ENGineer | Spring 2019

SPRING 2019

Boston University College of Engineering

INS I DE WATCH MAN ENGINEERING FOR MIDDLE SCHOOLERS

INSIDE THE MIND (AND HEART) OF THE SOCIETAL ENGINEER A BIG IDEA TURNS 10

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CONTENTS • SPRING 2019

Creating the Societal Citizen . . . or Else?

FEATURES

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BY DEAN KENNETH R. LUTCHEN

THE SOCIETAL ENGINEER

Taking His Time

A BIG IDEA TURNS 10

Alum Makes Analog Watches in a Digital World

22 Plot Twist

Solving an Alum’s Career Path

DEPARTMENTS 3

inENG

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Faculty News

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Alumni News

HIGHLIGHTS

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Breast Cancer Beacon

27 PHOTOGRAPH BY CONOR DOHERTY

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en years ago, when we established the theme of “Creating the Societal Engineer,” we aimed to prepare the next generation of students by complementing the skills of the engineer with other attributes that enable individuals to embrace lifelong learning and impact society regardless of where their careers might lead. The concept quickly caught on and is now imbued in the student experience and our graduates.

Our students are embracing a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving. They recognize that engineers bring essential skills to the table, but also need to work with professionals from a wide array of disciplines, backgrounds and cultures to implement solutions to society’s challenges. This has been immensely gratifying and you can read about some examples in this issue’s cover story.

As we embark on the second decade— and as I see the emergence of substantial threats to our future—we should consider expanding this idea to students in non-STEM fields. We need higher education in general to commit to Creating the Societal Citizen.

So many universities proudly emphasize their dedication to offering a liberal arts degree to their non-STEM students. This begs the question as to how many universities

The world needs to continue, of course, to create people who pursue liberal arts education. Our ability to create and appreciate the humanities—art, music, theater, philosophy, sociology and other fields— makes humans unique, as does our ability to use the scientific method to derive a data-driven understanding of nature and how technology impacts our lives and planet. We cannot stay comfortable producing large segments of the population with only cursory exposure to math and science.

Nothing short of the Earth itself may be at stake. Nor should we create engineers who do not appreciate the essential role humanities play in ensuring a fulfilling life.

Higher education can commit to Creating the Societal Citizen who can pursue any liberal arts or STEM major, but who also internalizes enough understanding of the scientific method so as to objectively assess issues that threaten our existence or quality of life. The Societal Citizen does not need to have the technical expertise of an engineer or the deep domain knowledge of a scientist.

Similarly, the STEM major need not be an expert in the liberal arts. Rather, the Societal Citizen is trained to see the big picture and understand how numerous disciplines, quantitative information and the scientific method all play roles in leading a fulfilling life and solving society’s multifaceted challenges.

The Societal Citizen should emerge from all possible disciplines taught at our institutions of higher learning.

After 10 years of exposing our students to disciplines outside of engineering, we think we got the concept of Creating the Societal Engineer right. In the coming decade we need to take the next step and make sure liberal arts students are prepared to be Societal Citizens.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KALMAN ZABARSKY

At Boston University, the College of Engineering, and in many colleges and universities nationally, there is an understanding of the enormous impact data science is playing in virtually every field of human endeavor.

require non-STEM majors to take more than a cursory math and science course. I question whether there are many programs that provide all students with adequate exposure to the scientific method and a baseline appreciation for quantitative analysis.

The potential consequences of having no such exposure have become starkly evident in recent years. For example, I wonder if people who have not been exposed to the scientific method are considerably more likely to claim climate change is a hoax or that childhood vaccinations are dangerous.

They do this despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. Why? Perhaps they want to believe this and/or there are politicians and those with cynical business self-interests (who also rarely have STEM backgrounds) who push this narrative. I suspect that an individual who does not understand the scientific method or quantitative analysis can more easily dismiss compelling data in favor of personal opinion.

At Boston University, the College of Engineering, and in many colleges and universities nationally, there is an understanding of the enormous impact data science is playing in virtually every field of human endeavor.

In our college, we now require all engineering students to take a data science course that includes exposure to machine learning.

Looking forward, there is an opportunity, perhaps a societal obligation, to ensure that all students in non-STEM disciplines are meaningfully exposed to the scientific method and taught to appreciate and respect the use of data in reasoning and problem solving. This is essential education if we are to prepare students for the digital economy.

The pathway there is not easy, but it is achievable if university leaders believe in the benefit to all.

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Sarin Elected to National Academy of Inventors

cover photograph by conor doherty

ENGINEER SPRING 2019 BU.EDU/ENG

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New Self-Lubricating Condoms

U-Design

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7 engineering leadership advisory board John E. Abele Founder & Director, Boston Scientific

Amit Jain ’85,’88 President and CEO, Prysm Inc.

Sharad Rastogi ’91 Vice President, Marketing, Cisco Systems

Adel Al-Saleh ’87 Group Chief Executive, Northgate Information Solutions

Dean L. Kamen, Hon.’06 President & Founder, DEKA Research & Development Corp.

George M. Savage ’81 Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer, Proteus Digital Health

Nizar Dalloul ’83, GRS’87 Chairman and CEO, Comium Group

Ezra D. Kucharz ’90 Chief Business Officer, DraftKings Inc.

Roger A. Dorf ’70 Former Vice President, Wireless Group, Cisco Systems

Antoinette Leatherberry ‘85 Principal, Deloitte Consulting

Binoy K. Singh, MD’89 Associate Chief of Cardiology, Lenox Hill Hospital, North Shore LIJ

Joseph Frassica, MED’88 Chief Medical & Innovation Officer, Phillips Healthcare Ronald G. Garriques ’86 CEO and Chairman, Gee Holdings LLC Joseph Healey ’88 Senior Managing Director, HealthCor Management LP Jon Hirschtick Founder & Chairman, OnShape Inc. William I. Huyett Chief Operation Officer, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals

Peter Levine ’83 General Partner, Andreesen Horowitz Nick Lippis ’84,’89 President, Lippis Enterprises Inc. Andrew Marsh CEO, LG Fuel Systems Kathleen McLaughlin ‘87 President and Chief Sustainability Officer Walmart Foundation Rao Mulpuri ’92,’96 CEO, View, Inc. Girish Navani ’91 CEO, eClinicalWorks

Francis Troise ‘87 CFO and President, Investment Technology Group William Weiss ’83,’97 Vice President & General Manager, General Dynamics-C4 Systems Emeritus Board Members Richard D. Reidy, Questrom’82 Former President and CEO, Progress Software Corp.

Venkatesh Narayanamurti Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology & Public Policy; Former Dean, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Anton Papp ’90 VP Corporate Development, Rockwell Automation, Inc.

