ENGINEER Spring 2011

Inside:

SPRING

Up and Running Nervous System 2.0

11

adventures

in Engineering!

How active learning is transforming the classroom !

innovative

courses...jeepers...even responsible hacking!

a watershed year!

The 2009–2010 fiscal year was one of tremendous growth and success for the Boston University College of Engineering in one of the most challenging environments in decades.

Freshman Class Size — 431 The largest class in the College’s recent history and a 27.5 percent increase over the previous year SAT Score of Matriculants — 1317 The highest in the College’s history Total Grant Awards — $45,051,837 Research grants and contracts awarded to primary engineering faculty alone—an increase of 65 percent over the previous year

44 Cummington Street Boston, MA 02215

Selim Ünlü, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs

Kenneth R. Lutchen, Dean

Richard Lally, Associate Dean for Administration

Solomon R. Eisenberg,

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs

Engineering Leadership Advisory Board John E. Abele Gregg Adkin ’86 Alan Auerbach ’91 Adam Crescenzi ’64 Roger A. Dorf ’70 Ronald G. Garriques ’86 Norman E. Gaut Joseph Healey ’88 Jon K. Hirschtick Bill I. Huyett Amit Jain ’85, ’88

Dean L. Kamen, Hon’06 Nick Lippis ’84, ’89 John Maccarone ’66 Venkatesh Narayanamurti Stephen N. Oesterle Richard Reidy, SMG’82 Binoy Singh ’89 John Tegan ’88 John Ullo David Wormley

did you know?

Boston University grants 55 percent of its engineering PhDs to U.S. citizens, placing it 11th among American engineering schools with the highest percentage of domestic doctorates, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.

The College’s faculty is comprised of highly successful and internationally recognized professors and researchers:

• 7 National Academy of Engineering or National Academy of Sciences members 2 MacArthur Award winners 9 IEEE Fellows 17 AIMBE Fellows 11 Acoustical Society of America Fellows 3 ASA Silver Medal winners 4 AAAS Fellows 5 Optical Society of America Fellows 27 NSF CAREER Award winners 1 Presidential Citizens Medal winner 2 Sloan Fellows

• • • • • • • • • • • 1 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator BU Engineering is ranked in the Top 20 in Research Expenditures per Faculty Member ($619,700) by U.S. News & World Report.

SPRING 2011

Engineer Engineer Editor Michael Seele

Managing Editor Mark Dwortzan Staff Writer Kathrin Havrilla

Contributors Caleb Daniloff, Rachel Harrington Design and Production Boston University Creative Services Photography College of Engineering, Mark Dwortzan, except where indicated The BU College of Engineering magazine is produced for the alumni and friends of the Boston University College of Engineering.

Please direct any questions or comments to Michael Seele, Boston University College of Engineering, 44 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215. Phone: 617-353-2800; fax: 617-353-5929; email: engalum@bu.edu; website: www.bu.edu/eng.

0311 056309 Please recycle

Inside

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4 Cover Stor y

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4 Adventures in Engineering How Active Learning Is Transforming the Classroom

F eat u res

COVER: Associate Professor Ari Trachtenberg (ECE) with programmable “quadricopter” used in his Hacking, Networks, Hardware and Software course (top); inspired by Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman’s (BME) Transport Phenomena in Living Systems course, BME seniors Alexander Giannakos and Meredith Duffy (bottom) are working on senior design projects that use multidisciplinary engineering to impact global health. (Cover photos by Vernon

Doucette, top, and Kalman Zabarsky, bottom)

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ENG Introduces Six New Master of Engineering Programs

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For Mobile Moms (and Dads): Alum’s App Finds Kid-Friendly Places

Up and Running: Two BME Alums Advance the World Health Organization’s Global Health Technology Initiative

Nervous System 2.0: Alum’s Prosthetic Devices Restore Function in Patients with Neurological Impairments

Depar tment s

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From the Dean Eng News Faculty News Alumni Events Class Notes

Creating the Societal Engineer

By Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen

What is the purpose and promise of engineering? Is it to create a disposable “lab on a chip” for quick diagnosis of disease? Is it to invent lightweight automobile materials or a system that stores wind-generated power in electric-car batteries? Certainly these are some examples of what engineers do, but not why they do them.

Engineering should be about improving the quality of life in all segments of society, at home and around the world. The person who does this—who uses the quantitatively grounded and highly powerful and creative skills of an engineer to engage, shape and advance organizations and activities that improve the quality of life for one person, for whole organizations, or even for entire populations—is someone we call the Societal Engineer. It is the kind of engineer we are dedicated to creating at Boston University.

This is not to be confused with the so-called “T-shaped engineer,” who has the important combination of breadth and depth but may not appreciate how such a shape can advance society.

Societal Engineers may indeed be T-shaped—at BU they are—but they are more than that. The Societal Engineer’s objective may be to help create a safer, greener, more sustainable, healthier, Photo by Vernon Doucette better-connected, more energy-efficient, productive world—with enough food, clean water and economic opportunity for all. This engineer is motivated by a desire to move society forward in a wide range of human endeavors and engages in work accordingly. In short, the Societal Engineer is an individual with a sense of purpose and appreciation for how engineering education and experiences are superior foundations for improving society.

Like many of our alumni, Societal Engineers do not have to be working engineers for their entire careers. They can be businesspeople, government policy makers, doctors, lawyers, financiers, or members of any of a wide range of occupations where their undergraduate engineering background gives them the tools they need to improve the quality of life throughout society. They develop new technologies, of course, but are also empowered to create economic value and jobs, formulate public policy, improve health care and use wealth to advance society in this country and around the world. Their education has prepared them to work in multidisciplinary teams, often, but not exclusively, matching technology with the needs of the marketplace to bring innovation into practical use.

How does Boston University go about creating the Societal Engineer? Certainly instilling the requisite excellent engineering education in a known discipline with its powerful quantitative and creative problem-solving skills is non-negotiable.

But we also advance innovative curricular and extracurricular programs to ensure that all graduates have access to key attributes for orchestrating an impact on society. These include effectiveness in multidisciplinary and cross-functional teams, an array of communication skills, a capacity for systems-level thinking, global awareness, a grasp for public policy as it relates to technology, a passion for and understanding of the innovation ecosystem and an entrepreneurial mindset, and, finally, a social consciousness that appreciates how innovation should create both economic and quality-of-life value.

In this issue we highlight one example: our new Technology Innovation Scholars Program (TISP), which prepares our students to show grade, middle and high school students how engineering impacts society [see p. 26]. You will hear of other concrete examples soon. The TISP program was partially funded by a generous alumnus—if you believe in the vision and concept of the Societal Engineer, I invite you to help us conceive and create other enhancements, and whenever possible contribute to their implementation.

Engineering must be about more than creating or refining technology. It’s a profession, a way to make a living, but it’s not about money. It must be a vocation and an avocation. Societal Engineers are perfectly positioned to make the kind of impact on our society that no other professionals can, and have a passion to do so. They see their product not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end: The lab on a chip can head off a pandemic in a refugee camp; lighter cars emit less carbon; ­batteries store clean energy that would otherwise be wasted.

Sustaining and improving our quality of life requires a vision. The Societal Engineer has this vision.

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

By Kathrin Havrilla

ENG Introduces Six New Master of Engineering Programs Beginning in the fall, the College of Engineering will offer Master of Engineering degrees (MEng) in computer, electrical, manufacturing and mechanical engineering; materials science and engineering; and photonics.

These six new programs join two existing MEng degrees already available in biomedical and systems engineering.

Each of the eight MEng programs is designed for individuals seeking careers in industry. Unlike the research-focused Master

of Science and PhD programs, the MEng does not require a thesis and can be completed in just one year of full-time study. Coursework emphasizes technology-leadership skills and management in the global workplace as well as advanced technical training, and may include hands-on projects.

“The College-wide implementation of the MEng programs is a cornerstone of our efforts to refine our graduate programs according to the career goals of our students,” says Selim Ünlü, associate dean for research and graduate programs. “MEng will serve those who want to pursue careers in industry.”

The one-year MEng programs are ideal for graduating senior students seeking to enhance their knowledge and skills before entering the workforce, mid-career profession-

als considering a career change and industry professionals who wish to further their careers through exposure to engineering management concepts.

The new MEng programs will help address a need for engineering managers with advanced technical knowledge and communication skills projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and could boost students’ earning potential. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, individuals with master’s degrees earn an average of $400,000 more over the course of their careers than those with only a bachelor’s degree.

For more information, contact the College of Engineering Graduate Programs Office at 617-353-9760, or see www.bu.edu/ eng/academics/find.

BU Engineering Doctoral Programs Win Accolades The College of Engineering was acknowledged for the strength of its doctoral programs in a recent study released by the National Research Council. Even though their doctoral programs are relatively new, the Biomedical, Electrical & Computer and Mechanical Engineering departments and Systems Engineering division all placed highly in the study’s rankings.

Biomedical Engineering ranked near the top of the first quartile; Electrical & Computer Engineering appeared in the top quartile after placing in the third quartile in the last NRC doctoral program study in 1995; Mechanical Engineering debuted in the second quartile; and Systems Engineering placed in the third quartile. Because it started in 2007, after the survey began collecting data, the Materials Science & Engineering doctoral program was not included.

“We are very pleased with the survey results confirming the outstanding progress we have made in the doctoral research programs in the College of Engineering,” says Selim Ünlü, associate dean for research and graduate programs. ”Overall, our engineering PhD programs have grown over the last two decades from virtually nonexistent

(Image courtesy of the National Research Council)

to some of the premier programs in the nation.”

While BU began conferring doctoral degrees in general engineering in 1987 through the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, it was not until 1991 that the College of Engineering began offering disciplinespecific doctorates. The year 2010 marked the College’s 18th commencement ceremony awarding PhDs. To compile this study, the NRC ranked the doctoral programs at 212 universities

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based on their quality and effectiveness as determined by measurements such as research activity, student support and outcomes, and diversity of the academic environment. Ünlü notes that the data-driven metrics used to rank doctoral programs in 2010 are far more accurate than the purely reputationalbased surveys the NRC used previously: “Combined with our enormous forward and upward momentum, we can look forward to an extremely bright future for the engineering doctoral programs at BU.”

www.bu.edu/eng

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adventures

in Engineering!

How active learning is transforming the classroom !

BY MARK DWORTZAN

The week before the first meeting... of freshman course EK 131: Hacking, Networks, Hardware and Software, Associate Professor Ari Trachtenberg (ECE) dispatched an email message from a Gmail account in his name requesting students to bring random objects, such as teddy bears and maps, to the first class. When that day arrived, Trachtenberg was nowhere in sight, but a woman named Sarah GriesseNascimento showed up in business attire and confidently announced that she was the Undergraduate Teaching Fellow (UTF). GriesseNascimento (EE’12) then began requesting students’ signatures and University IDs, and asked them to fill out a form with several personal questions—none of which were illegal or inherently dangerous.

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Photos by Kalman Zabarsky and Vernon Doucette

scenes from the new classroom!

Guided by innovative faculty, ENG undergraduates are programming robots, designing global health technologies, evaluating wind turbines and brainstorming ideas for new products.

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www.bu.edu/eng

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When Trachtenberg entered the room, he explained that anyone could have created a Gmail account in his name or easily impersonated the UTF to retrieve private information for malicious purposes. Having made his point without the aid of a single PowerPoint slide, he later carefully disposed of the questionnaires without reading them.

“These types of assignments and in-class demos help students link particular concepts to specific concrete experiences,” says GriesseNascimento. “Many students tend to fall for our ‘hacks,’ and by making mistakes or being forced to think early on, the students are more strongly impacted by the concepts and they remember them the next time they are tested, whether in the classroom or out in the real world.”

Drawing on best practices in undergraduate engineering education and their own instincts, Trachtenberg and a growing number of College of Engineering faculty members are augmenting the standard lecture with in-class dramatizations, creative brainstorming sessions, problem-solving exercises and other innovative educational features. Bucking the tradition of delivering canned concepts to a passive, note-

“I started doing this about two years ago, and I noticed a big change in the quality of students’ work,” says Wroblewski, who has introduced many changes to ME courses over the past two decades. “Since I went to this format, their project designs contain fewer errors.”

Energized by courses in which students play a more active role in their own learning— as well as by hands-on research projects, internships, student group activities and study abroad programs—College of Engineering undergraduates are emerging more prepared and motivated to solve critical world problems in health care, national security, clean energy, communications and other domains. To that end, the faculty is working to design courses that are more tangible, relevant, creative and challenging.

Google’s Android operating system—into the classroom experience. This year’s final student projects included programming a robot to ferry items between two rooms and a quadricopter to perform acrobatic maneuvers.

“These devices provide a rich set of possible applications that can inspire and excite students with the tangible applications of their learning,” says Trachtenberg, noting that other College of Engineering instructors have already done just that by introducing novel microprocessors, sensor motes and wireless network analyzers into their classrooms. For this professor, the impetus to engage his students with different novel hacking exercises and programmable devices each year is simple: “I get bored teaching the same class the same way more than once.”

