculty, staff and students per day during the pandemic. Now, the heavily automated lab is getting ready to run several biofilmfocused eVOLVER systems at once.

For Densmore, the product is not (or at least not only) retinol; it’s the process itself. By sharing the results, technical reports and methods of the BU team with the other 140 members of the BioMADE consortium, Densmore and company will be propagating a replicable system for converting all sorts of bio-based feedstocks into all manner of useful products.

Replicability is key, Densmore explains. “No one wants to say, ‘I cured cancer once.’” To tackle global challenges from cancer to climate change, he says, “We need more eyes on these problems. To do that, we need to lower the barrier to entry—but safely. So we centralize the manufacturing infrastructure,” within a certain number of certified labs like BU’s, “and distribute the computational infrastructure.”

First, BioMADE researchers will remotely order up experiments, and Densmore and team will carry them out. In the longer

Programmable Bacteria to Decontaminate Drinking Water

With a $1.4 million NSF grant, BU and UMass Amherst researchers are teaming up to create microscopic, programmable “living devices” that can detect and neutralize toxic contaminants found in drinking water. Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE) and Research Assistant Professor Samuel Oliveira (ECE) believe that this research could help provide the foundation for far-reaching future applications of synthetic biology to some of the most urgent challenges facing our society and planet.

Life at the microscopic level is far more cosmopolitan and conversational than we might imagine. Colonies of bacteria live together in interspecies communities, communicating with their fellows via species-specific biochemical signaling mechanisms. Now, suppose researchers can find a way to manipulate these signals and convince different species of cohabiting bacteria to “talk” to one another. In that case, they should be able to “program” them to enact specific processes collectively.

Researchers could then engineer synthetic bacterial communities customized for such tasks, so-called “living devices,” or “interspecies genetic circuits,” which could achieve all kinds of desirable outcomes, from analyzing and cleaning drinking water to creating environmentally

term, Densmore envisions members of the research community at large downloading the DAMP Lab’s software as well as the list of hardware used and assembly directions, so that other companies and universities can build their own bioreactors on the same model.

“That’s how we democratize biology with computing,” Densmore says. Instead of hoarding its “secret sauce” and running a unique “Michelin five-star restaurant,” as Densmore puts it, BU in a sense will franchise the DAMP Lab, standardizing equipment, software and processes all over the country. But, because BU’s eVOLVER-based, DAMP Lab–scaled bioreactor is infinitely adaptable, those replica labs won’t be producing identical studies and products. Other researchers will apply their creativity and generate their own solutions.

To use one more food analogy, Densmore points out that most people don’t bake their own bread, because it’s simply not an efficient use of their time. But, in biology, too much time is sunk into tasks that would be better automated and standardized, freeing researchers to use their minds.

“Pragmatically, that’s the only way to advance science and society,” Densmore says. “Right now, biology is baking a lot of bread.” By making BU’s packaged sliced bread available everywhere, “I’m saying, ‘Let’s get to making some cool sandwiches.’”

friendly biofuels or novel therapeutic strategies for human health.

Densmore’s co-PI at UMass Amherst, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Lauren Andrews, will lead the investigation into interspecies intercellular communication, while Densmore and Oliveira will leverage the infrastructure of the DAMP (Design, Automation, Manufacturing & Processes) Lab to develop a microfluidic platform for studying and maintaining bacterial communities. This platform can then be used to develop a database of models to predict the signaling dynamics of the bacterial communities.

Eventually, Densmore and Oliveira envision a proliferation of automation, shared resources, open-source databases and libraries of biological components that will allow for the scaled-up production of synthetic biological systems like the “living devices” they are working toward with Andrews. As such, the effort to understand, replicate and synthetically reengineer microbial processes in this study represents a step towards bioengineering a better future, starting with cleaner drinking water.

allison kleber

Intercellular communication as seen through an inverted microscope.

SILOS NOT

SOLUTIONS,

BY

In recent years, the College of Engineering has been doing hiring differently. Roughly half of new faculty are now recruited according to their alignment with an identified research theme, rather than with individual departments. Though they are still affiliated with the Biomedical, Electrical & Computer, and Mechanical Engineering departments, these early-career researchers are expected to collaborate meaningfully with colleagues across disciplines. As a result, young faculty members might make a mark on their fields years earlier than they would in the traditional system still in place at other engineering schools.

Here, we meet a few of these outstanding new hires, who joined the faculty in the 2022/2023 school year.

Assistant Professor Kayhan Batmanghelich (ECE)

atmanghelich earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His research area is the intersection of health care, machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly in developing medical imaging tools.

Focusing on neurodegenerative and lung diseases, Batmanghelich wants to include clinicians in the process of developing noninvasive imaging tools that make use of machine learning. “When clinicians understand how it works, they can offer feedback as we create the algorithms. The clinician is not just the user of the AI; the clinician should drive the AI.”