Anthony Pecore ’95 VP/Portfolio Manager, Franklin Templeton Investments

Kent W. Hughes ’79 Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Verizon

Claudia Arango Dunsby ’92 Vice President, Operations, Hybridge IT

Michele Iacovone CGS’86,’89 Vice President, Chief Architect, Intuit Inc.

John Scaramuzzo ’87 Senior Vice President, Scan Disk Inc.

Vanessa Feliberti ’93 Partner, General Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Tyler Kohn ’98 Head of Platform Technology, Mythic AI

Richard Fuller ’88 Microlocation Lead, OmniTrail Technologies

Yitao Liao ’10,’11 Chief Technology Officer, RayVio Corporation

Gregory Seiden ’80 Vice President, Applications Integration, Oracle Corp.

Timothy Gardner ’00 Founder & CEO, Riffyn Inc.

Martin Lynch ’82 Chief Operating Officer, Freewire Technologies

Roger A. Hajjar ’88 Chief Technical Officer, Prysm Inc.

Daniel C. Maneval ’82 Vice President, Pharmacology & Safety Assessment, Halozyme Therapeutics Sandip Patidar ’90 Managing Partner, Titanium Capital Partners

Thomas D. C. Little

associate dean for educational initiatives Richard Lally Kenneth R. Lutchen

dean

Solomon R. Eisenberg

senior associate dean for academic programs Catherine Klapperich

associate dean for research & technology development

facebook.com/ BUCollegeofENG

@BUCollegeofENG Bettina Briz-Himes ’86 Director, Technology Alliances, GoPro

Gregory Cordrey ’88 Partner, Jeffer Mangles Butler & Mitchell LLP

Mark Hildebrand ’87 Partner, Hougatonic Partners

Post, tag, tweet, ask questions, reconnect with alumni and learn about networking opportunities, job fairs, seminars and other news and events.

Professor Xin Zhang

eng west coast alumni leadership council Christopher Brousseau ’91 Global Commercial Director, Accenture Inc.— Spend Management Services

Join the ENG online community!

associate dean for administration Stacey Freeman

assistant dean for outreach & diversity Lisa Drake

assistant dean for development & alumni relations

Sanjay Prasad ’86,’87 Principal, Prasad IP

Xin Zhang Is BU’s Innovator of the Year

youtube.com/ BUCollegeofENG

FIRST WOMAN CHOSEN, CITED FOR TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH IN METAMATERIALS

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Dylan P. Steeg ’95 Director of Business Development, Skytree Inc. Francis Tiernan ’70 President, Anritsu Company (Retired) Joseph Winograd ’95,’97 Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Verance Corp

Michael Seele

editor

Liz Sheeley

managing editor Emily Wade

staff writer design & production Boston University Creative Services

photography

ENGineer 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 Mall, Boston, MA 02215.

Phone: 617-353-2800

College of Engineering, except where indicated

PHOTOGRAPH BY CYDNEY SCOTT

Brian Dunkin ’85 VP Medical Affairs, Boston Scientific Endoscopy Global

John Tegan ’88 President and CEO, Communication Technology Services LLC

STAY CONNECTED TO THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

rofessor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, MSE, BME) has earned this year’s Innovator of the Year award, an honor Boston University bestows annually on a faculty member who “translates his/her world-class research into inventions and innovations that benefit humankind.”

Zhang is the ninth faculty member and first woman to win the award, presented in December during BU Connect, an annual research and innovation showcase.

Zhang is well known for her pioneering work with metamaterials in areas as diverse as magnetic resonance imaging, downwell sensor technology for the oil industry and noise-cancellation acoustics. She is also the director of BU’s Laboratory for Microsystems Technology (LMST), which focuses on interdisciplinary research in microelectromechanical and nanoelectromechanical systems.

“Zhang is a creative innovator. You describe a problem to her and she can solve it,” says Michael Pratt (Questrom’13), managing director of BU’s Technology Development office. “She’s a go-to person for getting something done. It’s a true quality of an engineer, right? She can use these fundamental technologies and solve important problems across various domains.”

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“Professor Zhang’s ability to carry out pioneering and exceptionally creative work in a wide range of fields is a model and inspiration for other faculty members—particularly females,” says Gloria Waters, vice president and associate provost for research and a Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences. “Her ability to translate fundamental discoveries into practical applications is exceptional. I am certain that both her current and future work will have a major impact on society.”

A native of China, Zhang earned a PhD at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and did postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining BU in 2002. She received a National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER Award in 2003 and was named ENG’s inaugural Distinguished Faculty Fellow in 2009, an honor given to tenured engineering faculty. Despite the complex nature of her work in her Photonics Center LMST lab, she is clear about what drives her: solving problems with real-world applications.

“I am interested in: ‘can you make an impact?’” she says. “The problem has got to be difficult enough that it has not been solved—and important enough.”—joel brown See page 10 for more on Zhang’s recent work.

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Antibiotic Resistance Without the Antibiotics

Shrinking Down Soft Robots

HOW A PROTECTIVE MECHANISM IN BACTERIA LINKS GENETIC MUTATIONS WITH DRUG RESISTANCE

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novel, multistep process has been developed by researchers, including Assistant Professor Tommaso Ranzani (ME, MSE) and Assistant Professor Sheila Russo (ME, MSE), to construct a small, soft flexible robot called microfluidic origami for reconfigurable pneumatic/hydraulic (MORPH) systems. Their work, published in Advanced Materials, details the process and demonstrates its capabilities with the fabrication of a highly complex, soft structure.

“If you have a soft robot you can very easily deal with a highly structured environment and also better deal with the uncertainties of the real world than with traditional, rigid robots,” says Ranzani. “Soft microscale robots for applications like surgery do exist, but they are really simple, just one degree of freedom and they also do not apply that much force to the tissue.”

The researchers built the MORPH system, a 12-layer silicone structure that looks like a peacock spider, to demonstrate their new pro-

Assistant Professor Mary Dunlop (right) and postdoctoral fellow Imane El Meouche.

Single cells with high efflux pump expression and low DNA repair protein expression have reduced cell growth rate. (A) Time-lapse microscopy images show E. coli expressing magenta fluorescence indicating expression of the acrAB efflux pump and green fluorescence indicating MutS protein expression. (B) There is an anticorrelation in acrAB versus MutS expression; the purple dots correspond to cells whose growth rate falls in the bottom 10 percent of those measured.

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expression, a DNA-repair enzyme called MutS and cell growth rate.