Make it Tangible

Pacing across the stage of the Photonics Center auditorium on a mid-November morning, Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME) presents a contemporary legal case to the 30 students in his BE 435: Transport Phenomena in Living Systems class: “An individual gets coffee from McDonald’s and it causes burns, which

To introduce students to hacking ethics, techniques and hazards in his Hacking, Networks, Hardware and Software course, Trachtenberg not only engages them in safe but adventurous hacking exercises, but also asks them to interact with leading-edge, programmable devices.

Make it Relevant

HACKING RESPONSIBLY

In the course Hacking, Networks, Hardware and Software, Ari Trachtenberg (ECE) (right) uses an Androidbased smartphone (left) and a “quadricopter” (right) to introduce students to the Linux operating system.

Photos by Vernon Doucette

taking audience, these educators are empowering their students to take an active—and often central—role in shaping dynamic learning experiences that integrate both theory and practice.

For example, in the aerospace senior design course, Professor Donald Wroblewski (ME)—co-recipient, with Trachtenberg, of the College’s first annual Innovative Engineering Education Faculty (IEEF) Fellowship award in 2009—no longer gives in-class lectures.

Instead, the students view lecture notes posted online in advance of each meeting, freeing up class time for reviewing key concepts and implementing them through challenging, team-based exercises.

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

For instance, during a class session on the Linux operating system, he demonstrated the use of a “quadricopter,” a four-rotor toy helicopter that can be controlled by a smartphone with appropriate software. “This is a Linux computer,” he told his 30 students as he stood beside the black, desk drawer-sized, plastic vehicle. “One of your hacking projects is to program this thing.

Your job is to get it to do a figure-eight in the air.”

Recognizing that computer engineering focuses on computers and devices with varying shapes and functions, Trachtenberg is using some of his IEEF award funding to incorporate a wide variety of commonly used devices—such as Microsoft’s Xbox and smartphones based on

leads to semi-permanent tissue damage. Whose fault is it?”

Zaman, the College’s 2010 IEEF Fellow [see p. 31], peppers his student audience with questions in rapid-fire succession: “Was the coffee too hot? What should be the regulation?

Should McDonald’s be liable? Should they decrease the temperature of the coffee or come up with better cups?”

He then asks the students to begin by considering the science: “If the skin comes in contact with any object whose temperature is greater than or equal to 48 degrees Celsius for ten seconds or more, it will lead to permanent scar or tissue damage. In this case, is that what really happened?”

FIGHTING GLOBAL DISEASES Inspired by Muhammad Zaman’s

(center) Transport Phenomena in Living Systems course, BME seniors Alexander Giannakos (left) and Christopher Myers (right) are developing simple, robust and affordable cell phone-based tools for rapid and quantitative diagnosis of dengue fever.

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Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

www.bu.edu/eng

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Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Next, the students weigh in, focusing first on ethical concerns: “When you go to McDonald’s, you’re eating at your own risk. From a fork that stabs you to hot coffee that burns you, it’s your own responsibility.”

“It’s your own responsibility up to a certain temperature. A major problem with this case is, it was found that no one can drink coffee at that temperature.”

Stressing that both ethical sensibilities and engineering skills are needed to resolve civil issues like this one, Zaman asks the students to divide the skin into ten-millimeterthick layers and use a mathematical formula to evaluate the extent of tissue damage in each layer during a ten-second exposure to coffee at various initial temperatures. For homework, he asks them to come up with a model for determining a reasonable maximum safe temperature for coffee based on material properties, environmental conditions and other factors.

Each week, Zaman illustrates the principles of heat, mass and momentum transfer and their application in living systems by presenting new concepts in the context of openended, real-life learning challenges that range from coffee burns to blood doping to forensics, and directing students to appropriate analytical tools.

“Professor Zaman gave us real-world problems and asked us—the students—to think critically and help find a solution,” said Christopher Myers (BME’11). “He took in everything that we said, and no matter how far out there it may have been, he always considered it and discussed it with us.”

The problems that Zaman presents range from the local to the global. To broaden student horizons, he devotes about 15 minutes during each class to discussing how biomedical engineers can use their problemsolving skills to find scalable and sustainable solutions to health care and disease prevention challenges in resource-limited countries around the world. Examples include simple, robust technologies that can measure temperature, diagnose diseases such as malaria and HIV from blood samples, or deliver drugs in places that may not have access to clean water or electricity.

“This class has motivated me to pursue a career in public health,” says Salwa Masud (BME’11), “and I hope to use the problemsolving skills we developed to design affordable medical devices for developing countries.”

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

CONTROLLING QUALITY In Stormy Attaway’s Intro to Engineering Computation course, students collected and analyzed power and speed data from mini-wind turbines (Left).

Make it Creative Fifty-six eyes focus on a black, handheld device as a presenter extols its features during a class meeting of ENG ME 415: Product Development.

“This is an Apple TV,” he begins. “It’s a device that streams online movies that you connect to your TV with an HDMI cable. It can stream from YouTube, Flickr and other websites, and to your iTunes, so you can run thousands of movies and DVDs from your iTunes on your TV. I use it a lot to stream movies or TV shows or anything on my laptop.”

The speaker is not an Apple representative but Dani El-Zein (MFG’11), a student in jeans, a T-shirt, a black fleece jacket and wireframes. The moment he completes his fiveminute presentation, many of his 20 fellow students jump in with questions about the device’s functionality and performance.

A few minutes later, the games begin.

Several students suggest ways they would improve the Apple TV, and El-Zein, based on his intimate knowledge of the product, chooses the two he deems the best. Today the winning suggestions are: add a wireless control to the device so you can play downloaded video game apps on your TV; and add a USB port so you can plug in an external hard drive to store downloaded items for later viewing. The two winning students earn a point, and the student with the largest number of points at the end of the semester gets a grade of 100 on his or her lowest quiz.

“I want them to feel that whatever product they see, they can come up with something ­better—and to learn how easy it is,” says Professor Dan Cole (ME), the course instructor. “Sometimes the students come up with incremental improvements, sometimes almost a new product.”

This brainstorming exercise is but one of several creative activities through which ME 415 students learn about technical and marketing aspects of product development. They also form teams for in-class exercises such as generating ideas on how to improve the braking capability of inline skates, and complete homework

assignments that range from a market analysis of a folding kayak company to a postmortem assessment of why the Hummer SUV market collapsed.

One of the course’s most substantial homework assignments is to design a miniature item with a practical use that a company can give away at a trade show to promote its brand. Using a rapid prototyping machine that “prints out” small products based on design specifications, Fall 2010 semester students produced their miniature trade show products, shipped them to company representatives for feedback and used that feedback to redesign them. Entries included a miniature cereal bowl containing Post-it notes and a spoon pen for General Mills, an “elevator” that opens to hold business cards for Otis Elevators and a missileshaped pen for defense contractor Raytheon.

Ana Pelucarte (MFG’11), whose team designed the cereal bowl, lauds the course’s many engaging discussions on improving product performance and marketability. “One is able to learn not only from the professor’s perspective but also from the other students in the class,” she notes. “These discussions sometimes turn into debates, which are very interesting and dynamic.

Other times we participate in brainstorming sessions, which allow us to work on our creativity skills and build on each other’s ideas.”

Make it Challenging A late October meeting of EK 127: Intro to Engineering Computation at the Photonics Center starts out like most other large, introductory programming courses across America.

About 80 students file into a classroom resembling a truncated auditorium, take their seats in four rows of long gray desks stretching from wall to wall beneath fluorescent lights, and train their eyes on a projected PowerPoint slide at the front of the room. The instructor, dressed in black and white, stops to the left of the PowerPoint projection and announces, “Today we’ll cover anonymous functions and how you

In Dan Cole’s Product Development course, Ana Pelucarte (MFG’11) Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

(right) and teammates designed and redesigned a miniature cereal bowl containing Post-it notes for General Mills (center).

use them, passing a variable number of arguments to a function, and nested functions,” and then lectures the audience for ten minutes. But then, in an instant, she breaks protocol.

She brings up the next slide, which displays a practice programming problem, to be completed not as homework, but immediately.

Either individually or in collaboration with their deskmates, the students spend the next ten minutes working the problem. Then the instructor walks them through the solution. The rest of the hour-long class continues apace, with periods of lecture punctuated by practice problems.

“The more traditional stand-thereand-lecture-for-an-hour does not work anymore,” maintains the instructor, Assistant Professor Stormy Attaway (ME), the College of Engineering’s director of curricular assessment and improvement. “And so more and more people are moving toward the model of lecturing for a little bit and then having students work together on a problem or problem set.”

Near the end of the class session, Attaway passes out a “Reading Synopsis Page” on which students are expected to write down their name, lecture and lab section, the most important concepts in the assigned reading material and anything that may have confused them.

They hand in the page at the next class meeting after doing the reading.

“Since I am not spending the entire time lecturing, I rely on the students more to learn the material on their own,” says Attaway, who wrote the bestselling course text, MATLAB: A Practical Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving.

To review and apply what they’re learning outside of the lecture, students participate in a weekly discussion and computer lab sessions and complete long-term programming projects. The projects showcase how different engineering disciplines use the visual, interactive MATLAB programming language to solve problems, from image processing for quality control on wind turbine blades to elastic scattering spectroscopy for cancer detection.

“EK 127 is innovative in that it combines lecture instruction with individual lab work and group programming projects,” says Alex Handin, a mechanical engineering student who took the course in the fall. “This multifaceted approach toward learning the course material provides constant reinforcement as well as application of computer programming concepts.”

Coming Attractions College of Engineering undergraduate courses should continue to become more tangible, relevant, creative and challenging as new educational initiatives gain traction—including one ambitious endeavor that offers a glimpse of dramatic changes ahead.

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Supported by a two-year, $60,000 grant from Boston University’s Center for Excellence & Innovation in Teaching, the Mechanical Engineering department will soon completely redesign its large, introductory course EK 301: Engineering Mechanics I, now delivered in lecture format in five separate sections to all undergraduate engineering students.

Once the course goes live, approximately 200 students per semester will take their seats in groups of five at several round tables in a large, interactive learning facility. First they’ll hear a 15-minute lecture on a single topic, and then work together to solve a problem related to the topic, entering their graphical solution on a wireless tablet computer and dispatching it to a Web page on display at the front of the room. Faculty members and Graduate Teaching Fellows will roam the room like mobile coaches, guiding the process and answering questions.

When all the teams’ solutions are in, a faculty member will highlight correct and incorrect steps that were exposed from the group work and summarize the key concepts.

“The grant will enable us to deliver a more uniform learning experience for the students while providing improved feedback on p ­ roblem-solving steps,” says Lecturer Caleb Farney (ME). “These changes will provide a more enriching educational experience for the students in this key core course.”

www.bu.edu/eng

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Up and Running: Two BME Alums Advance the World Health Organization’s Global Health Technology Initiative It was a total coincidence. Two alumni of the biomedical engineering program, Jennifer Jackson (’96) and Jennifer Barragan (’99) had never met while at Boston University, but in 2010 both ended up in the same job with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Serving as technical officers on the Diagnostic Imaging and Medical Devices Team at the WHO’s Essential Health Technologies Unit—Jackson for three months last spring and Barragan since last May—both Jennifers have organized global conferences and developed concise resource documents to enable developing countries to vastly improve their health care technology management practices.

Their work is of critical importance, as many nations have insufficient plans, procedures and technical support personnel to ensure that medical devices—from anesthesia machines to blood pressure monitors—are functioning properly.

“Some hospitals have to wait up to a year to get any technical support for their medical devices, even for the simplest of repairs, such as a software upgrade,” says Jackson, who continues to serve the WHO as a voluntary technical advisor. “This means that illnesses are not diagnosed or treated because, quite often, there is just one device of its kind, such as a CT scanner, to serve an entire region.”

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Charged with helping to implement the WHO’s first Global Initiative on Health Technology, Barragan and Jackson have taken several steps to support member nations’ efforts to craft action plans aimed at improving their health systems’ medical device management performance. For the most part, both have worked on developing reports and manuals on effective medical equipment management and conferences that bring national health care representatives in contact with experts in the field.

They helped organize the WHO’s first Global Forum on Medical Devices, held in Bangkok last September, which attracted representatives from more than 100 countries.

During the conference, Barragan gave an introductory talk and Jackson chaired a session on eHealth. Barragan and Jackson serve on a working group responsible for developing WHO health care technology management guidelines and resource documents.

“We have worked with different country representatives to review their health care technology management needs, update the relevant parts of their action plans and correlate the WHO tools to those plans,” says Jackson. “I hope that through this work, effective management of medical devices will find its place on the national agenda of many developing countries.”

Taking Action across the Globe

Supporting Mission-Critical Equipment

Barragan encountered the problem firsthand during her previous job in Ethiopia, where she found that 40 percent of the nation’s medical equipment was inoperable due in part to a lack of spare parts and training.

“In U.S. hospitals, engineers and replacement parts are readily available, but a lot of developing countries haven’t built into their programming the notion that it’s important to maintain equipment so it will keep functioning,” she observes. “We want to create a system where the medical equipment going into health care facilities is safe, easy to use and maintain, and affordable.”