In the future, Batmanghelich hopes to collaborate with researchers in BME and has already begun projects with researchers at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and with clinicians at Boston Medical Center, including a study meant to weed out any possible AI biases in breast cancer screening that might affect underrepresented populations.

“These are multifactorial problems, and factors get lost if an engineer only works with engineer colleagues,” says Batmanghelich. “That’s one thing that attracted me to BU, where it is not only allowed but encouraged to work beyond these boundaries. That’s what brings value.”

PATRICK L. KENNEDY

“THESE EARLY-CAREER RESEARCHERS ARE EXPECTED TO COLLABORATE MEANINGFULLY WITH COLLEAGUES ACROSS DISCIPLINES.”

“That’s one thing that attracted me to BU, where it is not only allowed but encouraged to work beyond these boundaries.”

Assistant Professor James Chapman (ME, MSE)

hapman is a computational materials scientist with a PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology and postdoctoral experience at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. His specialty is materials discovery for energy, transportation and other applications with big implications for climate change.

A major contributor to climate change is ammonia fertilizer, because the reaction that produces it requires either a great deal of energy or the use of expensive platinum as a catalyst. Chapman is trying to combine several less expensive elements to create a novel catalyst that works as effectively as platinum. He’s short-cutting the trial-and-error process of experimentation by using computer simulations and is looking to speed it further by using machine learning.

“We’ve exhausted all the simple stuff we were able to develop using our intuition,” he says. “We need to move into these very complicated materials, and it would take us millions of years to run through the innumerable complex scenarios. That’s where machine learning can help.”

While ammonia and nitrogen production are Chapman’s focus, “There’s no reason you couldn’t use this process to find a polymer, an electrolyte, a heat shield for a hypersonic system.” That being the case, Chapman envisions himself working with researchers across ENG and BU, for example, in ECE as well as chemistry and physics.

Associate Professor Archana Venkataraman (ECE)

enkataraman holds a PhD from MIT, and did postdoctoral research at Yale University. She creates computational models and neuroimaging of brain dysfunction.

“My lab exists at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biomedical data analysis, primarily focused on neuroimaging modalities and clinical neuroscience,” Venkataraman says. “Broadly, my lab develops new computational models and algorithms to harness the information in these data to say something about the brain.”

In some cases, that information carries implications in neurosurgery by identifying areas of the brain a surgeon should avoid. She is spinning up a collaboration with epilepsy researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital to locate the brain regions that trigger seizures, and with BU’s Aphasia Research Laboratory to predict outcomes and improve therapies.

With a background in signal processing and experience in neuroscience, Venkataraman represents a convergence of expertise in one person, but she still believes it is vital to work with a diverse team of colleagues.

“We always have a partner who is an expert in the application domain,” she says. “Not only do they provide crucial insights when formulating our models, but they help us interpret and improve the algorithms as a dynamic collaboration. This cross talk is valuable for all that we do.”

“My lab exists at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biomedical data analysis.”

“We’ve exhausted all the simple stuff we were able to develop using our intuition.”

Assistant Professor Sean Lubner (ME, MSE, IGS)

n affiliated faculty member with BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability, Lubner earned his PhD from University of California, Berkeley. He has worked as a research scientist at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His primary focus is clean and renewable energy.

“A main barrier preventing us from switching over to renewable energy is the lack of large-scale energy storage,” says Lubner. Wind and solar energy are intermittent, so there needs to be a way to store large quantities of energy for use at night and on windless days.

One solution Lubner is working on is thermal energy storage. He’s developing an inexpensive ceramic-composite material that can store and conduct electricity even as it heats up to 2,000 degrees Celsius. That energy can then be converted back into electricity, or used for heat in certain industrial processes.

“I take very seriously the part of the job where I’m training and teaching,” Lubner says. “One of my motivations is to have the largest positive impact on society that I can. From a force-multiplier perspective, if I can train ten students to go out and start companies or think in more creative directions—that’s how you get an entire area of science moving forward.”

TOMORROW’S PROBLEM SOLVERS

The college’s commitment to convergent research extends beyond hiring faculty who can make important contributions to improving society; the contributions of graduate students are also important to research. ENG has begun offering convergent-themed fellowships to PhD students who are deemed to be most highly aligned with the college’s cross-disciplinary research strengths.

Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development Elise Morgan says, “We believe the convergent fellowship recipients will be future leaders in tackling complex problems that have, so far, evaded solutions.”

The first group of five convergent research fellows are now working on a range of projects in several of the college’s laboratories.

Wyatt Becicka earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University. In his PhD rotations at ENG so far, he’s worked on synthetic biology projects, including the development of cellular cancer immunotherapies. “I have been very impressed with how many projects and ideas are shared among groups at BU,” he says.

As a long-term goal, Becicka says, “I hope to incorporate expertise in engineering, immunology and chemistry to better harness the immune system as a tool for improving medical care.”