They hypothesized that if bacteria must permanently mutate their DNA to develop antibiotic resistance, then a DNA-repair protein might be linked to the process. And they were right—their findings show that there is an inverse correlation between efflux pump and MutS protein expression in bacteria. The more pumps the cells decide to use, the fewer MutS proteins a cell will have.

The same line of thinking was applied when they looked at the link between cell growth rate and efflux pump expression.

Slow cell growth has been known to lead to more mutations in cellular genetic material and the fact that increased pump expression and slow cell growth could be directly related to not just be a correlation, but a causation of permanent, genetic antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

“Not only are bacteria resistant because they are expressing efflux pumps, but they are also more prone to mutation through these other connections,” says El Meouche. “What

I find interesting is how varying expression of certain genes can lead to permanent genetic changes in the future.”

So far, Dunlop and El Meouche have uncovered three pieces of this mechanism, but are unsure of where those pieces fit in the larger antibiotic resistance puzzle. They could be directly related, causing the observed relationships, or, more likely, there could still be missing links in a chain of biological events that leads to resistance.

“We know a lot about genetic changes that pass through a population from events like the hostile environment of an infection,” says Dunlop. “But we don’t know a lot about that very first step of how an individual bacterium changes from being susceptible to resistant.”

That first step is one section of the puzzle they will continue to put together. This finding opens up the possibility of exploring how exactly these cells can develop antibiotic resistance in the absence of antibiotics and then potentially develop ways to block that pathway and curb resistance. —liz sheeley

IMAGE PROVIDED BY WYSS INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED ENGINEERING

PmutS

FIGURE PROVIDED BY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARY DUNLOP /PHOTOGRAPH OF DUNLOP BY KENT DAYTON

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ntibiotic resistance is a global threat that leads to more than 23,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Overexposure to antibiotics has long been blamed for this, but Assistant Professor Mary Dunlop (BME) is flipping that idea on its head by finding that bacteria can also develop resistance without being exposed to antibiotics.

In new research published in Science, Dunlop and coauthor Imane El Meouche, a postdoctoral scholar in Dunlop’s lab, discovered a link between a short-term survival technique used by bacteria and long-term drug resistance.

For decades, scientists have leaned towards the theory that drug resistance comes with prolonged exposure to that drug. El Meouche believed the same and expected her research to confirm it. But a control experiment curiously revealed a previously unexamined correlation between temporary protective measures and mutations that lead to permanent drug resistance.

In nature, bacteria will use efflux pumps to push antibiotics and other toxins out of the cell to protect themselves; these pumps are costly for the cell to produce and slow cell growth because they compromise the cell membrane and use a lot of energy. To balance the potential reward of survival against the certain cost of pump production, bacteria will hedge their bets by diversifying the number of pumps different cells express.

“Pumps are well known to be very important for antibiotic resistance,” says Dunlop. “We found that cells that have more of these pumps are not only inherently more resistant to antibiotics, but they are also in a position where they mutate to achieve a higher level of drug resistance. Expression of pumps may be a stepping stone to drug resistance.”

One of the more surprising results was that the bacteria were prone to mutations that cause resistance even though they were never exposed to antibiotics. To test this, they genetically engineered bacteria to express varying levels of pumps, then decided to look at the relationship between efflux pump

cess. The microstructure begins as a 2D object that is then transformed into a 3D structure.

The process starts with soft lithography when the 12 separate layers are manufactured, after which laser micromachining precisely cuts the material to form the spider shape before the layers are bonded together.

Each layer’s architecture is unique and when they’re placed on top of each other, they can form a soft spider with 3D channels running through it—almost like simplified blood vessels—that allow the spider to go from 2D to 3D. “We can program this structure to bend when injected with a fluid that you can then cure once inside, and it will generate the three-dimensional structure you want,” says Russo.

The technique is called injected-induced self-folding and can be used to build other shapes, or tweaked to fold the spider in a different way.

“You can reconfigure its shape and this has a lot of potential to deal with any complications during the situation you’re using the robot, everywhere you’re dealing with something that’s dynamically changing,” Ranzani adds.

“The whole system is very damage resilient.

If it undergoes a shape deformation, the soft robot will still work—with a rigid system if it becomes deformed, it just gets stuck.”

One potential application of this new manufacturing method is to build soft end effectors for surgical robots.

“If we can come up with manufacturing technologies, then maybe 10 years from now someone can use our technologies to make better tools,” says Ranzani. “One possibility being a new surgical tool constructed from soft materials with embedded intelligence and highly sophisticated control to make difficult and complex surgical procedures easier to perform.”

—liz sheeley

The MORPH system can create tiny, soft robots like this one inspired by a peacock spider.

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How Cells Remember

New Self-Lubricating Condom Could Revolutionize Safe Sex

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY RESEARCH ILLUMINATES THE LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD EPIGENOME

Assistant Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil, graduate student Minhee Park and colleagues engineered a fully synthetic epigenetic system to better understand, study and control its behaviors.

Assistant Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil.

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BME graduate student Minhee Park, the first author on the study.

GRINSTAFF & TEAM DEVELOP DESIGN THAT MAY HELP REDUCE DISEASE SPREAD, UNWANTED PREGNANCIES

write systems could predictively drive epigenetic behaviors that correlate to natural ones.

Their system was able to spread the epigenetic modification down the genome.

They also used their system to engineer the memory of a gene being turned on, such that the gene’s expression could be maintained even after the “on” signal is removed. This type of memory is similar to how a toggle switch works, and the biological basis of cell differentiation and development—it’s how a cell that becomes a neuron stays a neuron throughout its lifetime. This could be used to engineer synthetic biological memory switches and devices for various applications.

Charles Gersbach, associate professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Center for Biomolecular and Tissue Engineering at Duke University, who was not involved in the team’s research, says, “The work from Khalil and colleagues in developing a synthetic epigenetic regulatory system is a landmark achievement and a leap ahead in our ability to control biological systems. It also provides a framework for understanding how natural epigenetic systems work.”

—liz sheeley

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FIGURE PROVIDED BY STACY CHIN

turn on and off genes and how they retain the memory of these programs in development and differentiation.”

He adds that developing synthetic biology tools in mammalian systems could be useful for therapeutic applications like cell therapy, which could allow for the control of immune cell function, for example.

Most genomes are decorated with an array of chemical modifications that influence how a genome is packaged or unwound, and which genes get turned on and off. Some of these chemical modifications are epigenetic and thus heritable. How and why a particular modification is passed down through generations while another isn’t is still largely unknown.

As the basis of their epigenetic system, Khalil and colleagues used a bacterial DNA chemical modification and uploaded it into mammalian cells. They riffed off of accepted models of epigenetic regulation, known as read-write systems, to create their own version that has synthetic factors that can write (place) the modification in the genome and factors that can read (recognize) it.