Even before they ended up with the same job at the WHO, Barragan and Jackson had already made their mark in careers centered on missioncritical medical devices.

In her first seven years after graduating from BU, Barragan served as a biomedical flight controller for Wyle Laboratories in Houston, where she aided astronauts in maintaining and repairing medical hardware on the International Space Station. After earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University in 2006, Barragan spent three years working for the Clinton Foundation in Ethiopia, where she coordinated a medical equipment donation program

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Jennifer Barragan (BME’99) and Jennifer Jackson (BME’96) at the WHO’s first Global Forum on Medical Devices.

to rural health centers and advised the government on health care technology management.

Jackson, who earned an MBA from Babson College in 2005, has logged more than 12 years in health care technology system design, marketing and implementation as a project manager, negotiator and team builder, software developer and clinical engineer. The immediate past president of the American College of Clinical Engineering, she is now a clinical engineering research associate at Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome and a remote project management consultant for the biomedical engineering department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Barragan and Jackson trace much of their professional effectiveness to coursework and student group leadership activities that they pursued while at BU. “At the College of Engineering I developed analytical skills that allowed me to look at a problem in a variety of ways,” says Barragan, who co-founded the BU chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. “Development is a field where you are constantly faced with challenges and problems that can seem out of your control or impossible to solve. So today, when presented with such obstacles, I often find myself calling on those skills.”

Barragan giving an introductory talk at the WHO Global Forum on Medical Devices (left); Jackson (fourth from left) at an advanced clinical engineering workshop in El Salvador (top right); Barragan visiting a clinic in rural Ethiopia (bottom right). (Photos courtesy of Jennifer Barragan and Jennifer Jackson)

Jackson recalls learning to “formulate questions and seek out answers, not just take things at face value” and “to work in multidisciplinary environments that require the ability to put technical terms in a common language.”

For Barragan, obtaining her position with the WHO was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and an opportunity to improve health care device management practices on the ground; for Jackson, the job fit in with her personal mission of enabling individuals and nations to solve their own health care challenges.

“I want to help guide people to the right solutions,” says Jackson. “If I can empower them

with education and resources while challenging them to create their own solutions that they can implement, then I’ve done my job.”

The BU Connection Beyond the WHO job, first names and BME degrees from the College of Engineering, Barragan and Jackson have one more thing in common: they both took classes with Professor Herbert Voigt (BME).

When Voigt, president of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineer­ ing, was asked to serve on the international organizing committee for the WHO’s first Global

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Forum on Medical Devices, he had no idea that both Barragan and Jackson were actively involved in planning the conference. Within a few weeks he met Jackson at a meeting in Geneva and received emails from Barragan, and when the Forum convened in September, he observed both of them running sessions.

“I was very proud to see them so involved in such an important forum and organization,” says Voigt.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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For Mobile Moms (and Dads): Alum’s App Finds Kid-Friendly Places

MomMaps locates kid-friendly spots in several categories within a specified distance from a smartphone’s location. Users tap destinations to show addresses, directions, phone numbers, active URLs, photos and reviews. (Images courtesy of MomMaps)

After Jill Seman (EE’89) moved from San Jose to San Francisco in 2007 with her husband and two-year-old son, she wondered what kidfriendly places her new city offered. She tried using the online directory Yelp, but her search returned very few items. Then she looked at various iPhone apps for moms, but found none focused on locales that would appeal to a child.

As she began to search for such places on her own and share them with other moms, she came up with an idea for a GPS-based iPhone app that would map out parks, playgrounds, museums and other kid-friendly spots within a specified distance. Users would tap those spots to show addresses, directions, phone numbers, active URLs, photos and reviews, all uploaded by on-the-go parents.

“I saw other apps for moms and thought, I’m familiar with this technology, so I decided to create an app for myself,” Seman recalls. “I wrote and tested it while my kids were napping, a few months after my daughter was born.”

On a lark, she also put the new, free app, MomMaps, on iTunes, where—to her amazement—it took off. Since then, Seman has added a website, kidsplayguide.com, that parents can use to plan kid-friendly outings, and expanded the app to cover more than 25 different metropolitan areas and 25,000 destinations.

Entries, which range from restaurants with kids’

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menus and high chairs to indoor play spaces, include ratings on a scale of one to five balloons.

“I get contributions daily from within the U.S. and all over the world,” says Seman. “It’s been a lot of fun to watch this start as a hobby and expand to where it is now.” Recently listed as one of Working Mother magazine’s 20 best iPhone apps, MomMaps is currently the only app for parents to share kid-friendly spots and rate and review them.

The app has more than 10,000 avid users, including Kelly Tirman in San Francisco, who writes a blog on motherhood. “As a new mom, MomMaps provided me with a source of sanity,” says Tirman. “Not only did it help me find great places on the go, but it motivated me to get out of the house and explore the city with my daughter.”

To create MomMaps, Seman took an online course on how to program an iPhone, purchased a $99 developer’s license from Apple Corporation and used the software development kit that comes with the iPhone. Seman expects that the app, which generates revenue through ads posted on the iPhone and the website, will become profitable as she slowly builds out the platform.

While she stresses that you don’t need software development experience to build an iPhone app, Seman acknowledges that her

career prepared her well for the task. Since graduating from BU, she has gained more than 15 years of engineering and management experience with multimedia processing companies such as Nvidia Corporation. At Nvidia, she helped the company evolve from a start-up to a multinational corporation that produces graphics chipsets for top-selling PC companies such as Dell, HP and Intel as well as for popular desktop and mobile platforms such as Xbox and PlayStation.

Seman also credits the College of Engineering for her perseverance and command of engineering fundamentals. “At BU I learned not only the basics of how semiconductors work and how to program, but also how to keep working on a problem until I figured it out,” she says.

To upgrade MomMaps, Seman recently added the capability to share favorite locales in the app database with other parents and guardians via email and Facebook. She is also working to make the app available on BlackBerry and Android networks and enable users to share short video clips.

“I’m pleasantly surprised at how people have embraced MomMaps as a sharing platform,” says Seman. “It’s evolved into a forum for parents to share their favorite kid-friendly spots as well as their concerns about problematic destinations.”

—Mark Dwortzan

Jill Seman (EE’89) with daughter Mary, 3, and son Alex, 7, at the Koret Children’s Quarter in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. (Photo by Jinara Reyes)

Nervous System 2.0: Alum’s Prosthetic Devices Restore Function in Patients with Neurological Impairments For Warren Grill (BME’89), Addy Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, academic research has never been enough. In 2002, just before he and his business partner, Geoff Thrope, co-founded a medical device start-up, Thrope challenged him: “You know, Warren, you’re doing a great job of being an academic biomedical engineer and publishing papers that end up in journals on a shelf. But is that sufficient?”

Since then, Grill has risen to the challenge, translating fundamental research to several technologies with significant clinical impact.

In recognition of his many innovations, he was named Neurotechnology Researcher of the Year in 2003 in the Neurotech Business Report and received the Boston University College of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award for Service to the Profession in 2007.

Upgrading the Nervous System Grill specializes in what he calls “pacemakers for the nervous system,” electronic neural prostheses that stimulate the neurological system—as a cardiac pacemaker stimulates the heart—to restore function in individuals with disease or injury. What distinguishes his research is a strong emphasis on translation from computer models and preclinical studies to clinical feasibility studies with human subjects, and, in some cases, commercial products.

One trailblazing technology that has emerged from Grill’s research is an implantable device that uses electrical stimulation to control bladder function, including both continence and emptying.

“Our research focus is on the restoration of bladder function in persons with spinal cord injuries,” says Grill. “But we determined that we could also use our approach to continence control to treat persons with overactive bladders.”

Grill and Thrope initially formed NDI Medical, LLC with that goal in mind and developed a device to treat the condition. In 2008, they sold this device to the health care giant Medtronic.

Grill is also exploring deep brain stimulation devices, “brain pacemakers” that are used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s

disease. He is studying ways to improve the efficiency and selectivity of deep brain stimulation, so as to maximize clinical effectiveness while minimizing side effects—and ultimately to expand the number of patients who could benefit from treatment.

“Although the technology has been used in about 80,000 people worldwide, we don’t know how it works,” says Grill. “Our objective is to understand the mechanisms and use that knowledge to improve the therapy.”

Engineering Clinical Solutions Grill’s interest in the nervous system was initially piqued by his BME senior project in Professor Herbert Voigt’s Auditory Neurophysiology Laboratory. “I gave him the opportunity to do his senior project in my lab and he did a fabulous job—he won the Senior Project of the Year Award,” says Voigt. “Warren was a star.”

As it turned out, that project—quantifying the electrical properties of nerve cells in a sea slug—effectively launched Grill’s career. “I wanted to exploit the understanding of neurophysiology to restore function,” he recalls. “The excitement I felt in doing this work sparked my interest in this career.”

While at BU, Grill not only expanded his engineering horizons but also developed communication skills that have served his career ever since. He learned how to write convincingly in a U.S. history course on the country’s westward expansion and learned the basics of giving professional presentations from the former head of the BME senior project program, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen.

“He impressed upon us the importance of preparation and practice,” says Grill. “I still follow that model today.”

Grill went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University and served on the research and primary faculty there until 2004 when he joined Duke’s faculty. In 2002, he co-founded NDI Medical, a technology incubator that partners with academic researchers and supports in-house scientists and engineers to develop high-growth com-

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Warren Grill (BME’89) in his lab at Duke University. (Image courtesy of Duke University)

panies focused on innovative neurostimulation technologies.

In 2009 NDI spun out two independent companies: Checkpoint Surgical, which produces an FDA-approved device that allows surgeons to identify and protect nerves in the surgical field so they’re not damaged during operations; and SPR Therapeutics, which has developed a novel approach to treating chronic pain that’s now being clinically tested.

“The excitement and satisfaction come from the translation of research to the clinic—of seeing these things happen in humans,” he says.

Grill attributes much of his success in translating biomedical engineering concepts into complicated methods and devices to an insistence on keeping things simple: “Even though we use complex technologies to interact with complex physical systems, I strive to break those down into elementary units so that I can understand them.”

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews Researchers Discover Unexpected Antibiotic Resistance Mechanism Scientists seeking ways to combat the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria have traditionally focused on better understanding and inhibiting the mutations that enable individual cells to become highly resistant. While such studies have yielded valuable insights into the causes of antibiotic resistance in isolated cells, they have largely overlooked the potential impact of intercellular interactions within an entire bacterial population on its collective resistance to antibacterial drugs.

Now researchers from Boston University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered that the bacterial populations that are most resilient against escalating doses of antibiotics are those containing a small number of highly resistant members that sacrifice their own well-being in order to increase the population’s overall chance of survival. Described in the September 2 issue of Nature, the study could lead physicians to rethink how they assess bacterial infections and infectious disease researchers to intensify their focus on intercellular cooperation within bacterial populations.

According to lead investigator James J. Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at BU and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute, the most resistant individual cells, or isolates, in the population produce a small, cell-signaling molecule called indole, which protects the population’s more vulnerable members against the applied antibiotic but reduces the ability to thrive in the isolates that produce it.

“In the past, it was believed that the resistant bacterial cells would survive and thrive, and all the other cells would die,”

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Collins explains. “We discovered instead that cells that develop resistance produce indole, and send it out to other, more susceptible cells in the population that have not yet acquired a mutation to afford them resistance. The indole turns on drug pumps that allow the cell to pump out the antibiotic, and it activates other defense mechanisms against the antibiotic attack.”

To obtain their findings, Collins and his collaborators subjected a population of E. coli bacteria cells to stepwise increases in antibiotic stress. Extracting a number of samples each day for multiple days, they found that the great majority of cells were less resistant than the population as a whole, and that the rare, highly resistant isolates were producing indole. Subsequent experiments showed that indole could account for much of the population’s shared resistance.

The most resilient bacterial populations contain a small number of highly resistant members that sacrifice their own well-being to increase the population’s overall chance of survival.

Throughout the study, Collins and his team found dramatic differences within a single population of E. coli, with some bacteria showing exceptional resistance and some almost none. When studied in isolation, most cells displayed lower resistance levels than the group exhibited as a whole because they were no longer in contact with the small number of super-mutant cells providing the indole.

Subjecting a population of E. coli bacteria to increasing levels of antibiotic stress, a team of researchers led

by Professor James J. Collins (BME) uncovered a new mechanism for antibiotic resistance.

“The study indicates that individual measures of resistance obtained from a patient sample may not give an accurate picture of the resistance profile of the bacterial population,” says Collins, “and that targeting the indole pathway may be a novel, viable means for combating the development of antibiotic resistance.”

Supported by ongoing funding from the National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Science Foundation, the researchers next aim to explore cooperative antibiotic resistance behaviors in other bacterial species and get a better understanding of the dynamic development of these different mutant strains.

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

New Method Dramatically Improves Pathogen Detection Rapid, chip-scale, low-cost detection of viruses and other pathogens is critically important to curbing the spread of pandemics and responding to potential biowarfare agents, but in many ways today’s biosensor technology falls short. The most commonly used techniques, which rely on fluorescent labels, are expensive and cumbersome.

