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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

BIONIC PANCREAS ADVANCES