When they tested it in human cells, Khalil and his team found that their engineered read-

PHOTOGRAPH OF KHALIL BY MIKE PECCI

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he genomes of any two unrelated people are more than 99 percent identical, yet those individuals can look completely different. Likewise, a liver cell and a neuron share the same genome yet have very different functions. Those differences come more from the epigenome, the system that controls how the genome is modified, packaged and expressed. Although the epigenome plays major roles in biology and disease, it is not fully understood.

In new research published in Cell, Assistant Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil (BME), BME graduate student Minhee Park and colleagues engineered a fully synthetic epigenetic system to better understand, study and control its behaviors. Using synthetic biology, they constructed molecular modules that mimic features of natural epigenetic systems and found that they were able to induce epigenetic activities, such as storing cellular memory, in mammalian cells.

“This adds to the growing body of work to advance synthetic biology in mammalian systems,” says Khalil. “To be sophisticated about how we control mammalian cells, we first need to understand basic principles of how cells

ther than new flavors and colors, it’s been nearly 50 years since a major advancement has been made in condom design—but that may have recently changed when BU researchers announced the invention of a self-lubricating condom that could have widespread benefits in preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unplanned pregnancies.

“Preventing the spread of HIV and other diseases is critically important,” says Professor Mark Grinstaff (BME, Chemistry), coleader of the interdisciplinary research team that announced the new condom design in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science. “That really was the driving force for creating new technology here.”

The actual condom has not been tested yet, but Grinstaff’s team conducted a touch test with individuals during which they were given three pieces of latex—a standard, nonlubricated latex condom, a standard condom with a personal lubricant applied to it, and the selflubricated condom they’d developed.

In a promising sign, 85 percent of study participants who felt and compared the new condom material to latex condoms and condoms wetted by personal lubricant products found that Grinstaff’s was the most slippery to the touch.

“People found that to be an attractive feature,” he says. “Those in our survey who don’t typically use a condom said they would consider using a condom if it stayed slippery like this.”

Of every 10 participants in the group, nine indicated that if it were on the market, they would prefer to use the self-lubricating condom rather than a standard latex version.

To the naked eye, the self-lubricating condom prototype looks like a typical male latex condom; the technological improvement is in the way it feels to the touch.

In contrast to the popular silicone-based lubricants found in many condoms—which actually repel moisture and can be tacky and messy—the newly designed condom is coated in polymers that capture moisture from water

A natural rubber (left) is transformed from hydrophobic, or water-repelling, to hydrophilic, or water-attracting, material (right) through the new coating that keeps the condom lubricated. A water droplet test shows how before water was sitting on the surface of the condom (bottom left) and after the coating, the droplet is absorbed into the condom (bottom right).

and body fluids and trap those liquids on the condom surface. The result is essentially a continuously self-lubricating condom that could consistently provide a slippery sensation throughout sexual activity for extended lengths of time, without the need to stop and add any artificial lubricant.

It took Grinstaff’s group, which specializes in solving medical problems, more than three years of research and testing nearly 1,000 formulations to find a winning combination of latex and lubrication.

The process started back in 2015 with a call for proposals from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was seeking ideas for new technologies that would increase condom usage around the world. The Gates Foundation awarded grants of $100,000 each to 11 researchers, including Ducksoo Kim, a School of Medicine professor of radiology and Boston Medical Center director of interventional radiology, who partnered with Grinstaff to bring the idea of a self-lubricating condom to reality.

“We have a coating on the latex that maintains all the properties of latex,” Grinstaff explains. “It’s durable and strong. It is a coating that when you get a thin layer of moisture on it, it becomes slippery. It’s quite exciting technology.”

Stacy Chin (GRS’17), a coauthor on the study and chief executive officer of start-up

HydroGlyde Coatings, a BU spin-off that will help bring the coated condoms to consumers, explains, “poor lubrication encourages condom misusage.”

They knew that if they could “improve comfort for users, we can enable them to wear condoms more consistently and appropriately, preventing STIs and unplanned pregnancies.”

Chin says that HydroGlyde Coatings— which has already raised $1.4 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research program, the Massachusetts Tech Transfer Center and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center—will hopefully have its first product, a self-lubricating male latex-based condom, on the market in two years.

If and when the condom is ready for mass production, the researchers say it would most likely be in Southeast Asia, because countries there are the leading growers of the rubber trees that produce latex for gloves, condoms and other products.

The last significant advancement in condom technology was the lubricant that’s now in 99 percent of condoms. “There really hasn’t been an advance since then,” Grinstaff says. “Glow-in-the dark condoms and flavored condoms are clever gimmicks that don’t help performance. I think we can do better.”

—kat j. mcalpine and doug most ENGINEER SPRING 2019 BU.EDU/ENG

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Breast Cancer Beacon

the location of the guide wire tip to within less than a millimeter.

Cheng notes that device makers are developing similar beacons using a variety of different technologies; one is a tiny radioactive “seed” that the surgeon places at the site of the tumor. However, that seed absolutely must be removed after surgery, and many hospitals are wary of taking on risk associated with temporarily implanting radioactive devices in the body. Another type of beacon sends out radio waves, but this approach isn’t precise, and the radio waves can also interfere with other electronic instruments used during surgery. According to Cheng, AcouStar is appealing to surgeons and hospitals because it does not produce electromagnetic radiation or radioactivity.

NEW DEVICE COULD MAKE LUMPECTOMIES FASTER AND MORE PRECISE

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A New Tool for Doctors More than 300,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the United States, and most diagnosed with the early stage disease choose either lumpectomy or breast-conserving surgery over mastectomy.

Lumpectomy is less invasive than mastectomy and typically easier to recover from, though both surgeries give patients an equal shot at survival.

However, lumpectomy does not always remove the whole tumor the first time around.

In fact, one in four breast cancer patients needs repeat surgery soon afterward because microscopic examination reveals that trace cancer cells were left behind. Cheng, Lan and their colleagues think that AcouStar will increase the odds of removing tumors completely on the first try.

Cheng’s research group invents new ways to study the body using light instead of invasive, and potentially toxic, chemical stains and labels. In 2016, Cheng and his coworkers were 8

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The Future of Surgery Lan points out that arriving at the concept was the easy part. The hard part—turning it into something that doctors would actually want to use—was still to come.