Label-free biosensing devices avoid these drawbacks by using advanced photonics technology to identify potential pathogens, but they often lack sufficient sensitivity to detect nanoscale viral particles.

Now a new, highly sensitive nanoparticle detection technique and device, developed by Professor Selim Ünlü’s (ECE) research group in collaboration with Professor Bennett Goldberg (Physics, ECE) and the MITRE Corporation, promises to overcome these challenges and pinpoint single virus and other pathogen particles with unprecedented speed, accuracy and affordability. Known as the Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor (IRIS), the prototype device is the first not only to provide high-throughput detection of single nanoparticles of interest, but also to measure their size—an important factor in confirming the identity of a suspected pathogen.

In a single experiment conducted on bovine serum samples at the Boston University Medical Campus, IRIS detected and sized hundreds of individual H1N1 viruses. The research team, which also includes PhD students George Daaboul and Xirui Zhang (both BME) and Abdulkadir Yurt (MSE), described the system and the experiment in the October 19 edition of Nano Letters.

“Effective, label-free virus detection has been a major problem for decades,

Conceptual representation of H1N1 viruses captured by antibodies on the IRIS surface.

(Image courtesy of Aysegul Yonet)

and I claim that this is a solution,” says Ünlü.

“Compared to existing label-free techniques, our method is more robust, less expensive, and provides higher sensitivity and size verification.”

To detect and size pathogens, IRIS shines light from multicolor LED sources sequentially on nanoparticles bound to the sensor surface, which consists of a silicon dioxide layer atop a silicon substrate.

Interference of light reflected from the sensor surface is modified by the presence of particles, producing a distinct signal that reveals the size of each particle. The device has a very large surface area and can capture the telltale interferometric responses, in parallel, of up to a million nanoparticles.

Because the sensor discriminates according to particle size, it can “weed out” noise from many smaller particles in the target solution that may bind to the sensor indiscriminately.

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“The key criteria for any detector are sensitivity (how low a concentration can you use) and specificity (in the presence of other molecules, pathogens or cells, how sure are you that you detected the presence of the targeted pathogen amid other clutter or noise),” Ünlü explains. “You want an alarm that’s very sensitive, but that only goes off when there’s a fire.”

The research team next plans to augment IRIS with optical elements that will enable the device to recognize not only the size of potential pathogens, but also their shape and orientation. In addition, they are testing the device on hemorrhagic fever diseases including Ebola and Marburg.

Their work is partially funded by Army Research Laboratories, the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center and the MITRE Corporation.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews

Flight Lessons from Bats, Birds and Insects ENG Faculty, Alum Partner in $7.5M Grant to Develop ­Bio-Inspired Aerial Vehicles Aiming to build a process for translating biological capabilities for agile flight in a range of environments for engineered flight vehicles, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to a team of researchers from Boston University, the University of Washington, the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Operating under a $3.1 million subcontract, the BU team includes Professors John Baillieul (ME) and Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE) and Assistant Professor Calin Belta (ME) in the College of Engineering; and Thomas Kunz, professor of biology, and Margrit Betke, associate professor of computer science, in the College of Arts & Sciences. The project’s principal investigator, Kristi Morgansen, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, received her BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from BU in 1993 and 1994.

Combining expertise in birds, bats and insect flight as well as in sensor and control systems, the researchers will study the dynamics of winged creatures on a neurological level, in the laboratory and in free flight. By carefully examining how diverse airborne species sense their environment in forests, caves and other cluttered spaces and use that data to control their movement, they could help engineers design more agile unmanned aircraft for military, disaster recovery and other applications.

Entitled AIRFOILS (Animal Inspired Flight with Outer and Inner Loop Strategies), the project seeks to develop techniques to balance long-range goals, like reaching a final destination, with short-term navigation, such as avoiding obstacles or sustaining wind gusts.

“We will try to learn how these animals move from place to place and react to obsta-

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Images such as this high-resolution thermal one of bats in flight will be used to develop flight control algorithms approximating bat flight. (Image by Tom Kunz, BU professor of biology)

cles, and rethink flight control algorithms from the ground up,” says Belta. “Classical flight control algorithms emphasize stability and safety, but it may be advantageous to modify these algorithms so vehicles can react quickly to the environment.”

In one scenario, biologist Thomas Kunz will image bats flying through forests with high-speed, high-resolution, thermal cameras; computer scientist Margrit Betke will convert Kunz’s raw image data into a three-dimensional computer model of bat trajectories through a forest; and Baillieul, Belta and Paschalidis will use the computer-reconstructed bat trajectories to develop flight control algorithms that approximate the bat flight, and ultimately test them on real vehicles.

Recognizing that bats and other winged creatures often fly in formation,

the College of Engineering team’s work will leverage their previous research on multiple robot formation control and feedback control of mobile vehicles.

“We’ve worked with ground-based robots and operated them in formation,” says Baillieul. “The goal is to take what we know about controlling groups of mobile robots and apply it to aerial vehicles that must rapidly maneuver through clutter.”

A former student of Baillieul’s who became an expert in the control of aerial and underwater vehicles, Morgansen is expected to develop sensors to place on the flying vehicles that mimic the many simple sensors used by bats and other winged animals to gather critical information about their environment.

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

ECE Researchers Devise Improved Video Surveillance Method Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, video camera networks have proliferated in the U.S. and abroad, appearing everywhere from airports to border crossings to city streets.

Today, more than 30 million surveillance cameras produce nearly 4 billion hours of video footage each week, but the sheer volume of data exceeds the processing capacity of human analysts. Even where software is used to sift through the data for suspicious activity, the algorithms used are not always up to the task, especially in busy urban areas.

Recognizing these mounting challenges, two ECE researchers—Professor Janusz Konrad and Associate Professor Venkatesh Saligrama—and Pierre-Marc Jodoin, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, have devised a new automated method—much faster and more reliable than conventional techniques—to process video data and pinpoint potential security risks. They reported on their research in the lead article of the September 2010 issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

The article advanced a new statistical approach for detecting unusual objects or events, such as abandoned packages or illegal vehicle maneuvers, in the most highly cluttered urban environments. Rather than classify and track objects in a video stream, as most video surveillance software does, this approach breaks footage down to a sequence of snapshots, compares pixels in subsequent snapshots for subtle changes and uses statistical methods to identify and locate pixel-level changes that depart from normal activity within the monitored scene. Data collected on these anomalies can then be tracked via conventional software systems.

(1)

(3)

(2)

Novel video ­surveillance method identifies a streetcar as an ­anomaly within the clutter of traffic: (1) snapshot of the actual video; (2) snapshot indicating locations where there is motion; (3) long-term baseline activity; (4) outliers from baseline activity.

(4)

“Typical approaches entail tagging, identifying and tracking every single object, but in an urban setting with too many moving objects, you can’t track them all,” says Saligrama. “Instead of tagging and tracking objects, our idea is to collect pixel-level statistics and monitor variations over time.

Using cameras with embedded algorithms, we’ve shown that pixel-level anomaly detection can work.”

The method works by characterizing activity at each pixel within a video frame as either moving—represented by a “1”—or still—depicted by a “0.” Over time, a sequence of consecutive 1s in a set of adjacent pixels signifies a busy period; a sequence of 0s denotes an idle period. Conventional machine learning techniques can then be applied to this binary data to establish a baseline of typical events within a given space, and thus enable the software to flag those events that depart from the baseline.

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The method’s speed, accuracy and minimal computer memory requirements (algorithms that process the data can be deployed in surveillance cameras rather than run on centralized servers) have garnered favorable attention in industry circles. The research team published a paper on the method in the April 2010 edition of SPIE Professional that was cited as the issue’s top downloaded article, and potential industry partners have initiated conversations with the researchers about possible collaborations. Saligrama and his colleagues recently applied for a patent through Boston University.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, National GeospatialIntelligence Agency and Office of Naval Research, the research team next plans to refine its method by considering different time scales.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews

BU Poised to Impact Cancer Research Cross-campus collaboration nets $2 million NIH ­nanomedicine grant The National Cancer Instititute’s Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer has tapped a multidisciplinary research team, comprising members of the Charles River and Medical Campuses, to launch a training center to help grow the next generation of nanomedicine researchers in cancer. Funded by a five-year, $2 million grant, the new Boston University Center for Cross-Disciplinary Training in Nanotechnology for Cancer will engage several College of Engineering faculty members and students in leading-edge cancer research.

“We built the infrastructure to allow nanotechnology researchers to connect with physicians and medical researchers and apply their discoveries to critically important issues in human health.”

An offshoot of nanotechnology, nanomedicine is medical intervention at the molecular scale for treating disease or repairing damaged tissues. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, too small to be seen through a conventional laboratory microscope. Biological molecules and structures inside living cells typically operate at less than 100 nanometers. Harnessing nanoparticles to deliver drugs, heat, light or other substances to specific cells could dramatically alter the future of diagnoses, prognoses and treatments for a range of diseases.

Traditional chemotherapy, for example, is

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delivered through the vein and exposes the entire body to its potent effects.

“If you can deliver chemotherapy specifically to sites, you not only concentrate the chemotherapy at the site of the tumor, but decrease the side effects and off-target effects,” says Douglas Faller, a BU School of Medicine (BUSM) professor, director of the BU Cancer Center and one of the grant’s primary investigators. “We’re taking a very blunt instrument, systemic chemotherapy, and turning it into a targeted approach.”

The $2 million training center grant, distributed under the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health, will allow graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at BU to train in research labs focused on developing diagnostic and therapeutic tools for various types of cancer, from purification of microRNAs—molecules that play an important role in gene regulation—to the development of noninvasive imaging and detection of cancer cells.

A new cross-disciplinary course, Introduction to Nanomedicine, has also been developed and will be codirected by Katya Ravid, a BUSM professor of medicine and biochemistry and director of the Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research (Evans Center), and Mario Cabodi, a College of Engineering research assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

BU’s multidisciplinary research effort, known as the Nanomedicine Initiative, brings together the Charles River Campus Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology (CNN), the Cancer Center, the Evans Center and the BUSM

Nanodroplets for delivery of therapeutic agents—a research collaboration between Assistant Professor Tyrone Porter (ME, BME) and Professor David Seldin (MED). (Image by Aysegul Yonet)

Department of Medicine on the Medical Campus.

“We built the infrastructure and support to allow researchers who develop nanotechnology to connect with physicians and medical researchers and apply their discoveries to critically important issues in human health,” says CNN director Bennett Goldberg (Physics, ECE), one of the grant’s primary investigators. “The scientists on the Charles River Campus are thrilled and energized to see such rapid adoption of new ideas and techniques, and the BUSM faculty are excited by the opportunity to advance their areas of biomedical science and health care.”

Initial projects include developing a screening test for thyroid cancer, using ultrasound to release drugs from nanoparticles and studying tumor cell circulation and adhesion.

—Caleb Daniloff, BU Today

ENGNews

Top-Ranked ENG Algorithms Could Reveal New Cancer Drug Targets An interdisciplinary team of College of Engineering faculty members—Professor Sandor Vajda and Research Assistant Professor Dima Kozakov (both BME), Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE) and Associate Professor Pirooz Vakili (ME)—has developed a family of powerful optimization algorithms for predicting the structures of complexes that form when two cell proteins bond together, structures that sometimes generate erroneous cell-signaling pathways that can trigger cancer and other inflammatory diseases. Recognizing the promise of these computational methods to advance new approaches to combating these ill-

The researchers are attempting to design novel molecules that can block chronically hyperactive cell-signaling pathways found in human inflammatory diseases and cancers.

nesses, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) approved a $1.6 million, five-year grant that will enable the researchers to continue refining them.

A joint effort of Boston University’s Center for Information & Systems Engineering and Biomolecular Engineering Research Center, the project combines Paschalidis’s and Vakili’s expertise in optimization and systems theory with Vajda’s and Kozakov’s knowledge of biophysics and bioinformatics.

“Given the three-dimensional structure of two proteins, you’d like to predict with great accuracy the structure of the complex formed once these two proteins bind,” says Paschalidis, who compares the process to characterizing all the possible structures that pairs of Lego blocks can form out of an initial set of 1,000 blocks. “Based on laws of thermodynamics, we’ve developed optimization algorithms that have succeeded in doing just that.”

Applying those high-precision algorithms to a related effort, Vajda and Kozakov are also collaborating with BU Associate Professor Adrian Whitty, Professor John Porco, Professor Karen Allen and Research Assistant Professor Aaron Beeler (all Department of Chemistry); and Professor Gilmore (Department of Biology) to identify small molecules—potential drugs—that can disrupt protein-protein interactions (PPIs) that produce structures that may provoke illness.

Operating under a separate, fouryear, $1.6 million NIH-NIGMS grant, the BU team aims to develop synthetic molecules that inhibit PPI targets at sites identified by Vajda’s and Kozakov’s innovative computational approaches—without introducing any harmful side effects. In particular, the researchers are attempting to design novel molecules that can block chronically hyperactive cell-signaling pathways found in human inflammatory diseases and cancers.