Guorong Hu earned a bachelor’s degree in electronic information engineering from Jilin University in China and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan. He is working with Assistant Professor Lei Tian (BME, ECE) as well as Professor David Boas (BME, ECE) and Professor Ian Davison (Biology) on computational miniature mesoscopes. Based on fluorescent imaging, this type of device can be worn by freely moving animals, allowing researchers to collect biological data during ordinary behavior.

“The skills I learned in electrical engineering, such as signal processing and optics, and in biomedical engineering, such as fluorescent microscopy, combine smoothly in this work,” Hu says. “By the time I earn my PhD, I hope this device will answer a wide range of questions about distributed cortical function.”

“If I can train ten students to go out and start companies or think in more creative directions— that’s how you get an entire area of science moving forward.”

Ruangrawee Kitichotkul earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He is working on improving image reconstruction in particle beam microscopy with Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE) and other members of BU’s Signal Transformation and Information Representation group.

Eventually, Kitichotkul says, “I hope that my research is used in real-world products with positive social impacts, whether automobile safety sensors or various medical imaging modalities. For example, reducing acquisition time in MRI while maintaining the image quality could reduce the time and cost and make MRI scans more accessible.”

Assistant Professor Brian DePasquale (BME)

computational neuroscientist, DePasquale earned his PhD from Columbia University and did his postdoc work at Princeton University. He uses mathematical modeling to explain how populations of neurons perform the computations that underlie animal behavior.

By applying mathematics to understanding how the brain works, DePasquale is an inherent collaborator, making him a great fit for BU. “As a partner to experimental neuroscientists, I can help researchers who are developing neuroscience experiments to achieve their goals. I want to be a resource to lots of different investigators at BU. Some collect data from electrodes, others use optical microscopes—at base level, they’re looking at neurons, and by developing models in tandem with them, I can help refine experiments before they happen.”

In turn, Boston University suits DePasquale, who relishes the chance to work with data collected across campuses, from BME to biology to the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. “It’s important to be multilingual, in a sense,” DePasquale says. “That’s the benefit of breaking down borders. Going forward, all engineers have to be trained to speak the language of other disciplines.”

DePasquale hopes that the core scientific discoveries he enables will one day lead to better therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases, as well as an improved brain-machine interface for artificial limbs.

Miao earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Central South University in China and a master’s degree in chemistry from University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is working with a team of BU chemists, physicists and materials science engineers in studying how to turn a molecule into a tiny semiconductor.

“I strongly value the research environment created by BU that emphasizes collaborations between faculties and departments,” says Miao. “And I feel extremely fortunate to have joined a lab where people can learn and reap tremendous benefits from each other, as we come from different departments and have diverse backgrounds.”

Rebecca Shannon earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Western New England University. She is working with Associate Professor Sheryl Grace (ME) on a study of the breakup of rain drops when they interact with a shock wave from a hypersonic vehicle. “My background in heat transfer and energy storage have translated well to fluid dynamics,” she says. “I have enjoyed learning more about aerodynamics, and I’m able to perform significantly more complex computations using the BU shared-computing cluster than I could on a typical desktop.”

“I hope to continue to make contributions to my field that will help the world run more efficiently and safely,” Shannon says. “And I want to help teach the next generation of students and share in their interesting ideas and enthusiasm for technological advancement.”

Zelin

“That’s the benefit of breaking down borders. Going forward, all engineers have to be trained to speak the language of other disciplines.”

BIONIC PANCREAS ADVANCES

Seeing a Way to Combat Cancer

CHENG’S ADVANCED SPECTROSCOPE REVEALS

THE WORKINGS OF CANCER CELL METABOLISM

In the fight to treat ovarian cancer, innovative chemical imaging techniques developed by Professor Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE) are fast becoming valuable tools, as reported in two high-impact journals in the space of two months.

In a study published in Nature Communications, Cheng and colleagues found a metabolic signature for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Cisplatin, a chemotherapy drug used to treat ovarian and other cancers, contains platinum, which renders it ineffective in some patients for reasons never clearly understood.

FINDING UFO’S

Cheng’s team found that the platinumresistant cells were absorbing a lot of fatty acids. When the researchers blocked fatty acid uptake with a molecule inhibitor, they managed to kill even the platinum-resistant cancer cells.

Cheng identified fatty acid saturation as the culprit using multiplex stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) imaging cytometry, a high-throughput method of single cell analysis invented in the Cheng lab.

“It’s an advanced chemical imaging tool,” says Cheng. “It provides a way to visualize a molecule—like the molecule that metabolizes fatty acids— based on the signature, the spectroscopic fingerprint of these molecules.” Instead of using dyes or fluorescent labels to image one kind of molecule, Cheng’s method reveals the bigger picture. “We can visualize fatty acids, but we can also visualize glucose, cholesterol. It gives us the opportunity to see how cancer cells metabolize, to see how they change or reprogram themselves in response to a treatment.”