“Doctors and engineers speak different languages,” says Cheng, explaining that while doctors are pragmatists, engineers are technology-first thinkers who are always devising new uses for the latest materials and techniques to come out of their labs—but even the most state-of-the-art gadget will flop if no one needs or wants it. “It may be cool, but it may not be

BU engineers Ji-Xin Cheng (left) and Lu Lan (right) monitor a tablet that displays AcouStar guidance to surgeons.

observing a lumpectomy surgery and noticed how long it took just for the surgeon to locate the tumor. “The surgeon may take a couple of hours to find the tumor, and sometimes they miss it,” says Cheng. He wondered, “Is there a way we can help the surgeon see the tumor in real time, during the surgery?”

Many small, early stage tumors can’t be felt by hand during an exam, which makes them difficult to locate during surgery. For tumors like these, a doctor typically inserts a thin guide wire, less than a millimeter wide, into the breast prior to the lumpectomy, using mammography or ultrasound to make sure that the tip of the wire is sitting inside the tumor.

Using Light and Sound to Treat Tumors That technique is the gold standard, but because the position of the wire is not visible to the surgeon, finding the tumor is still a challenge, explains breast surgeon Linda Han, director of breast oncology at the Parkview Cancer Institute, who has been collaborating with Cheng’s team since 2014. First, the surgeon has to mentally map two-dimensional scans onto a three-dimensional body. This maneuver is made more complicated by the fact that the patient’s position changes between the time the wire is placed and the time she reaches the operating table. “If it’s

really deep you really have no idea where the tip of the wire is,” says Han. The result is prolonged surgeries and higher rates of redo operations.

Cheng brought the problem to graduate student Lu Lan, who quickly devised a plan to harness optoacoustic technology, which uses light to generate sound waves, to create a beacon that could broadcast the location of the guide wire tip. Then, after hearing that Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, HoloLens, was taking early orders, Lan and Cheng got the idea to project a virtual image of the guide wire tip onto the HoloLens display during surgery. “We realized that augmented reality can be the part that fills the gap of improving the efficiency of the surgical guidance of our optoacoustic guide,” explains Lan. AcouStar works by sending nanosecond flashes of laser light through a fiber-optic guide wire. Because the laser pulses are so short, they don’t heat up the breast tissue; instead, their energy is converted into sound waves—too high for humans to hear—that ripple out in every direction and are picked up by three sensors attached to an adhesive patch stuck on the outside of the patient’s breast. By comparing the time it takes for the sound waves to arrive at each of the three receiving sensors, the device can triangulate

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

he operating room at Indiana University Health University Hospital was lit up with excitement and relief. The surgery, planned and rehearsed for months, was a success—every trace of the tumor removed.

But this operating room was very different from the others lining the hospital hallway. For one thing, with the exception of the breast surgeon performing the lumpectomy, it was full of engineers, not doctors and nurses. And it was the only operating room in the building—in the world, actually—using a new, experimental device called AcouStar, which is designed to pinpoint tumors so that they can be taken out faster and more accurately.

And then there was this little added quirk of the procedure: The patient was not actually a patient, but a cadaver, and the tumor was not really a tumor, but a small clip of metal standing in for the real thing. No life was saved that day. But Professor Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE), BME graduate research assistant Lu Lan (ENG’19) and their colleagues at BU and Purdue University believe that, one day, AcouStar could lead to better outcomes for thousands of breast cancer patients.

Professor Ji-Xin Cheng, biomedical engineering graduate research assistant Lu Lan and their colleagues at BU and Purdue University believe that, one day, AcouStar could lead to better outcomes for thousands of breast cancer patients. useful.” That’s why he takes a problem-oriented approach, starting each project by working with doctors to identify a problem, rather than looking for jazzy new technology applications.

Lan learned this lesson firsthand, when Han and her surgical colleague, Samilia ObengGyasi, gently vetoed his proposal to use the HoloLens, explaining that the headset was just too heavy for a surgeon to wear for the duration of a surgery. So Lan changed course, deciding to project the AcouStar guidance onto a tablet display instead.

After three months testing a prototype on a silicone breast model called a “phantom,” in the spring of 2017 Cheng, Lan and their team were ready for a more realistic trial. At this proof-of-concept stage, they couldn’t yet test it on a real patient. But they could try it out on a cadaver breast.

The solution was standard stuff for surgeons, but way outside the engineers’ lab-bench comfort zone. Lan spent three days discussing the idea with his team before deciding to go ahead with it, but says that, ultimately, it was an easy decision: “The main thing, the goal, is to verify the device, so we have to push ourselves to overcome this mental barrier.”

The team would have access to the cadaver for only three days, with Obeng-Gyasi acting as surgeon. On her very first try, she was able to completely excise the “pseudo-tumor,” but the researchers realized that the patch they had used to fix the sensors to the body wasn’t sticky enough and kept moving around during the surgery.

Two months later, after tweaking the sensor patch design, the team was ready to try again. They spent hours reviewing video footage of their previous attempt, figuring out how they could make the procedure faster and more accurate. The surgery was a success, and the team published their work in May 2018.

Now, working with Vibronix, a company founded in 2014 by Cheng and his colleague Pu Wang, and with support from the NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research program, AcouStar is getting ready to move beyond the prototype stage, which means demonstrating that the fiber-optic guide wire is safe in the body for up to 24 hours and making the AcouStar platform smaller and easier to use.

Ultimately, Cheng believes AcouStar could be used not just for breast cancer surgery but for a wide variety of procedures that require surgeons to locate something they can’t see or feel with pinpoint accuracy.

“It’s really important that we utilize technology that’s clinically meaningful for our patients and surgeons,” says Han. “For these impalpable tumors, 3D virtual localization is the technology that’s going to be the wave of the future.” —kate becker

The team tested AcouStar, including the scalpel and sensor patch seen here, on a silicone “phantom” before testing it on a human cadaver breast.

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Metamaterials Offer Communications Breakthroughs

Turning Cells On and Off

TINY, DETAILED STRUCTURES MANIPULATE SOUND AND ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES IN NEW WAYS

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NGO TEAM CREATES CELLULAR CONTROL SYSTEM FROM HEPATITIS C GENOME he field of synthetic biology—where scientists redesign existing biological systems to do new jobs—offers the promise of a more nuanced approach to treating disease than pharmaceutical drugs: cellular therapies that can work more precisely and selectively. One long-standing goal of modern biology is a type of immunotherapy that allows us to tweak the immune system to do our bidding, and for some cancers, it’s already proving effective.

But for immunotherapy—and for all medicines based on living human cells—there’s a sticky problem: once you train cells to attack a tumor, or kill bacteria or build cartilage in an arthritic knee, how do you turn them off when the job is done?