Despite decades of effort by the pharmaceutical industry, it has proven extraordinarily difficult to develop oral drugs that inhibit PPIs, Vajda observes. “Current protein-based drugs can disrupt PPIs, but

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An interdisciplinary College of Engineering team has developed computational methods to predict the structures that form when two cellular proteins interact.

only on the surface of cells,” he says. “But 90 percent of PPIs occur within the cell, and these are the interactions that we’re working to disrupt.”

The ENG team’s optimization algorithms will ultimately be incorporated into Vajda’s and Kozakov’s protein-protein docking server ClusPro, a website to which any user can submit the three-dimensional coordinates of two proteins and receive a supercomputer-calculated prediction of the structure of the complex formed by those proteins. ClusPro has been used by over 3,000 research groups worldwide, and generated over 100 structures reported in scientific literature.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews

Leading-Edge DNA Sequencing Method Nets Major NIH Grant Low-cost, ultra-fast DNA sequencing would revolutionize health care and biomedical research, and spark major advances in drug development, preventative medicine and personalized medicine. By gaining access to the entire sequence of a patient’s genome, a physician could determine the probability of that patient developing a specific genetic disease.

In pursuit of that goal, a team of researchers from Boston University’s College of Engineering and the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester has obtained a nearly $4.2 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to refine its nanoscale, low-cost, ultra-fast DNA sequencing method. Developed in the past four years on an initial $2.2 million NIH grant and led by Professor Amit Meller (BME), the project is one of ten to receive funding from the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 2010 under its “Revolutionary Sequencing Technology Development—$1,000 Genome” program.

Since its founding in 2004, the $1,000 Genome program has produced innovations that have reduced the cost of genome sequencing from $10 million to $20,000, and cut the time needed to complete the process from three or four months to a week.

But reaching the $1,000 mark will require creative, unprecedented approaches.

Toward that end, Meller and his team have demonstrated the first use of solid-state nanopores—four-nanometerwide holes in silicon chips that read DNA strands as they pass through—to optically sequence the four nucleotides that encode each DNA molecule. Described in the May 12 online edition of Nano Letters, their novel, highly efficient, optically based method to detect single DNA molecules in nano-

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pores could significantly reduce the cost of DNA sequencing and the time required to sequence a complete human genome.

“We are the first to employ optical detection from individual nanopores, and this allows us to probe multiple pores simultaneously using a single high-speed CCD camera,” says Meller, referring to the charge-coupled devices that science and medical researchers use to obtain high-quality images. “As a result, our method can be scaled up vastly, ultimately allowing us to probe thousands of nanopores and obtain unprecedented DNA sequencing throughput.”

Combining optical detection capability with the ability to analyze extremely long DNA molecules with superior sensitivity (which Meller’s group demonstrated in an earlier Nature Nanotechnology paper), the team’s solid-state nanopores are uniquely positioned to compete with current, thirdgeneration DNA sequencing methods for cost, speed and accuracy. Unlike those approaches, the new nanopore method does not rely on enzymes whose activity

limits the rate at which DNA sequences can be read; instead, readout speed is restricted only by current optical detection limits.

“This puts us in the unique advantageous position of being able to claim that our sequencing method is as fast as the rapidly evolving CCD/CMOS technologies,” Meller says. “We currently have the capability of reading out about 100 bases per second, which is already much faster than other commercial third-generation methods.

This is only the starting point for us, and we expect to significantly increase this rate in the next year.”

Licensing intellectual property from BU and Harvard University, Meller and his collaborators founded NobleGen Biosciences in February 2010 to develop and commercialize nanopore sequencing based on the new method.

—Mark Dwortzan BME Professor Amit Meller is advancing an ultra-fast, low-cost DNA sequencing method that uses electrically based nanoscale sensors with optical readout.

ENGNews

Novel Biosensor Could Enable Rapid, Point-of-Care Virus Detection From bird flu to H1N1, outbreaks of fastspreading viral diseases in recent years have sparked concern of pandemics similar to the 1918 Spanish flu that caused more than 50 million deaths. A significant fraction of today’s viral threats are viruses that use RNA to replicate and often produce symptoms that are not virus-specific, making them difficult to diagnose. Among them are hemorrhagic fever viruses, such as Ebola and Marburg, which could be used as biowarfare agents. Developing rapid, sensitive diagnostic techniques that health care providers can quickly deploy at multiple sites is critical to identifying and containing future epidemics of RNA-based viruses.

Traditional virus diagnostic tools such as ELISA and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) remain strong options, but they require significant infrastructure and sample preparation time. Now a team of researchers led by Boston University Assistant Professors Hatice Altug (ECE) and John Connor (Microbiology, BUSM) has introduced a novel biosensor that directly detects live viruses from biological media with little to no sample preparation.

Partly funded through the BU Photonics Center and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and working in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the team has demonstrated reliable detection of hemorrhagic fever virus surrogates (e.g., for the Ebola virus) and poxviruses (such as monkeypox or smallpox) in ordinary biological laboratory settings. The researchers reported on this breakthrough in the November 5 online edition of Nano Letters.

“Our platform can be easily adapted for point-of-care diagnostics to detect a

Detection of PT-Ebola shown in spectral measurements (left); schematic description of the plasmonic nanohole array sensor defined on a gold film (right). Sensor is functionalized with antibodies (green features) to specifically immobilize target viruses (blue particles).

broad range of viral pathogens in resourcelimited clinical settings at the far corners of the world, in defense and homeland security applications as well as in civilian settings such as airports,” says Altug. “By enabling ultra-portable and fast detection, our technology can directly impact the course of our reaction against bioterrorism threats and dramatically improve our capability to confine viral outbreaks.”

Connor notes an additional, significant advantage of the new technology: “It will be relatively easy to develop a diagnostic device that simultaneously tests for several different viruses. This could be extremely helpful in providing the proper diagnosis.”

The new biosensor is the first to detect intact viruses by exploiting plasmonic nanohole arrays (PNAs), or arrays of apertures with diameters of about 250 to 350 nanometers on metallic films, that transmit light more strongly at certain wavelengths.

When a live virus in a sample solution—such

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as blood or serum—binds to the sensor surface, the effective refractive index in the close vicinity of the sensor changes, causing a detectable shift in the resonance frequency of the light transmitted through the nanoholes. The magnitude of that shift reveals the presence and the concentration of the virus in the solution.

“Unlike PCR and ELISA approaches, our method does not require enzymatic amplification of a signal or fluorescent tagging of a product, so samples can be read immediately following pathogen binding,” Altug says. Ahmet Yanik, Altug’s research associate who conducted the experiments, adds, “Our platform can detect not only the presence of the intact viruses in the analyzed samples, but also indicate the intensity of the infection process.”

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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Toward a Faster, Better, Smaller Chip New Research Aims to Reduce Defects in Shrinking Integrated Circuit Elements

Is there a limit to how much data you can fit in your iPod? The answer may lie at the nanoscale. Over the past decade, as PCs and other consumer electronic devices have packed more and more information into faster, higher-density chips, the feature size used in semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) fabrication has shrunk from 180 to 45 nanometers—and the industry now has its sights on reducing that figure to 11 nanometers. These tiny feature sizes are making ICs impossible to inspect and analyze with conventional optical imaging methods, challenging researchers and worrying manufacturers who aim to deliver chips free of processing faults and circuit defects.

To tackle this problem, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) awarded two grants totaling $5.3 million to an interdisciplinary research team from Boston University—Professor Bennett Goldberg (Physics, ECE), Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE), Associate Professor Jerome Mertz (BME) and Professor Thomas Bifano (ME)—along with an industrial partner, DCG Systems, Inc. of California, the leading IC diagnostics company. The team plans to spend the next four years applying novel imaging approaches to pinpoint and resolve defects on next generation ICs. The effort will build on a state-ofthe-art subsurface microscopy technique developed since 2000 by Ünlü, Goldberg and their students which uses a spherical microlens to boost the optical resolution of images taken of the transistors at the heart of integrated circuits. With laboratory data demonstrating imaging of a 45-nanometer circuit node, the researchers are now working on further improvements to accommodate the semiconductor industry’s quest for smaller and smaller feature sizes.

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Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE) (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky)

Their goal is to enable IC imaging and fault isolation in 22-nanometer (nm) technologies and in 11-nm technologies, improve imaging resolution by a factor of more than three (from 250 nm to 80 nm) and apply the technology to a state-of-the-art failure analysis lab tool developed by DCG Systems.

“Each step in the development of new IC chips requires new analysis tools, and potential delays due to unexpected faults can be very costly, with minutes measured in thousands of dollars,” says Ünlü.

“Progress in this area will lead not only to more cost-effective chip development, but also to better, faster and more efficient automotive, medical and other potentially lifesaving devices that depend on reliable integrated circuits.”

To inspect and analyze an integrated circuit, engineers focus laser light to a point comparable to the smallest feature size and measure the reflected signal or monitor the electrical response. In some cases they also collect time bursts of light from the transistor as it switches from “on” to “off.” Since top inspection is prevented by the dense metal-

lic multilayer structure, backside imaging through the silicon substrate is necessary. Ünlü and Goldberg’s unique microlens technology enables imaging at a much higher resolution than conventional microscopy methods provide.

To advance backside optical imaging to the 11-nm node, the team will utilize micromirrors built by Bifano, and beam and polarization shaping techniques pioneered

by Mertz to achieve the tiniest focal spot, and test these advances using a laser voltage imaging system. By focusing a laser beam on a tiny transistor and monitoring the resulting free carrier changes due to transistor switching, this system interrogates the local functionality of the circuits at the transistor level. To conduct these tests, the BU team will work with DCG Systems.

“This is an exciting opportunity to go beyond the traditional limits, utilizing new methods with Bifano and Mertz that we hope will provide imaging resolution to enable diagnostics and analysis of 11-nm circuit features,” Goldberg says.

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

NSF Greenlights Sustainable Building Project

Smart Neighborhood team members reached out to visitors both to learn what they would want in a Smart Neighborhood and to inform them about the initiative on Dartmouth Street in Boston’s Copley Plaza on Sept. 15— Carbon Day. A sustainable living fair founded in 1990, Carbon Day was sponsored by the Boston University Center for Energy & Environmental Studies (CEES) and Clean Energy & Environmental Sustainability Initiative (CEESI) jointly with the Electric Vehicle Urban Infrastructure Study. (Image courtesy of BU Smart Neighborhood)

Past efforts to design more sustainable buildings have largely focused on finding ways to reduce their energy consumption in isolation. Now a new, four-year project drawing on engineering and architecture faculty at Boston University and MIT, respectively, promises to deliver substantial carbon footprint and energy cost reductions not only to individual buildings, but also to other buildings and electricity consumers in their neighborhood and beyond.

Funded by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the project’s collaborators—Professors Michael Caramanis (ME) and John Baillieul (ME) from Boston University’s College of Engineering, and Professor Leslie K. Norford and Associate Professor John E. Fernandez from the Building Technology Program in MIT’s Department of Architecture—plan to develop a new method to retrofit existing buildings and design new ones that minimize internal energy consumption and costs, and transact mutually beneficial electric energy exchanges with electric utilities.

The research team envisions equipping individual buildings with the capability to integrate production and consumption of electric energy via a smart micro-grid capable of monitoring and controlling smart appliances; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and other grid-friendly devices; and onsite electricity generation from rooftop photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. Each building would also be configured to exchange electric energy with external energy markets, enabling it not only to draw on external power sources but also to sell some of its own power to the grid—and neighboring electricity consumers on the grid—at low cost.

For example, when clean energy generated from rooftop photovoltaic panels exceeds the building consumption rate, the excess will replace fossil fuel-generated electricity consumed by others on the utility side of the meter.

“Our framework will enable advanced sustainable buildings to interact with nextgeneration electricity markets, including

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synergistic interactions between the built environment, transportation and urban infrastructures that expand the use of wind, solar and other intermittent, renewable energy sources,” says Caramanis. “We consider this adaptive interaction capability the major contribution of our research toward a sustainable energy future.”

Toward that end, the research team aims to create a two-layer technology platform that will enable a building to continuously optimize its energy consumption under dynamically changing internal, building-side-of-the-meter conditions—including building capabilities, safety requirements and occupant power-use preferences—and external, utility-side-of-the-meter factors, such as weather and energy market trends, requirements and costs.

Caramanis envisions that findings from this effort will enhance a parallel project, Smart Neighborhood, which he’s working on with BU colleagues in the College of Engineering, College of Arts & Sciences and Graduate School of Management. Smart Neighborhood seeks to create sustainable neighborhoods by engaging consumers, utilities, and government and private sector interests to determine the optimal use of energy, transportation, food, water and green space.

In collaboration with strategic private sector partners such as NSTAR, IBM and Schott Solar, the Smart Neighborhood research team is working to engage Boston’s Back Bay community to become early adopters of smart grid technology designed to electronically monitor, analyze and minimize power consumption in residential and commercial buildings, and to embrace onsite solar and other clean generation systems as well.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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Mechanical Engineers Fashion Implantable Silk Biosensors

Featured on the inside front cover of the August 24 edition of Advanced Materials, this image shows a metamaterial structure patterned directly onto a 2 cm × 2 cm freestanding silk film placed on a bed of natural silk threads.