Boston University has filed a patent for Cheng’s SRS technology and licensed it to Vibronix, Inc., a medical device start-up Cheng founded in 2015 with a mission to put the tools he develops into the hands of clinicians.

Coauthors on the Nature Communications paper include Yuying Tan, a BME doctoral student and research assistant, and Kai-Chih Huang (ENG’20), a former BME research assistant, as well as collaborators at Northwestern University.

Cheng and several of the same researchers collaborated on a related study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In that study, they found a way to kill cancer cells by blocking an enzyme that aids in the uptake of unsaturated fatty acids, as well as evidence that a patient’s diet might bolster the treatment.

“Usually, unsaturated fatty acid, which is a major component of olive oil, is a good thing,” says Cheng, “but in this case, it’s bad, because it actually rescues the cancer cells from the treatment.”

In both studies, it was Cheng’s cutting-edge imaging technology that revealed these biomarkers. “Yet, without the collaboration between imaging and cancer biology, these discoveries would not have been possible,” says Cheng. — PATRICK L.

KENNEDY

Images of cancer cells, taken with an SRS spectroscope.

“Without the collaboration between imaging and cancer biology, these discoveries would not have been possible.”

Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE).

To Protect Our Most Vital Organs

BIG NIH GRANTS ENABLE ZHANG TO STUDY COMMON THREATS TO THE BRAIN AND HEART

Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME, BME, MSE) is already established as an expert in the mechanics and mechanobiology of arterial tissue. This year, with the help of two large grants from the National Institutes of Health, she’s extended that expertise to the study of brain as well as heart arteries, aiming to discover origins and portents of Alzheimer’s disease and a life-threatening condition known as aortic dissection.

“The overarching goal for both grants is to have early detection and intervention for these diseases,” says Zhang. “It’s exciting that we have the tools now for looking at these very sophisticated mechanical aspects of the arteries and can combine that with our understanding of microstructure and the clinical data that’s out there.”

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, afflicting nearly 6 million Americans, and the sixth most common cause of death in the United States. A growing body of evidence points to cerebrovascular dysfunction—problems in the arteries that are critical for proper function of the brain—as a culprit.

With a five-year NIH R01 research grant totaling $3.9 million, Zhang’s goal is to unravel the connection between cerebrovascular integrity and brain health, focusing on the cerebral arteries.

“We have some preliminary results showing that cerebral arteries become stiffened and lose their elasticity in Alzheimer’s disease,” Zhang says. “We want to understand the changes in the biomechanics and microstructures of the cerebral vessels and how that affects the pathology in the brain.

It’s a challenging, chicken-or-egg problem.”

In the long term, Zhang hopes her work will result in diagnostic tests that would catch warning signs in the arteries before Alzheimer’s progresses. “It’s great to have access to donor tissue samples from the BU Alzheimer’s Disease Center, so we can establish these connections,” Zhang says. “But it would be great to see this without having to look at the postmortem tissue.”

Zhang’s co-PIs in the study are Joseph Zaia and Thor Stein, professors at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Professor Irving Bigio (BME, ECE, Physics, Medicine) collaborates with Zhang on high-resolution imaging and quantitative assessment of vessel structural proteins and cells.

Zhang is the sole PI on the second of the two NIH grants she’s received this year, a $2.2 million R01 grant focused on aortic dissection, one of the top 20 causes of death

in the country. As in the Alzheimer’s study, Zhang has zeroed in on structural defects in the arteries as a potential cause for the disease. But, where her concern there is on cerebral arteries stiffening, here the issue is when the aorta (the largest blood vessel that transports blood from the heart to the rest of your body) develops layer separations or local defects in the aortic wall.

Zhang is working on this grant with a collaborator, Andy Yun, a Harvard Medical School professor and research scholar at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“A lot of people have the risk factors for aortic dissection, a relatively rare disease and often challenging to detect, but when it happens, it’s really, really bad,” says Zhang. “The knowledge we gain from this research should provide insights into the biomechanical markers for aortic dissection, and that will be useful for early diagnosis and treatment.” — PATRICK

PHOTOGRAPH, BOTTOM, BY VERNON DOUCETTE; IMAGE, TOP, COURTESY OF KATHERINE ZHANG

L. KENNEDY

Multiphoton image of a human cerebral artery showing the proteins elastin (green) and collagen (red) in the arterial wall.

Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME, BME, MSE)

“The overarching goal for both grants is to have early detection and intervention for these diseases.”

Getting Tough Fast

BROWN COMBINES MACHINE LEARNING, MECHANICS TO SPEED DISCOVERY OF IMPACT-RESISTANT MATERIALS

Designing materials for impact protection—think military helmets or a car’s crumple zone—is arduous and expensive. Engineers can’t simply model the impacts on a computer; they must physically subject the candidate materials to crashes.