“A challenge for doctors will be to control these living entities while they are in the body, allowing them to carry out their curative properties while not letting them get out of hand,” says Assistant Professor John Ngo (BME). “This is a new paradigm, and the rules

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The microcantilevers arranged in a repeating pattern make up the metamaterial that could help close the terahertz gap. When current runs through the material, the cantilevers snap down and form a grid-like structure.

other side of the ladder; that transformation of the metamaterial increases its capacity to hold the electric charge flowing through it, otherwise known as its resonant property.

Resonance is the phenomenon when vibrations from one source affect another—like when glass shatters from a very high frequency sound. When the electrical charge is able to spread out, the metamaterial will then resonate at a lower frequency, and its resonant property will change—which is how the terahertz wave is manipulated.

The device can also shift wave polarization from circular to linear, meaning that it can focus a wave in a particular direction. Currently only about 30 percent of the original power of the wave is transmitted, but altering the geometry of the metamaterial could increase that percentage.

The reconfigurable metasurface will help bridge the terahertz gap and can be used to develop novel imaging and sensing terahertz technologies. Closing the gap could also allow for faster communications, like transmitting data faster than 4G or 5G data speeds on mobile electronics.

—liz sheeley

cient from the drug-development standpoint, because these drugs already exist,” says Ngo. “A convenient benefit of the system is that we already know exactly how long these drugs stick around for.”

The system is modular, and can be used to build and disconnect different types of molecules that turn different genes on and off. Ngo and Wong hope the system will offer a new tool for cancer researchers, and may eventually lead to tailored cancer therapies. “Everybody is racing toward getting a more controllable system,” says Wong.

“The system is very modular and very generalizable,” says Ngo. “We don’t know what type of systems will be the most useful yet in terms of having genes turn on or off, so having tools that can be used to engineer drug control into lots of different cell features will be very important. I think if we’re creative enough, we can figure out how to control essentially any protein using this type of technology.”

—barbara moran

Assistant Professor John Ngo

PHOTOGRAPH BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

One reason for the terahertz gap is that the development of electronics has not reached the ability to receive and transmit such high frequency waves yet. The metamaterial developed in Zhang’s lab, a collaboration with Professor Richard Averitt’s group at the University of California, San Diego (formerly of BU physics), has the ability to tune the transmission of terahertz waves, which opens the door to closing the technology gap. The work, published in Optica and featured as the cover image, demonstrates a metasurface with an array of micro-cantilevers, or beams only attached on one end—picture a rung on a ladder with just one side of the ladder connected to it.

Engineers can choose what kind of wave the metamaterial will transmit and its properties by changing the amount of voltage they send through the material. Any substance that can conduct electricity has a resonant property, and by manipulating that property with voltage changes, the engineers can alter the transmitted wave.

When current is applied to the metamaterial, the cantilevers snap shut, thus forming a grid pattern and connecting the rung to the

IMAGE PROVIDED BY PROFESSOR XIN ZHANG

n expert in the field of metamaterials, Professor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE) and her lab have recently developed two new structures that can manipulate sound and electromagnetic waves. Although they are different, both offer two forms of wave control in their own spectrums and performance yet seen in other devices.

Metamaterials are tiny, 3D-millimetersized constructions that get their properties from their structures rather than their base material and are built to extend functionality beyond the limitations of natural materials. A metasurface, which is essentially a 2D metamaterial, is designed with a repeating pattern that can manipulate a wave.

The acoustic metasurface’s design was based on the marriage between a well-known class of structures known as space-coiling metamaterials, and a classical acoustic element, a horn. By building an almost hybrid of these shapes, the engineers were able to simultaneously tune both the phase and amplitude of sound waves using one structure, which had never been done before. Their work has been published in Nature Communications.

This new design has the capacity to shape myriad applications ranging from biomedical ultrasound to non-destructive testing and sonar. In the future, it could be used to control high-intensity ultrasound waves to focus on a very specific shape to destroy cancerous tissue without hurting viable tissue. Also, by being able to alter acoustic waves, engineers could control sonar and have it hit a specific target without the fear that it could be picked up by another.

The second metamaterial manipulates waves from the terahertz region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic waves are anything from radiowaves to microwaves as well as visible light and X-rays, which all radiate at different frequencies, giving them unique properties.

The terahertz region sits between microwaves and infrared light on the spectrum and technology to operate on the terahertz frequency, known as submillimeter radiation, is considerably less developed than other areas.

regarding how to control therapeutic cells still remain to be written.”

Ngo and his collaborators have come up with a tool that offers a means of control, and it comes from a seemingly unlikely source, the hepatitis C genome. When paired with a widely available antiviral medication, the new system offers a novel tool: a highly specific way to turn engineered cells on and off, with an existing, proven medication. The team published their findings in Nature Methods.

“The big question is, can we engineer cells to do what we want for therapeutic applications?” says Assistant Professor Wilson Wong (BME), who shared a BU Ignition Award for related research with Ngo. Wong’s ultimate goal is to remove immune system T-cells from patients, genetically engineer them to find cancer, and then return them to a patient’s body, controlling them with a system like Ngo’s.

“This work shows that we can repurpose existing medicines to control therapeutic cells in a way that is not only selective, but also effi-

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U-Design Introduces Hands-On Engineering to Middle School Students

Merck Global Health Invests in Drug Testing Technology ZAMAN’S PHARMACHK DEVICE TO BE DEVELOPED FOR GLOBAL, CLINICAL USE

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ccording to the World Health Organization (WHO), poor quality or counterfeit medicines expose millions of people to dangerous conditions and cause more than 130,000 preventable deaths every year. To combat that crisis, Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE) and his BU team have developed PharmaChk, a userfriendly, portable device for testing drugs of questionable quality. And now, the team is partnering with Merck Global Health to test and optimize the technology.

“I am thrilled about this new partnership with Merck Global Health, the world leader in pharma and global health,” says Zaman. “It comes at a perfect time and will enable us to take this technology to the places where it will make the biggest impact.”

Those places include Africa, Latin America and Asia, where WHO estimates indicate that 30 to 50 percent of drug sales are of poor quality. In addition to misleading patients into thinking they will get better, these faulty,

or sometimes fake, medicines facilitate the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens. And in the absence of proper storage and transportation facilities, drugs that initially pass quality testing may deteriorate before they reach the consumer.

“We wanted to invest in a product that could help low- and middle-income countries, had the flexibility to test many different drugs and was easy to use,” says Nuno Martins, Merck Global Health general manager on the project. He adds that Merck’s first target would be antibiotics and antimicrobials, including antimalarial drugs.

Beatrice Greco, the associate director of science innovation partnership at Merck Global Health, adds that the company wants to invest in technology that can help prevent drug resistance, and that PharmaChk has the most potential to go from a prototype to an affordable and accurate field device.