Photonics engineers use light to excite the bonds that connect atoms within molecules, causing them to vibrate at a specific resonant frequency. Using spectroscopy techniques to examine what light frequencies are absorbed by a material, they can determine what kind of bonds it contains, and thus identify the material. In recent years engineers have designed artificially structured materials—or metamaterials— that produce strong resonance frequency responses in the terahertz (1012 Hz) range— distinct responses that can “fingerprint” many biological and chemical agents.

Now a research team from Boston University and Tufts University has found a novel way to turn these electromagnetic metamaterials into implantable sensors and

detectors made of tough but biodegradable silk. Incurring no harm on the human body and optically transparent, such devices may ultimately be used to identify toxins in the bloodstream or monitor drug delivery rates or tumor growth in real time.

Drawing on the expertise of Professors Xin Zhang (ME), Richard D. Averitt (Physics) and Fiorenzo G. Omenetto (Tufts Department of Biomedical Engineering), and Zhang’s former graduate student Hu “Tiger” Tao (ME, PhD’10), the team has devised a new, simple method to spray electromagnetic metamaterials onto silk substrates, thus enabling them to be implanted in the body. The researchers described their achievement in the August 24 edition of Advanced Materials.

—Mark Dwortzan

Future of Engineering Symposium Explores Personalized “Intelligent” Medicine On October 29 in the Photonics Center, Professor James Collins (BME), a leading expert in systems and synthetic biology, and George Savage (BME’81), a medical doctor and chief medical officer of the biotechnology firm Proteus Biomedical, addressed approximately 250 students, alumni and faculty at the College of Engineering’s third annual Future of Engineering Symposium. The event focused on the potential impact of engineering, technology, innovation and public policy on health care.

“In the 19th century, medicine was highly personalized but also ineffective,” Savage observed. “Now, we have swung to the other end of the spectrum, where medicine is highly effective but impersonal.”

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Savage discussed Proteus’s system of small, ingestible event markers that are implanted in a patient’s medications. An inexpensive, disposable monitor worn as a patch identifies each pill upon swallowing and tracks vital signs to detect and report adverse reactions.

Collins discussed emerging technologies ranging from targeted antibiotics to stem cell therapy as examples of the growing influence of synthetic and systems biology on personalized medicine.

“With these developments,” Collins said, “doctors will be able to filter information through a network of human illnesses to determine a patient’s disease state, specifically target that disease and predict exactly what treatments are needed.”

—Kathrin Havrilla

Keynote speakers Dr. George Savage (BME’81) (left) and Professor James Collins (BME) engage the audience in a discussion about personalized health care.

(Photo by Glen Kulbako)

ENGNews

First Ten Lutchen Fellows Share Research Highlights Nine of this year’s ten recipients of the Kenneth R. Lutchen Distinguished Fellowship Program (Chantal de Bakker, Amy Canham, Molly Keenan, Genevieve Plant, Joseph Greenspun, Craig LaBoda, Nicholas Luzod, Sean DeLeo and Samuel Hoffman) with Dean Lutchen. The tenth recipient, Benjamin Weinberg, was unavailable.

Last summer, ten College of Engineering juniors and seniors pursued innovative research projects supported by the new Kenneth R. Lutchen Distinguished Fellowships. Funded by annual donations of $100,000 from an anonymous alumnus of the College’s Biomedical Engineering program, the program supports up to ten upper-level undergraduate research projects each summer. At a luncheon held in October, nine of the first ten Lutchen Fellows shared highlights of their projects with Dean Lutchen.

“I always felt it was very important to give undergraduates substantive, hands-on experiences outside the classroom,” Lutchen said. “Classes are necessary, but we’re also pushing the concept of the Societal Engineer—that engineering is a great foundation for people to have a significant impact on society.”

A case in point is Amy Canham (EE’11), who spent part of last summer in Zambia investigating ways to collaborate with health professionals to design user-friendly medical technologies that address the particular needs of resource-limited countries. For four weeks, Canham worked closely with her advisor, Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME), and the Boston University Center for Global Health & Development, in an effort to improve public health in Zambia.

“I worked mostly with individuals designing training programs for using cell phones to transmit results from the lab where they are determined to the facility where they can be delivered to patients,” said Canham, noting that cell-phone-based transmission of a child’s blood sample data results to the facility can reduce the time it takes for health professionals to determine if that child is HIV-positive.

Samuel Hoffman (ME, EE’12) highlighted his efforts to optimize the design of a “polymorphic zoom” system that improves the optical performance of standard zoom lenses and could be used in unmanned aerial vehicles, security systems and microscopes.

The system uses two electrically actuated “deformable” mirrors developed by Hoffman’s advisor, Professor Thomas Bifano (ME), consisting of hundreds to thousands of optical surfaces controlled to nanoscale precision.

“In a conventional zoom, an optical lens is translated to achieve magnification or demagnification, typically using a motorized translational drive system,” Hoffman explained. “In a polymorphic zoom, the focal lengths of two deformable mirrors are dynamically adjusted by changing the mirrors’ shape. The result is a zoom system with unprecedented speed and inertial stability.”

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Chantal de Bakker (BME’12) summarized her contributions to the development of a noninvasive method that uses contrast agents to pinpoint cartilage formation in bone fractures that does not show up in CT scans.

“The ability to visualize cartilage could lead to the earlier identification of healing problems in complex fractures and also could be very useful in the analysis of fracture healing in animals used in biomedical research,” said de Bakker, who collaborated with her advisor, Professor Elise Morgan (ME) on the project.

The Lutchen Distinguished Fellowship Program was designed to attract and retain top applicants to the College of Engineering.

Each fellow must identify a research project and faculty mentor and maintain a minimum 3.0 grade point average. Entering freshmen who win a $10,000 fellowship can use it during the summer after their sophomore or junior year.

After hearing from last summer’s fellows, Lutchen described their reports as articulate and passionate: “You really got into the essence of what you were trying to do, and I hope it has an influence on where you’re going.”

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENG Students to Inspire the Next Generation of Technology Leaders

The first Technology Innovation Scholars meet with Dean Lutchen and Jonathan Rosen. (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky)

On a crisp mid-December morning, 16 College of Engineering undergraduates gathered around a conference table in the Ingalls Engineering Resource Center for their inaugural meeting as the College’s first Technology Innovation Scholars (TIS).

Selected from among 59 applicants, the students will visit elementary, middle and high schools in Greater Boston and in their home communities, where they’ll give presentations to excite students about engineering and its impact on the world.

Co-directed by College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen and Jonathan Rosen, special assistant to the Office of the Provost focused on promoting interdisciplinary entrepreneurial studies and senior research fellow for entrepreneurial studies at the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship & Commercialization at

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the Graduate School of Management, the TIS program awards a $1,200 stipend and travel expenses to ENG sophomores, juniors and seniors selected to serve as “engineering ambassadors.”

“We want to do outreach and amplify the K–12 public’s awareness of what engineering is and what role it plays in society,” said Dean Lutchen at the TIS kickoff meeting.

The TIS program is part of a broader commitment by the College of Engineering to graduate Societal Engineers—innovators and leaders motivated to leverage their engineering foundation to address challenges that can improve the quality of life and create economic value throughout society. A major step in this process is inspiring and mentoring the pipeline of technology leaders.

The idea for a Technology Innovation Scholar program originated two years ago, when Lutchen and Rosen created a presentation on how engineers play a crucial role in addressing society’s challenges and delivered it to about ten Boston-area high schools.

Lutchen also produced and delivered a ­separate presentation for fifth graders.

When their student audiences and teachers responded enthusiastically to these presentations, Lutchen sought a way to awaken many more young minds to the excitement of engineering.

Toward that end, Lutchen and Rosen asked the 16 TIS students to prepare and deliver their own inspirational sessions on engineering and its impact on society, using the high school and fifth grade presentations—and their own experience—as source material.

ENGNews

“We want you to help us design even better ways of doing this,” said Rosen, who suggested that students stage live demonstrations and problem-solving exercises. “My request is for you to think about what you remember from your early education that got you excited about engineering.”

In addition to serving as engineering ambassadors, groups of two to four Technology Innovation Scholars will partici-

pate as mentors for FIRST Robotics teams for a Boston-area high school. Either at the school or at BU, they will help the teams build robots that address a specified challenge in preparation for the FIRST Northeast Regional Competition hosted by BU at Agganis Arena in April. Some scholars will also form interdisciplinary student teams to solve challenging, socially relevant design problems and build working prototypes.

The winners are Samir Ahmed (EE), Erik Frazier (BME), Chris Sullivan-Trainor (ME), Maria Zenzola-Heimbach (ME), Yasmin Atefi (ME), Cassiday Blundell (BME), Alex Chan (EE), Ita Kane (ME), Oliver Kempf (AE), Charles Manning (MFG), Peter Rock (ME), Anna Evans (EE), Mary-Louise Fowler (BME), Pam Hyde (BME), Mark Moosburner (BME) and Michael Robichaud (ME).

—Mark Dwortzan

College Welcomes Gretchen Fougere as Assistant Dean for Outreach & Diversity College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen has appointed Dr. Gretchen Fougere as assistant dean for Outreach & Diversity. This newly created position consolidates all outreach efforts and serves as the focal point for planning, developing and implementing outreach and diversity programs throughout the College while advancing its strategic vision of educating Societal Engineers equipped to solve complex problems in health care, energy, security, communication and other high-impact domains.

“Gretchen joins us with a wealth of engineering and outreach experience,” says Lutchen.

As an engineer, Fougere has managed teams and developed products in aerospace, energy storage, nanotechnology and other high-technology industries. A graduate of the doctoral program in materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, she has served as a design and structural engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, a research assistant at Argonne National Laboratory, and engineering researcher and manager at Motorola and Duracell (Gillette).

As an educator, Fougere taught science and engineering in elementary and middle school classes as well as in afterschool programs for girls and underrepresented minorities. She also delivered science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programs at public schools and other forums. Most recently, Fougere served as a senior leader of the Engineering Is Elementary curriculum project at the Museum of Science, managing partnerships with participating educational organizations and providing training and resources to elementary school educators.

In her new position as assistant dean for Outreach & Diversity, Fougere will develop innovative approaches to kindergarten through 12th grade STEM outreach and tailor these programs to create opportunities for the College’s undergraduate students to fulfill their role as Societal Engineers. She will also pursue strategies to diversify the graduate student population.

“This opportunity is particularly meaningful to me because the College of Engineering strives to cultivate students who make a difference in the world with

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Gretchen Fougere (Photo by Cydney Scott)

their engineering degrees,” Fougere says.

“I plan to partner with faculty and students to create programs that demonstrate to the broader community the vital role that engineers play in society. If we can inspire more students to become excited about careers in STEM-related fields, we will help fill the pipeline for BU, other engineering schools and society at large.”

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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Student and Alumni News Bytes Alp Artar (PhD’13) received the Best Student Presentation Award in the Nanostructured Thin Films III category for his paper, “Light tunneling in multi-layered plasmonic crystals,” at the SPIE Optics + Photonics conference, held in August in San Diego, California.

The paper presents findings by Artar and Assistant Professor Hatice Altug (ECE) that could lead to smaller, faster and more sensitive biosensors.

Doctoral students Elif Cevik (ECE), Margo Monroe (BME) and Grace Wu (BME) received 2010 Applied Healthcare Engineering Fellowship Awards from the Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology (CIMIT). Covering tuition, stipend and some ancillary expenses for up to two years, CIMIT fellowships support highly innovative yet traditionally underfunded areas of health care research.

Description of Human Actions contest during the 2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition. Guo also wrote a paper based on his research with his advisors that won the Best Paper Prize at the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance in September.

Limor Eger (PhD’12) and Zachary Sun (PhD’13) were recently selected by the Department of Homeland Security to attend the Second UK–US Greenfield Aviation Security Workshop, held in December in High Wycombe, United Kingdom. Eger and Sun’s research on CT imaging may change the face of airport security by making it easier to detect explosives.

A paper on improving the efficiency and speed of wireless sensor networks published in 2006 by Rajesh Krishnan (MS’96, PhD’04) and Associate Professor David Starobinski (ECE) was honored by the Journal of Ad Hoc Networks as a “Top Cited Article 2005–2010.”

Based on Krishnan’s thesis, the paper examined how network nodes could be grouped to improve the network’s efficiency. Krishnan is now a program manager at Science and Technology Associates, Inc., in Virginia.

Kai Guo (PhD’11) and his advisors, Assistant Professor Prakash Ishwar and Professor Janusz Konrad (both ECE), developed a new action recognition algorithm that exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods and is suitable for real-time use. Edging out seven other teams with their algorithm, the trio won the “Aerial View Activity Classification Challenge” in the Semantic

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New CIMIT Fellowship recipients Margo Monroe (BME), Grace Wu (BME) and Elif Cevik (ECE).

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Lincoln Miara, a PhD student in the Division of Materials Science & Engineering, received the Dr. Bernard S. Baker Student Award for Fuel Cell Research, second prize, for his poster “A Model to Describe the Kinetics of Oxygen Reduction for Mixed Conducting Cathodes” at the 2010 Fuel Cell Seminar & Exposition held in October in San Antonio,

Texas. The purpose of the award is to encourage and recognize exceptional students in the field of fuel cell-related technologies.