Now, Associate Professor Keith Brown (ME, MSE, Physics) has figured out how to combine additive manufacturing with robotics and machine learning to test thousands of combinations of materials and designs with unprecedented speed—and no large-scale destruction.

“In the past year, our lab discovered a host of structured materials that were highly efficient in terms of absorbing mechanical energy, as the result of over 10,000 experiments,” says Brown. “We’re talking about big numbers—numbers it would be totally impractical, if not impossible, to reach without an automated system.”

That’s just one example of the advances in materials discovery that Brown and colleagues have shown are possible. The team published their findings in a recent paper in Matter and presented them at the first-ever Accelerate conference in Toronto, where Brown received a travel award.

“When nature builds materials and structures, it makes these exquisitely complicated things,” says Brown. “Our goal is to figure out ways to learn how to create

similarly intricate structures that have really highly tuned and tailored properties for things like impact protection and mechanical performance—things that are hard to simulate.”

To catch up to nature, which has had “the benefit of hundreds of millions of years of evolution,” Brown says, “we build robots that do these experiments for us.”

That’s the first key component: Brown’s BEAR system, short for Bayesian experimental autonomous researcher. The engineers enter parameters into the system—say, properties of strength or toughness. The autonomous system rapidly designs one structure after another and, with a robotic arm and several 3D printers, manufactures samples.

Next, the researchers subject each sample to quasistatic compression in a kind of leaner stand-in for an impact test. Ultimately, once they find the sample structure—for example, a lattice—that meets the criteria, they can manufacture multiple copies of that lattice and knit them into a material with the desired toughness. “It’s like a box spring,” says Brown, “where you have a series of components arranged in a way that allows you to absorb energy effectively.”

Combining quasistatic and impact tests, the researchers trained a model that accurately predicted the impact performance in novel lattices. The results proved how relatively simple data, obtained without fullsize samples or complex measurements, can be used to accomplish bigger goals in materials discovery.

Along with his students Aldair Gongora (ENG’21) and Kelsey Snapp (ENG’25), Brown’s collaborators on the Matter study included Maysarah K. Sukkar Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation

Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME) and Emily Whiting, an associate professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences. The team’s work is funded in part by the US Department of Defense. — PATRICK L.

KENNEDY

Keith Brown (ME, MSE, Physics)

“It’s like a box spring where you have a series of components arranged in a way that allows you to absorb energy effectively.”

One of the intricate lattices Brown designed with his BEAR system.

PHOTOGRAPH, BOTTOM, BY DANA J. QUIGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY; TOP, BY KEITH BROWN

Bionic Pancreas Better for Managing Type 1 Diabetes

Your pancreas is like a little digestive engine, working hard to keep your body fueled and running. Just six inches long, it’s responsible for turning lunch into the energy that gets you through the afternoon and making sure your blood sugars stay balanced.

But in people with type 1 diabetes, the pancreas fails in the second job. The organ doesn’t produce enough insulin, a hormone necessary for converting and storing sugars. Without it, those sweet carbs can’t enter cells, leaving sugars stuck in the bloodstream and people with type 1 diabetes feeling thirsty, hungry, and tired. In the long term, diabetes can cause heart disease and damage the eyes, kidneys, feet and skin. Patients must constantly monitor their blood sugar levels and inject insulin to keep them in check.

There’s no cure for type 1 diabetes. But a bionic pancreas, invented by BU biomedical engineers and in the works for two decades, is moving closer to giving the nearly two million Americans with the chronic disease

fresh hope. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found the wearable automated insulin delivery device, iLet, was better at managing blood glucose levels than existing standardof-care methods.

The iLet was developed in the lab of Professor Ed Damiano (BME). In 2015, he cofounded a public benefit corporation, Beta Bionics, to advance the technology and bring it to market. His coinventor was Firas El-Khatib, previously a senior research scientist at BU and now Beta Bionics’ VP of research and innovation. Both are authors on the latest paper.

In a 13-week clinical trial at 16 sites across the United States, the iLet improved glycated hemoglobin (A1C) levels—a measure of blood glucose control—reducing them on average from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent.

“It sounds so modest, you drop the entire cohort on average a half of one percent, but it’s actually pretty meaningful,” says Damiano. “Every percentage point

reduction in A1C has been shown to confer meaningful reductions in long-term health complications for people with type 1. Across a population, that can be huge.”

The 15-mm-thick iLet is about the size of a credit card. Worn on a belt clip—or even in a bra strap or shoved in a pocket— the device communicates with a separate Bluetooth-enabled monitor to continuously track a subject’s glucose levels. Through a thin tube connected to the body, the iLet automatically delivers a tailored dose of insulin every five minutes, which it calculates based on current and past glucose levels; it can also learn and adapt to changing needs based on the body’s response to past insulin deliveries. By contrast, other methods for managing type 1 diabetes require patients to prick a finger or use a monitor to measure their glucose levels, then administer insulin by injection or with a pump—it’s up to them, with help from their physician, to calculate the correct dose.