PharmaChk works by analyzing the drugin-question’s active ingredient and seeing if it

ast summer, about 80 middle school students gained exposure to engineering concepts, many for the first time, through the hands-on U-Design program. Annually sponsored by the College of Engineering, U-Design gives youngsters the opportunity to build something, have fun doing it and start to consider the possibility of an engineering career.

“One of the goals of U-Design is to get traditionally underrepresented and underserved kids excited about engineering through hands-on exploration,” says Assistant Dean of Outreach and Diversity Stacey Freeman. “Our hope is that programs like these will increase the number of women and racially diverse students who choose engineering.”

The college offers scholarships for up to half of the participants, most of whom are from the Boston area. ENG undergraduates, mainly from the Technology Innovation Scholars Program (TISP), mentor the students with lead teachers from local high schools who have been working with U-Design and TISP for many years.

Two TISP undergraduates who participated in U-Design, Esther Huynh (ME’19) and Eva

The third prototype of PharmaChk.

matches up with the expected quantity of the genuine medicine. Many technologies that test drug quality require basic lab skills, but a PharmaChk user simply drops a pill into the designated slot, and, using a tablet dashboard, chooses which medicine to test and clicks start—the machine does the rest. The device is stored in a large briefcase and can be carried around easily, making it adaptable to test medicine quality at all points in the supply chain, from manufacturer to the end user.

According to Zaman, who has been working to curb low-quality and counterfeit drugs for decades, “Merck’s experience, expertise and understanding of the real-world challenges involved with bringing PharmaChk into clinical use will allow us to ensure the maximum benefit to those who suffer from the prevalence of poor-quality medicines.”

—liz sheeley

Searching for a Better Battery

Gee (ME’20), said that students came in with a mix of backgrounds and engineering knowledge, and they were gratified that some who had never considered engineering were getting excited about it.

“I had never been exposed to engineering as a possible career path when I was in middle or high school,” says Huynh. “It’s great to get students interested in STEM and also gives me the chance to apply what I’ve learned at BU into a very practical setting, which is definitely satisfying.”

The U-Design program featured three workshops: Electrical and Mechanical Gizmos; Robo-Alley; and Flight School 101. The Gizmos workshop focused on designing and building electrical circuits, while Robo-Alley gives students the chance to learn coding basics to integrate into a robot. Flight School teaches students about the mechanics of flight and provides hands-on experience building gliders and rockets.

In addition to coursework, students also tour ENG faculty lab spaces, hear lectures from researchers and see how what they’re learning is applied to solving real-world problems.

—liz sheeley

Students learn about programming robots to move around mazes in the Robo-Alley workshop.

Below, left: A student learns about electrical circuits in the Gizmos workshop.

Below, right: The Flight School 101 workshop gives students a chance to learn about flight principles in a hands-on way.

RYAN USES COMPUTATIONAL MODELS TO IMPROVE THE CAPACITY OF LITHIUM AND METAL BATTERIES

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The electrolyte transports lithium ions, which react with the electrodes to produce electrons that are transported between the electrodes through an outside circuit. While these batteries start off strong, major contributors to their loss in capacity—and thus the strength and length of their charge—are small, fragile lithium dendrites that can grow within them over time.

If broken, through dropping your phone for example, the battery can lose capacity, and if the dendrites continue to grow they can cause the battery to short-circuit and potentially catch fire.

Ryan says interest in the dendrite issue has increased significantly over the last five years as technology and research methods have advanced. Researchers have been studying the growth and possible suppression of these dendrites through experimentation at the atomic level and large-scale battery models at

Assistant Professor Emily Ryan, with graduate student Kathy Dupre (ENG’21). Ryan is using computer modeling to explore why lithium batteries deteriorate and how to build stronger ones.

the macro-level to gain more insight into the world of these tiny structures.

“We’re not looking at each atom, but small volumes of material that contain lots of atoms,” Ryan says of her lab’s unique approach. They’re using computational models to look at the problem on a mesoscale—an in-between approach to what others are doing.

—sarah wells

PHOTOGRAPH OF RYAN BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

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ight and efficient lithium-ion batteries rule the world of portable technology, as they can power items from your smartphone to your smart car. But they also have shortcomings—deformities that form inside the batteries and cause them to catch fire.

In her Computational Energy Laboratory, Assistant Professor Emily Ryan (ME) is working to improve the next generation of lithium batteries by using computational models to find the best plan for suppressing the growth of deformities (called dendrites) and improving the capacity of lithium air and metal batteries.

These types of batteries comprise a positively charged cathode and a negatively charged anode, with a liquid electrolyte in the middle.

“You can think about it like a sandwich,” says Ryan. “You’ve got a solid and a solid with a liquid in between.”

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A BIG IDEA TURNS 10

INSIDE THE MIND

BY LIZ SHEELEY |

OF THE SOCIETAL ENGINEER

THE EARLY ENTHUSIAST

Mackenzie Hall joined the BU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) in her freshman year, a decision that changed the course of her academic career.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY CONOR DOHERTY

“I DON’T THINK THERE ARE ANY any engineering students at BU who aren’t Societal Engineers,” says Nicole Enos (CE, BME ’19).

Her sentiment is shared by many students in the College of Engineering. Because being a Societal Engineer isn’t defined by specific attributes listed on a résumé, they must pave their own path to discover how they exemplify the concept.

“It manifests differently for everyone, but a big part of being a Societal Engineer is reaching outside of engineering and bringing people in, embracing this intersectional, interdisciplinary view of how engineers fit into the world, and realizing that engineering doesn’t exist without all the other fields,” Enos explains. “It’s also searching to do good, and to have that positive impact on the world through what you’re learning and what you do beyond BU.” In 2008, after two years on the job, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen reorganized the College of Engineering to allow for more flexibility in interdisciplinary training and research, and used that reorganization as a way to modernize the strategic vision and establish the concept of creating the Societal Engineer.

Two pillars support the concept: advancing quality of life and moving society forward. At its core, the Societal Engineer is someone who uses an engineering education to build a better world through teamwork and innovation. The term “Boston University: Creating the Societal Engineer” was granted a trademark by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2012.

In the decade since Lutchen introduced this idea to the college, students have embraced and demonstrated the ideals of the Societal Engineer through their academic, extracurricular and professional careers.

THE EARLY ENTHUSIAST Mackenzie Hall (BME’20) is one of those students. She became aware of the college’s societal engineering push before matriculating, and it was one of the reasons she picked BU for her education.

“I connected with the idea of the Societal Engineer,” Hall says. “To me, it means staying in touch with the effects of your engineering work, and how your projects can be integrated into the community they were designed for.”