Michele Moresco (PhD’11) won the Best Student Paper Award at the Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices 2010 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The paper reports on research by Moresco, Associate Professor Enrico Bellotti (ECE) and ECE Visiting Scholar Francesco Bertazzi on the use of semiconductor materials to achieve faster, more sensitive ultraviolet detectors, which are used in space, spectroscopy, defense and other applications.

Peter Moriarty (ME’11) won the 2010 Robert W. Young Award for Undergraduate Student Research in Acoustics for his proposal to do lab and field research on the phenomenon of apparent Faraday waves produced by the mating behavior and acoustic oscillations of the American alligator. Moriarty will receive his award at the 161st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Seattle, Washington, in May 2011.

—Mark Dwortzan Rachel Harrington contributed to this article.

FacultyNews ENG Faculty Net Prestigious IEEE Honors

Christos Cassandras

John Baillieul

W. Clem Karl

Last fall, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recognized five College of Engineering faculty members with prestigious awards and responsibilities.

Professor John Baillieul (ME) was selected for the IEEE Control Systems Society’s (CSS) 2011 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize, which recognizes distinguished contributions to control systems science or engineering. As part of the honor, Baillieul will deliver a plenary lecture focused on the interplay between information and control of things in the physical world at the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in December in Orlando, Florida.

An international scientific, engineering and professional organization founded in 1954, the CSS is dedicated to the advancement of research, development and practice in automation and control systems.

Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE), head of the Division of Systems Engineering, was named president-elect of the CSS and will become president in 2012. Professors David Castañón (ECE), ad interim chair of the ECE Department, and John Baillieul (ME) previously served in this position.

Professor W. Clem Karl (ECE) was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). Established in 1948 as IEEE’s first society, the SPS consists of signal processing scientists and professionals and is concerned with the generation, transformation and interpretation of information.

Two ECE faculty members received honors from the IEEE Photonics Society, which focuses on the research, development, design and manufacture of materials,

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devices and systems that are expanding the field of quantum electronics and its applications.

Professor Selim Ünlü was named the new Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics (JQE), effective January. Published monthly by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 1965, the JQE covers advances in quantum electronics, a domain of physics concerned with the effects of quantum mechanics on how electrons behave in matter and interact with photons.

Assistant Professor Hatice Altug was selected as the 2011 winner of the Photonics Society’s Young Investigator Award, which recognizes individuals who make outstanding technical contributions to the field of photonics prior to their 35th birthday. Altug will receive the award— which consists of a certificate of recognition and an honorarium of $1,000—at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics meeting in Baltimore in May. A Boston University faculty member since 2007, Altug was honored for her groundbreaking achievements in confining and manipulating light at the nanoscale to dramatically improve biosensing capabilities. Initiating several advances in nanophotonics, nanoplasmonics and integrated nanofluidics over the past six years, she has developed state-of-the-art technologies for real-time, label-free and high-throughput detection of very low quantities of biological molecules such as proteins and viruses.

—Mark Dwortzan Rachel Harrington contributed to this article.

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Collins Elected to National Academy of Engineering In recognition of his outstanding contributions to synthetic biology and engineered gene networks, Professor James J. Collins (BME) has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the most prestigious honors accorded to engineers.

“I was thrilled and honored to receive the news that I had been elected to the NAE,” says Collins, who joins more than 2,000 peerelected members and foreign associates— senior academic, government and industry professionals—who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers. Current Boston University members include BU President and chemical engineer Robert A. Brown and Research Professor Farouk El-Baz, who directs the BU Center for Remote Sensing.

“This is a historic moment for the College of Engineering,” says Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen. “When our PhD programs—and national research aspirations—began barely 20 years ago, we were fortunate to recruit a promising junior faculty member named Jim Collins. His work has played an important part in advancing us into the front rank of engineering schools in a very short period of time, so it is particularly gratifying that he is the first member of our primary faculty to be elected to this highly exclusive company of scholars. I join the faculty in extending hearty congratulations to Jim on this richly deserved honor.”

The NAE does not accept applications for membership; it elects new members from nominations submitted by existing members. Recognized for their outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, education and literature, and leading innovations in new and existing engineering fields, members provide leadership and

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expertise to projects, symposia and publications aimed at improving quality of life through engineering and technology.

A pioneer in both synthetic and systems biology, Collins is developing innovative ways to design and reprogram gene networks within bacteria and other organisms to attack tumors, direct stem cell development and perform other desired tasks that could bring about cheaper drugs, more effective treatments of antibiotic-resistant infections, and clean energy solutions. Also a trailblazer in efforts to improve function of physiological and biological systems, he has spearheaded several new medical devices such as vibrating insoles to improve balance in elderly people and a device to treat stroke-induced brain failure.

In addition to serving BU as William F. Warren Distinguished Professor, University Professor, and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics, Collins is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and founding core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. His many honors include a MacArthur “Genius Award,” a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize, the Metcalf Cup and Prize (BU’s highest teaching honor), and being named on the Scientific American list of top 50 outstanding leaders in science and technology. Collins serves on the scientific advisory board of several biotechnology companies.

Collins joined the BU faculty in 1990 after earning a bachelor of arts degree in physics from the College of the Holy Cross and a PhD in medical engineering from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

—Mark Dwortzan

Professor James J. Collins (BME)

Biomechanics Symposium Celebrates Evan Evans’s 70th Birthday

A daylong symposium was held on October 15 to celebrate Professor Evan Evans’s (BME) many achievements in biomechanics and their impact on the field—as well as his 70th birthday. Evans received a commemorative plaque from BME Department Chair Professor Sol Eisenberg. (Photo by MaryEllen Palmer)

FacultyNews

BME Professor Recognized for Education and Research Innovation Last fall, Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman’s (BME) creative approaches to engineering education and research were recognized by the College of Engineering, which named him as this year’s recipient of its annual Innovative Engineering Education Faculty (IEEF) Fellowship Award, and by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), which has invited him to attend three prestigious conferences since 2009.

Enhancing ENG Education Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen chose Zaman as this year’s IEEF Fellow for his achievements as an engineering educator and his capacity to further enhance engineering education at Boston University in a sustainable way.

“This award will allow me to develop new courses, incorporate innovation in existing courses and develop partnerships across various disciplines on campus and outside BU,” says Zaman, for whom engineering education is both a dedicated practice and avid research interest.

Zaman, who joined the BU faculty in 2009 and whose research includes the application of biomedical engineering to the developing world, is using the twoyear, $25,000-per-year fellowship to create a Laboratory for Engineering Education & Development (LEED) to prepare ENG students for challenges and opportunities in global health.

“Many of our students are very interested in solving problems at the interface of engineering, medicine and the developing world, and additional courses and other engagement opportunities would enable them to fully utilize their passion and interests,” he says. “The lab will focus on creating a new EK 130 course, incorporate global health tracks in senior design and use social

Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME) (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky)

networking websites to engage students in developing countries with BU students to solve real problems through innovative and interactive solutions.”

The LEED will also partner with Engineers Without Borders and BU’s Center for Global Health & Development to engage students in extracurricular opportunities in global health.

Exchanging Ideas across the Globe Zaman was also selected as one of 53 innovative early-career educators to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s second Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium. He joined young educators representing a variety of engineering disciplines at the December conference in Irvine, California.

Confronting a perceived shortfall of engineering leaders in the U.S. in the coming decades, the symposium sought to better equip some of the nation’s best engineering educators to transform engineering education at their universities. The ultimate goal

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was to develop innovative ways to engage students so that they will emerge with the knowledge and skills necessary to become effective engineers.

The NAE subsequently invited Zaman to attend the 2011 Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (JAFOE).

Scheduled for June 6–8 in Tsukuba, Japan, this conference will assemble about 60 outstanding engineers (ages 30–45) from Japanese and U.S. companies, universities and government labs to discuss leadingedge research and development activities in diverse engineering fields.

“I am incredibly excited to be selected for the bilateral Japan–U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium,” says Zaman, whose research is focused at the interface of cell biology, mechanics, systems biology and medicine. “This will be a unique opportunity to interact with leading scientists and engineers from both the U.S. and Japan in multiple areas of my research.”

Zaman was also selected to attend the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2009.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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Moustakas, Altug and Zaman Win Faculty Awards At the College of Engineering faculty meeting in December, Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Programs Selim Ünlü announced the recipient of the College’s Distinguished Scholar Award, Professor Theodore Moustakas (ECE), and the winners of the Early Career Research Excellence Award, Assistant Professors Hatice Altug (ECE) and Muhammad Zaman (BME).

Distinguished Scholar Award The annual Distinguished Scholar Award, formerly called the Distinguished Lecturer Award, honors a faculty member engaged in outstanding, high-impact research, and provides the recipient with a public forum to discuss and showcase research before the Boston University academic community.

Moustakas presented the lecture “Nitride Semiconductors and their Application to Solid State Lighting and Water/Air Purification” in March.

Moustakas studies the growth, fundamental material properties and fabrication of novel electronic and optoelectronic devices.

Specializing in the development of nitride semiconductors, he is currently working to create visible and ultraviolet LEDs and lasers for solid-state white lighting, water and air sterilization and identification of biological and chemical agents. He is also investigating indium gallium nitride “quantum dots” that boost solar cell efficiency.

A member of the ENG faculty for more than 20 years and a cornerstone of the Materials Science & Engineering Division, Ünlü said, Moustakas has had a broad impact on his field, through 25 patents, hundreds of invited talks and journal papers and 7,000 citations in research literature. Recently selected to receive the 2010 Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE)

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Theodore Moustakas (ECE) (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky)

Hatice Altug (ECE) (Photo by Vernon Doucette)

Innovator Award, he has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Electrochemical Society.

Federation of the Societies of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Young Investigator Award, the ENG Innovative Engineering Education Faculty Fellowship and invitations to three prestigious conferences of the National Academy of Engineering [see p. 31].

Zaman had previously won the highest teaching honor across the entire University of Texas system, the Regents Teaching Award, while serving on the faculty from 2006 to 2009.

Focused at the interface of cell biology, mechanics, systems biology and medicine, Zaman seeks to understand and decouple the integrated chemical, biological and mechanical basis of tumor invasion that precedes metastasis. In addition, his research focuses on the development of robust technologies and innovative solutions to improve the quality and practice of medicine in the developing world. He is currently a member of a technical committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

—Mark Dwortzan

Early Career Research Excellence Award The annual Early Career Research Excellence Award celebrates the significant, recent and high-impact research accomplishments of tenure-track faculty less than ten years removed from their PhD. Since joining the College of Engineering in January 2007, Altug has earned the National Science Foundation Career Award and “Young Investigator” awards from both the Office of Naval Research and IEEE Photonics Society.

Altug’s research is concerned with confining and manipulating light at the nanoscale to dramatically improve biosensing capabilities [see p. 29 for more details].

A member of the ENG faculty for little more than a year, Zaman has received the

FacultyNews

Faculty News Bytes Associate Professors Murat Alanyali and David Starobinski (ECE) received $714,501 from the National Science Foundation in support of their efforts to establish methods and algorithms that will ensure that secondary spectrum markets can be profitable for wireless telecommunications providers seeking more efficient use of the radio spectrum for phone calls, texting and other transactions.

Assistant Professor Sean Andersson (ME) was awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant by the National Institutes of Health to fund the development of a novel method for studying the dynamics of single molecules moving on biopolymers. A new control approach centered on the concept of particle tracking with a scanning force microscope, the method takes advantage of the high spatial resolution of scanning force microscopy and the high temporal resolution inherent in the high resonant frequencies of cantilevers.

Assistant Professor Lorena Barba (ME) received a $100,600 grant from the National Science Foundation to organize a Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute educational conference entitled “Scientific Computing in the Americas: The Challenge of Massive Parallelism.” The funding enabled 12 distinguished lecturers from across the globe and 30 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from the Americas to attend the gathering, held January 3–14 in Valparaiso, Chile. Attendees received stateof-the-art training in the use of modern, high-performance computing (HPC) hardware to advance scientific discovery.

Professor Soumendra Basu, Associate Professor Srikanth Gopalan and Professor Uday Pal (ME) received the Boston University Technology Development Fall 2010 Ignition Award for their project, “Large Scale Rapid

Assistant Professor Sean Andersson (ME) was awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant by the National Institutes of Health to fund the development of a novel method for studying the dynamics of single molecules moving on biopolymers. (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky)

Response Energy Storage and Electrical Energy Generation System.” The Ignition Award Program grants funds to Boston University faculty to bridge the gap between government-funded, discovery-oriented research and the follow-on development work performed by external commercial or nonprofit entities.

Professor Mark W. Grinstaff (BME) won the inaugural Innovator-of-the-Year Award from Technology Development, which recognizes a faculty member who translates research into innovations that benefit humankind. Grinstaff has cofounded three companies now commercializing his research ideas: Hyperbranch Medical Technology, Flex Biomedical and Acuity Bio, which is commercializing a new drug delivery device for the prevention of tumor recurrence after surgical resection.