“The iLet is designed to require hardly anything of you,” says Damiano. “As much as possible, it’s designed to be like a self-driving car—as opposed to holding the wheel and making all the insulin-dosing decisions. That’s a categorically different experience.” — ANDREW THURSTON

For Damiano, iLet’s progress is personal— he began work on the bionic pancreas in 2002 to help his five-year-old son, who developed type 1 diabetes as an infant.

Ed Damiano (BME)

The iLet bionic pancreas monitor.

PHOTOGRAPH, BOTTOM, COURTESY OF ED DAMIANO

BU Astrophysicist Joins NASA Team to Study UFOs

It’s not a bird or a plane, but there are objects in the sky that we can’t quite explain. One challenge with UFOs— now officially called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP—is that “the instruments used to record these things were not designed for this purpose whatsoever,” says Professor Joshua Semeter (ECE), director of BU’s Center for Space Physics (CSP). Many UAP sightings come from Navy pilots, who have the technology to shoot objects down, not take a high-resolution picture, he explains.

Semeter has been appointed to a NASA team charged with studying UAPs and creating a road map to better observe, study and ultimately identify the phenomena. Officials say the most likely explanation for UAP sightings is surveillance operations by foreign powers or weather balloons—but most documented accounts remain unexplained.

“It excites the imagination,” says Semeter. His research focuses on the ionosphere—the layer of the atmosphere that interacts with solar wind and the magnetic field of Earth, creating phenomena like the aurora borealis. He also looks at other atmosphere and ionosphere events, such as how the ionosphere interferes with GPS signaling. Semeter’s speciality of using sensors and atmospheric signals to better understand the environment makes him well suited for the job of uncovering UAP mysteries.

“In the spectrum of work from NASA, all the way from cosmology and astrophysics to Earth observing, it’s all sensor-related,” says Semeter. “The types of sensors that are staring down at Earth from orbit may not be optimized to detect and understand small objects that appear in the fields of view, but we will be trying to understand the available data, how it might contribute to the small minority of these phenomena that are not yet explained or accounted for, and make recommendations for observational programs going forward.”

Atmospheric and ionospheric interactions produce phenomena that still aren’t fully understood. Semeter and his CSP colleagues apply radar, radio and optical

sensing technologies in efforts to develop theories and models that make sense of the phenomena.

“The atmosphere becomes thinner as you go up in altitude,” says Semeter. “At the same time, the sun is injecting energy in the form of light and heat and ionizing radiation. At some altitude, you have a combination of energy and low density that produces ionization and forms a layer of plasma that’s electrically conducting. As most people see it, plasma is the fourth state of matter.” The ionosphere, Semeter explains, is evidence for a shielding mechanism that protects us from dangerous particles.

Using data and declassified footage from a range of government departments, along with commercial data, Semeter and the fifteen other experts on the NASA team are figuring out a “road map,” he says.

“We want to know what NASA assets can be tuned and turned on to this problem,” says Semeter. “We want to make specific recommendations about what NASA could do to answer specific questions. We’re trying to play a role that’s consistent with NASA’s mission, which is being rigorous about fundamental science and addressing this from a scientific perspective.” —

Joshua Semeter (ECE).

JESSICA COLAROSSI

Semeter’s speciality of using sensors and atmospheric signals to better understand the environment makes him well suited for the job of uncovering UAP mysteries.

Communicating with Cells in Their Natural Language

Researchers have been trying to replicate cells’ system of communication for decades, with no success. Now, Associate Professor Chuanhua Duan (ME, MSE) and colleagues have figured it out. Their biomimetic method of talking to cells might lead to targeted drug delivery, improved prosthetics and other applications.

“Essentially, we’ve cleared the way to communicate with cells using their natural language,” says Duan.

We respond to stimuli because the cells in our bodies communicate with one another and their surroundings by transmitting signals in the form of small chemical molecules. Cells that are set up to receive certain signals each have a receptor for that signal. The cells use protein nanopores— tiny openings that act as gates—to trigger the molecules’ release.

Instead of a door, though, picture a ball on a chain. The ball, made up of amino acids, blocks the pore opening until the correct signal arrives. Then the chain—a string of residues—swings the ball out of the way to let the nanopore open. All this happens in milliseconds, repeatedly.

For nearly two decades, researchers tried to replicate this gating system with artificial devices. “But none of the attempts could completely close the pore,” Duan explains. “And none of them could reach that speed. And none of them could do this reversible gating multiple times.”

And so the trail went cold.

Then in 2018, Duan won a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award to replicate cell-cell information transfer. Along with graduate research assistants Rami Yazbeck (ENG’16,’18,’22) and Yixin Xu (ENG’22) and former ENG faculty member Tyrone Porter, Duan sought to develop the first device that would mimic real-life protein gating.

The team struggled through their own only partially successful attempts before hitting upon a novel solution. They removed the chain from the ball-and-chain gate, used different nanoparticles as the ball and used electrokinetics to drive the nanoparticles to the nanopore.

The result? The gate closes (and opens) completely, rapidly and repeatedly, the first time this gating function has been completely achieved with artificial means.

Someday, devices that use this technology might target a medication to a precise location—such as a tumor—at precise times. The team’s findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ironically, in nanofluidics, blockage is usually considered a failure, says Duan. “If something blocks the pore, you would think it’s useless. But we essentially converted this from a failure to such exciting potential applications.

“People have asked, ‘How did you guys have this idea?’ But we didn’t have the idea— we learned from nature.” —

PATRICK L. KENNEDY

“People have asked, ‘How did you guys have this idea?’ But we didn’t have the idea—we learned from nature.”

Duan and colleagues developed the first device that mimics real-life protein gating, re-creating a cellular system of communication.

Chuanhua Duan (ME, MSE).

Hadi Nia Earns NIH Award for Groundbreaking Lung Research Technology

Assistant Professor Hadi Nia (BME, MSE) has earned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award. The nearly $2.5 million grant will empower Nia to pursue novel models and tools to image the lung in real time and at cellular resolution. He will probe the links between the physics, biology and immunity of the lung, in both sick and healthy specimens.

A complex vital organ, the lung faces risks from airborne pathogens and pollutants as well as cancer, making it imperative that we learn more about the dynamics of the origin and progression of lung disease. But current methods for studying the lung offer a limited picture.

To bring new clarity to pulmonary research, Nia has developed and is refining a technology he calls LungEx, a system for ex vivo studies in which a ventilator and perfusion pump keep the lung functioning while a transparent container Nia calls the “crystal ribcage” allows for observation of the organ’s workings.

This innovation promises to unlock insights into the real-time dynamics of respiration and circulation, the trafficking of immune and cancer cells, the transmission of airborne pathogens and the immune system’s response. The new understanding of the lung that should result will have implications for drug development and delivery, lung transplantation and even aging.

“These high-risk, high-reward mechanisms are truly empowering for our lab, as they allow us to ask bold questions without worrying too much about funding,” says Nia. “With our promising preliminary data in the context of pri-

mary and metastatic lung cancer, as well as pneumonia, our team is very excited about the transformative potentials of our proposed technology.”

Nia’s is one of 103 High-Risk, HighReward research grants the NIH has awarded this year for early-stage investigators who have proposed innovative, high-impact ideas.

“The science advanced by these researchers is poised to blaze new paths of discovery in human health,” says Lawrence A. Tabak, acting director of NIH. “This unique cohort of scientists will transform what is known in the biological and behavioral world.”

Nia’s collaborators on the project

include Professor Bela Suki (BME), who sparked his interest in the lung, as well as Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine faculty Giovanni Ligresti, Katrina Traber, Sarah Mazzilli and Joseph Mizgerd, who contributed their invaluable expertise on pulmonary diseases. Nia also credits the Neurophotonics Center for providing imaging equipment and further guidance.

Nia has received multiple awards for his research, including Beckman Young Investigator and NIBIB Trailblazer awards. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in Iran and his doctoral degree from MIT.

— PATRICK L.

KENNEDY

PHOTOGRAPH, BOTTOM, BY JACKIE RICCIARDI; TOP, BY ROBINA WEERMEIJER ON UNSPLASH

“These high-risk, high-reward mechanisms are truly empowering for our lab, as they allow us to ask bold questions without worrying too much about funding.”

Hadi Nia (BME, MSE).

The lung is a complex vital organ, facing risks from airborne pathogens and pollutants as well as cancer.

With Keck Funding, BU-UCI Team to Study Cell Signaling

Acontinent-spanning team that includes Associate Professor Ahmad (Mo) Khalil (BME) has received a $1 million award from the W.M. Keck Foundation for a cell signaling study that might lead to heart and pain therapies with fewer side effects.

Khalil and co-PI Chang Liu, associate professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, will develop a platform to create biomolecules that enable the systematic study of biased signaling by G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). GPCRs are a large class of membrane proteins used by cells to convert extracellular signals into intracellular responses regulating many physiological

functions in the human body, including vision, smell, neurotransmission, the endocrine system and the immune system.

“Deciphering how cells sense and transduce diverse extracellular signals— ranging from light to odorants, hormones and neurotransmitters—is a fundamental problem that touches virtually every area of biology,” says Khalil. “The Keck award will allow us to pursue bold new ideas and technologies that combine my lab’s expertise in synthetic biology and cell signaling with the Liu lab’s expertise in directed evolution to help systematically test and study models of GPCR signaling, such as the notion of biased signaling. I am especially excited to launch this project with my friend and long-term collaborator, Chang Liu.”