ExxonMobil provided Associate Professor Siddarth Ramachandran (ECE) with a “knowledge build grant” to help

S P R I N G 2 011 M A G A Z I N E

develop optical fiber sensors for harsh environmental sensing. The fiber sensors could be used to enhance the efficiency and safety of oil and gas exploration and production, and the funding will give Ramachandran the opportunity to test the technology in a realworld context.

Assistant Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang received a $1.15 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop and validate a biomechanical model of the vascular extracellular matrix, specialized proteins that provide structural support to blood vessels and the development of cells. Coupling molecularlevel structural protein mechanics to tissuelevel behavior, this multiscale model could enable researchers and clinicians to probe basic mechanisms behind cardiovascular and other diseases and ultimately design new therapies.

—Mark Dwortzan Rachel Harrington contributed to this article.

www.bu.edu/eng

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AlumniEvents Distinguished Alumni Awards Honor Outstanding ENG Grads At a ceremony held during Alumni Weekend in October, the College of Engineering announced its 2010 Distinguished Alumni Awards, which honor individuals who have made significant contributions to their profession, community and alma mater.

“Past honorees have represented the broadest array of talent, achievement and dedication across a wide spectrum of professional positions and voluntary endeavors,” said Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen. “Whether they stay in engineering or move on to management or other careers, our alumni have an important impact on the world.”

Jacob Miller (ENG’08), a manufacturing engineer at Weil-McLain, received the inaugural Distinguished Young Alumni Award, which honors outstanding alumni within ten years of graduation. In his previous position at the SPX Corporation, Miller was the only one in his rotational class in a two-year manufacturing program to reach

the level of Six Sigma Black Belt certification from the American Society for Quality. While working full time and earning a master’s degree in quality systems management, Miller also participated as a mentor in the ENG Young Alumni Mentoring Program.

Gregg Adkin (ENG’86), senior director of business development at EMC Inc., received the Service to Alma Mater Award, which honors alumni who have enhanced the College of Engineering’s stature through voluntary activities. A longtime supporter of the College, Adkin has served on the Dean’s Engineering Leadership Advisory Board, a group of senior executives from industry and academia who advise the College on future directions, challenges and opportunities.

Nassib Chamoun (ENG’86) received the Service to the Community Award, which honors alumni who have made exceptional contributions to the betterment of their community. Chamoun founded and is

president/CEO of Aspect Medical Systems, and invented technology that measures the effects of anesthetics and sedatives on the brain. The technology allows medical professionals to reliably assess patients’ level of consciousness and customize the precise amount of drug they require, resulting in better overall patient care and surgical outcomes.

The Service to the Profession Award honors alumni whose work has significantly contributed to the advancement of their profession and brought them recognition within their field. Two of this year’s recipients were the founders of Prysm, Inc.—President and CEO Amit Jain (ENG’85, ’88) and CTO Roger Hajjar (ENG’88). The company created laser phosphor displays for large format display applications, an innovative design that offers the industry’s lowest power consumption and environmental impact and delivers long-lasting performance and brilliant picture quality.

Photos by Glen Kulbako

Jacob Miller (ENG’08) Gregg Adkin (ENG’86) with Dean Lutchen Nassib Chamoun (ENG’86) James McCoy (ENG’85, SMG’05)

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AlumniEvents Also honored with the Service to the Profession Award was James McCoy (ENG’85, SMG’05), vice president/CIO of Integrated Defense Systems at Raytheon. A staff member of Raytheon since 1985, McCoy helps provide global capabilities integration to a broad range of international and U.S. agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Armed Forces and the Missile Defense Agency. He also participates in Raytheon’s MathMovesU and Mentor-Protégé outreach programs.

Roger Dorf (ENG’70), former vice president/general manager of the Wireless Group at Cisco Systems and member of the Dean’s Advisory Board, was also recognized at the ceremony. At the Boston University Alumni Awards luncheon the following weekend, Dorf was one of four alumni to receive a Boston University Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest award BU bestows on its graduates. He is the third ENG graduate to earn the honor.

—Kathrin Havrilla

Industry Nights Co-sponsored by the ENG Career Development Office and BME, ECE and ME departments, Fall 2010 Industry Nights provided opportunities for juniors and seniors to network with professional alums.

Peter M. Cirak (ENG’01, MS’07) (left) and students at ME Industry Night.

Thumbs Up for BU

Roger Dorf (ENG’70)

Roger Hajjar (ENG’88) and Amit Jain (ENG’85, ’88)

Derek Russell (ENG’88) and sons with Rhett the Terrier at the BU-BC hockey game tailgate party.

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www.bu.edu/eng

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ClassNotes 1981

Andrew Isaacs, BS Bedminster, New Jersey Andrew was named chief strategy officer at Phoenix Marketing Solutions, a privately held medical communications and integration company in Warren, N.J. He received the BU College of Engineering Distinguished Service to the Community Award in 1999 and has 25 years of medical device, pharmaceutical, consulting product development and commercial leadership experience.

2000

what are you doing?

2001

1984

Marc Kaufman, BS Chevy Chase, Maryland Marc has joined the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Reed Smith. He writes that he “still gets to a few hockey games every year!” Email him at mskaufman@ reedsmith.com.

We want to hear from you! Send your class notes submissions to engalum@bu.edu or visit www.bu.edu/alumni/eng.

1985

Eric Berger, BS Ipswich, Massachusetts Eric received Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity’s Distinguished Service Award for his involvement in the development and implementation of its True Brother Initiative, a program that provides fraternity members a format and structure to live values-based lives.

Patrick Loughlin, BS Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pat was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, effective Jan. 1, 2011. He lives with his wife and three sons in Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Pat marvels at the many impressive changes to BU and Kenmore Square over the years but is also happy to see some old haunts remain pretty much the same (like the Dugout!). Pat sends a shout-out to old friends at the Towers and 166–168 BSR.

1987

Rod H. Altschul (aka Maxwell), BS Beverly Hills, California Rod made an iPhone app “The Wishing Well Game” and an iPad app, “The Wishing Well Popup Movie and Game,” the latter of which MSN selected as “Hot App of the Week!” in its Thanksgiving “Surf Report.” The iPad app consists of “The Wishing Well” film, a popup book and a game based on the film in which players toss coins into a magical well and try to avoid evil mechanical turtles.

“My training at BU made me feel comfortable learning new technology, allowing me to stay on the cutting edge,” writes the award-winning filmmaker and special effects artist. “I’m forever grateful!”

1989

Thomas Kelly, BS Houston, Texas Thomas was promoted to Partner at Accenture, a global management consulting firm. He is the North American lead for the Manufacturing and P & IP service lines for the Energy Operating Group, and specializes in global manufacturing strategy, operational restructuring and performance improvements within the hydrocarbon and oil-field service industries.

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Loretta (Hawkes) McHugh, BS Thompson, Connecticut Loretta and Evan McHugh are pleased to announce the birth of their son, James Patrick Ronald McHugh, on September 11, 2010. “Big sister Maggie couldn’t be more excited for her brother to be here,” Loretta writes. “Keep an eye out for the McHugh family at BU hockey games!

Email Loretta at loretta.hawkes.2000@alum.bu.edu.

1993

Paul W. Gross, MS, PhD’98 New York, New York Paul and Tanya Gross are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Anneliese Mei, on December 3, 2010. “We named her Anneliese Mei in keeping with her German and Taiwanese components, and she has been a very easy baby and a blessing to our family,” Paul writes. “Big siblings Cecily and Matthias are adjusting as well as could be expected to the reality of having a new little sister.”

1995

John Kaufhold, BS, MS’01 Arlington, Virginia John Kaufhold and Liz Appel (CAS’94) were married in August. Among those attending the wedding were James Appel (LAW’69), Rebecca Bates (ENG’90), Natalia Levina (CAS’94), Nicole Goldstein Rivas (CAS’95), Michele Arbeeny Lotito (CAS’94), Aaron Lewis (SMG’95), Lisa Maney Lewis (SMG’95), Teresa Lopez VanDever (CAS’95), Isaac Peachin (ENG’95), Joseph Greenstein (ENG’95), Vadim Spektor (ENG’95, MED’00), Leah Dunton Greenstein (ENG’96), Timothy Todd (Tater) Read (ENG’00), Robert Weisenseel (ENG’04), Bob Dizon (ENG’01), Kristen Richardson (ENG’01) and Chuck Dorval (ENG’04). Liz is a regulatory counsel for the assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior, and John is a technical fellow and image scientist at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Washington, D.C.

George Papadopoulos, BS Franklin, Massachusetts George and Ashley (Ellis) Papadopoulos (CGS’99, SED’01) announce the birth of their first child, Theodore William, on March 13, 2010.

2004

Al Conti, BS East Greenwich, Rhode Island Al organized a 10-year reunion for his Sleeper Hall floormates last September. Attending the reunion were Eda Atasoy (COM’04), Rowan Benjamin (SMG’04), Jackie Baker Linnell (CAS’04), Bill Griffin (ENG’04), Deena Kelly (CAS’04), Jon Manierre (ENG’04), Michael Mephan (ENG’04), Liz Peterson (CGS’02, CAS’04), Brad Phylis (ENG’04), Adam Pisco (ENG’04), Nina Quinn (CAS’04), Chris Taclas (ENG’04), Lisa Trifiletti (CAS’04), Melissa Wrba (CAS’04) and their residence assistant Steve Comeau (ENG’01, ’07). Al and Mike had T-shirts printed with Steve’s face on the front and “Sleeper 11” on the back.

Weekend activities included canoeing, catching up and an Allston pub crawl. Some came from as far as Hawaii and Seattle for the reunion.

Haidong Pan, PhD Beijing, China Haidong was honored as a 2011 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum; he is one of 11 YGL honorees from the People’s Republic of China. Haidong is CEO and co-founder of Hoodong Online (Beijing) Technology Co. Ltd., which operates hoodong.com, the world’s largest free Chinese wiki website. He received the ENG Distinguished Alumni Award for Service to Alma Mater in 2008 and serves as vice president of the Boston University Alumni Association of China.

Passings Alvin Manuel Polsky (’58) Bedford, Texas Richard P. Ferri (’62) Southborough, Massachusetts Henry J. Klim (’78) Brighton, Massachusetts

The Engineering Annual Fund Impacting the Lives of Students Every Day Photo by Frank Curran

Relying on donations from generous alumni like you, the Engineering Annual Fund enormously impacts the educational experience of ENG undergraduates by supporting essential programs and activities that extend beyond what tuition and external research funding can provide.

“With Engineering Annual Fund support, the BU ASME strives to think outside the box by participating in a variety of design competitions and professional events. Ten of our members recently attended the ASME’s Student Leadership Seminar, and as a result of our strong input, BU has been invited to host the seminar next year.”

Gifts of any size immediately benefit the Summer Term Alumni Research Scholars (STARS) Program; the Supplemental Undergraduate Research Funds (SURF) Program; student organizations such as BU’s chapters of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), Engineers Without Borders and Society of Women Engineers; and many other initiatives.

“BMES has directly benefited from contributions made to the Engineering Annual Fund, helping us support not only academic events such as our lecture series, but also fun and social events such as the annual student/faculty basketball game.”

Photo courtesy of ASME

—Neha Dave (ME’11)

—Kristen Lee (BME’11)

Photo courtesy of Engineers Without Borders

“Through the SURF program, I have gained a great deal of research and analysis experience investigating temperature and solar flux data in the upper atmosphere that I otherwise would not have had the chance to pursue.”

—Chet VanGaasbeek (ECE’11) Photo courtesy of BMES Photo by Vernon Doucette

You can help shape future alumni into well-rounded Societal Engineers who have a lasting impact on the world by donating to the Engineering Annual Fund today.

Visit www.bu.edu/eng/alumni to make your gift and to join the ENG Alumni Facebook Group.

Stay Connected to the College of Engineering Join the ENG online community!

Post, tag, tweet, ask questions, reconnect with alumni and watch engineering videos. Stay up-to-date on the most recent happenings, including networking opportunities, job fairs, seminars and other employment events.

www.facebook.com/BUCollegeofENG www.twitter.com/BUCollegeofENG www.youtube.com/BUCollegeofENG

NONPROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID BOSTON MA PERMIT NO. 1839

Edward Damiano PhD (Applied Mechanics), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

People with type 1 diabetes have long awaited an automated “closed-loop” system to help them maintain safe blood sugar levels while sharply reducing the time and energy they devote to their own care. To that end, we’re developing the first fully automated system for regulating blood glucose levels in people with diabetes. Now in clinical trials, our system uses decision-making software to pump insulin and glucagon (a blood sugar-raising hormone) beneath the skin based on blood glucose readings every five minutes.

The College of Engineering has supported this project every step of the way along the path from bench to bedside. The Biomedical Engineering Department’s alliance with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Partnership Program was critical in getting us seed funding to pursue preclinical work at the Boston University Medical Center, and BU’s Technology Development bolstered our efforts to patent the technology and establish partnerships with industry. Thanks to the interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial culture and expertise at the College of Engineering, our research is thriving.

www.bu.edu/eng.

To learn more, visit www.bu.edu /eng.

Photo by Melody Ko