In the classical model, GPCRs act as on/ off switches where a ligand turns on or off all signaling from a GPCR. In recent years, however, this classical model has been expanded through the discovery of biased GPCR ligands, biomolecules that do not simply activate or inhibit all signaling but rather, selectively modulate downstream pathways. In effect, this turns a black-and-

white signaling paradigm into a “color” picture by adding another dimension to its possibilities, say Khalil and Liu.

However, researchers are limited in their ability to probe this dimension due to the lack of specific and potent GPCR ligands that are capable of triggering biased signaling in desired directions. Khalil and Liu will combine their work on establishing versatile reporters for GPCR signaling with their novel continuous evolution technologies to derive new ligands that induce user-defined signaling profiles for human GPCR targets.

The new ligands will be used to trap medically relevant GPCRs in distinct or previously unseen conformations, enabling structural and biochemical studies to uncover the molecular mechanisms of biased GPCR signaling and the detailed interrogation of multidimensional signaling of many other signaling systems as well.

“GPCRs control almost every aspect of human physiology and the ability to selectively activate certain GPCR signaling pathways over others is hypothesized to have major therapeutic advantages, like treating pain or heart conditions with fewer side effects,” says Liu. “Yet whether this selective activation is possible in a general manner, that is still an open question in the field. We are excited to answer that question by leveraging our continuous protein evolution approaches.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY DANA J. QUIGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY

“The Keck award will allow us to pursue bold new ideas and technologies.”

Mo Khalil (BME).

Connizzo to Complete Tendon Study with AAUW Grant

Atendon disease study that was slowed when the coronavirus pandemic hit has earned a prestigious American Association of University Women (AAUW) award that will take it over the finish line.

With a goal of developing therapies to treat tendon injury in older adults, Assistant Professor Brianne Connizzo (BME) has for several years been studying the role of inflammation in chronic tendon disease. Using a novel rotator cuff tissue model, Connizzo and colleagues demonstrated that inflammation can cause degradation and cell death in young tendons. But unexpectedly, the explants from aged mice performed better under the same conditions.

Connizzo hoped one more experiment would show how aged tendons can be inflammation resistant. Then the pandemic paused the study. When the

researchers could finally return to the lab, they discovered that a freezer had failed, and a critical (and expensive) batch of aged tissue samples had been lost.

Now, with funds from the AAUW, Connizzo can complete the final experiment. The competitive AAUW Research Publication Grant in Engineering, Medicine and Science will allow her team to purchase new samples and hire a grad student to help subject these tendon explants to inflammation and track the cellular responses.

One of the world’s largest sources of funding for female scientists, AAUW and its mission are close to Connizzo’s heart.

“I am committed to the advancement of women in science and engineering,” Connizzo wrote in her proposal. “At a time when research inequity is increasing due to the increased demands placed on women and mothers during the global pandemic, I believe this fellowship will be critical in helping to overcome barriers in my own research and that of the women I hope to inspire.”

Runyon Grant for BME Study of Tumor “Design Principles”

to nutrients, which can put them under stress, and are in a crowded environment, which makes it hard for them to divide and the population to grow.

The Runyon study should solve that mystery, says Klumpe, by discovering the “design principles” at work. “What stabilizes an aggregate? What causes it to fall apart? The hope is that we’ll learn what’s necessary for cells to stick together, remain together and cooperate. That’s useful from the cancer research perspective, so we can disrupt that cooperation—keep those cells from growing and dividing.”

BME

postdoc Heidi Klumpe has won a fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation to figure out how cells aggregate into tumors. Klumpe will use yeast as a model organism to engineer cell aggregates and observe their growth and maintenance over many generations.

Cell aggregation is the basis of every living thing from algae and moss to ducks and people. Unfortunately, that includes tumors. Yet it remains something of a mystery why and how cells do aggregate, since they face some headwinds—the cells in the middle of an aggregate have reduced access

A key tool in Klumpe’s study will be a technology developed by her postdoctoral advisor, Associate Professor Ahmad (Mo) Khalil (BME), whose automated eVOLVER system can continuously run hundreds of cell cultures in real time. Once set up, the cultures can be monitored and managed remotely.

“The plan is to build these aggregates, put them in the eVOLVER and then ask, ‘How well do they stay together?’” Klumpe says. “Having the ability to build a new biological design and then test that idea relatively quickly is going to be awesome.”

Klumpe’s other advisor is Associate Professor Mary Dunlop (BME). It’s an ideal combination for her work, says Klumpe. “Mo’s group has the hardware and synthetic biology expertise, while Mary’s group has experience with microscopy and modeling.”

—

PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Brianne Connizzo (BME).

Heidi Klumpe (BME).

“I am committed to the advancement of women in science and engineering.”

“What stabilizes an aggregate?

What causes it to fall apart?”

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