Hall joined the BU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) in her freshman year, a decision that changed the course of her academic career; EWB faculty advisor Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE) inspired Hall by his work developing solutions for public health problems in lowresource areas.

“That was my first exposure in applying engineering to situations that aren’t super high tech,” she notes. “EWB develops engineering solutions based on the available resources—or, as my dad would call it, ‘MacGyvering.’”

Hall has been technical lead at EWB for two years. One of her duties is to make brochures and posters that disseminate the message of the organization and the work the BU chapter is doing; these printed materials are then distributed to the chapter’s international partner communities to help locals understand the purpose of EWB projects and how to use them. Hall wanted to get even more involved and inquired about working in the Zaman lab, where she’s been performing research since May 2018 and plans to continue until she graduates.

“The Zaman lab is a natural extension of EWB,” she says. “His work here and in EWB is about understanding the society ENGINEER SPRING 2019 BU.EDU/ENG

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THE CONCEPT OF BEING A SOCIETAL ENGINEER BECAME MUCH CLEARER TO HIM AS HE BEGAN TO WORK ON VERTO. THE ENTREPRENEUR

Pablo Ferreyra (center) and Soon Hong (left) cofounded Verto, a safe, convenient platform for students to resell their possessions. After spending a summer developing it in the BU Innovation Lab, they hired marketing manager Christina Song (right) when their business began to grow.

we are trying to solve a problem in, and taking those real-world constraints into account when building a device or developing a process.”

Hall works on a Zaman lab project called PharmaChk, a large-briefcase-sized device that can test the quality of drugs in low-resource areas, such as developing countries. The device is user friendly and portable, making it ideal to test drugs in places— including Africa, Latin America and Asia, where the World Health Organization estimates that 30 to 50 percent of drug sales are of poor quality—where issues like breakdowns in the supply chain, substandard storage and counterfeit drugs are common.

In addition to misleading patients into thinking they will get better, these faulty, or sometimes fake, medicines facilitate the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens. And in the absence of proper storage and transportation facilities, drugs that initially pass quality testing may deteriorate before they reach the consumer.

To test a drug’s quality, PharmaChk measures the level of a medicine’s active ingredient. This means that each test is specific to the drug being examined and new assays must be developed for each drug they want to analyze, which is what Hall does. She’s especially proud of developing the framework for one of the assays she’s now working on for a tuberculosis drug.

And Hall is just one of the many undergraduates working in research laboratories in the College of Engineering.

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THE ENTREPRENEUR Pablo Ferreyra (EE’19) began his three-year-plus stint in Professor Anna Swan’s (ECE, Physics, MSE) lab before he matriculated as a freshman.

Coming from a family of electrical engineers, he understood early on the wide impact engineering can have through tools that are built to solve problems. Growing up in Brookline, he was also familiar with BU from a young age—his mother completed her master’s degree at Metropolitan College and he spent time in the BU children’s care center while she was in class. “BU was always part of my community and always on the top of my list when I started looking at colleges,” he says.

Ferreyra is a Trustee Scholar—one of about 20 students in each class who receive the full scholarship—and has certainly lived up to the potential the University recognized when admitting him into that program. In addition to his work in the Swan lab, he has been part of the winning team of multiple local hackathons, is cofounder and chief executive officer of a company that won a spot in Boston University’s Innovation Lab (BUild) summer accelerator program, and now serves on BUild’s student leadership council.

He pursued a research position in Swan’s laboratory after meeting with her (she was then his freshman-year advisor) during orientation, and completed a summer of work before his first day of classes. But at the beginning of last summer, Ferreyra had to leave his lab work to dedicate all of his free time to a company he cofounded, called Verto,

established after the founders conducted hundreds of interviews with students about why, instead of selling their used furniture or other possessions when they moved, they would leave them on the street (a particularly noticeable occurrence when a majority of the apartments in the area turn over in September).

“We interviewed over 300 students and quickly noticed a repetitive narrative: students didn’t feel safe using platforms like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. We heard of a lot of creepy, awkward, stressful and sometimes unsafe situations during the in-person pick up,” he says. “What makes us different from these other platforms is our core emphasis on student safety.”

From their interviews, Ferreyra and cofounder Soon Hong (CE) discovered that students’ three main concerns were safety, payment methods and convenience; the company addressed safety concerns by requiring all Verto users to have a verified “.edu” email address.

Verto is also integrated with courier delivery service Postmates and payment processing platform Stripe.

Postmates allows a user to get a product delivered the same day they buy it, and they can track delivery status in real time through Verto. Stripe gets rid of the need for cash—another inconvenience that drove students away from other secondhand selling platforms.

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST That is how Maura Appleberry (ME’19) arrived at where she is now.

“I was just driving through Northern Indiana with my dad on a family vacation and saw all the wind turbines,” Appleberry, then a high school junior, recalls. “I thought, this is so great, I want to be involved in this. But my dad pointed out that there’s no way to store that wind energy.”

Now a senior majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in energy technologies, Appleberry says she took it upon herself after that trip to delve into the renewable energy storage field.

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

After learning about the lack of solutions for wind energy storage as a high school student, Maura Appleberry decided to focus her education and research on developing better batteries for all types of renewable energy storage.

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“Even if you do decide to meet up with your vendor, all you have to do is just pick up the product,” Ferreyra explains. “We really wanted to create a platform that prioritizes the students’ safety and comfort, and also their time. Students are really busy, so we need to make an application that surrounded their lives.”

“We went through the summer accelerator at the BUild Lab, which is an amazing program,” he continues. “They put us in touch with a lot of great mentors—we were pretty confident that we were able to build the application, but there’s a lot more to a business than just the engineering.”

He says that the program helped them define their customer segment and how they were going to enter the market, and introduced them to the free law clinics on campus that helped them with incorporation, shareholder agreements, privacy policy and more.

“It was thanks to all that preparation that we were able to have such a successful pilot here at BU,” says Ferreyra.

He also notes that the concept of being a Societal Engineer became much clearer to him as he began to work on Verto.

“The whole idea with Verto is to make a change for the better, both for the environment, but also for the user,” he says. “Being a Societal Engineer is about figuring out problems in our community and problems that we see in our day-to-day lives and then building cool technology and solutions to solve those problems.”

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THE TEAM PLAYER

THE CONCEPT OF THE SOCIETAL ENGINEER resonates not only with undergraduate students, but also with graduate students and faculty. For a class project, a group of ECE graduate students built a prototype of a wearable device akin to a guide dog to enable people who are visually impaired to safely navigate the world hands-free.

Emily Stern (’18, ’20), a student on the project, says the idea to pursue this plan came from discussion with her class professor, Osama Alshaykh (ECE), a lecturer and assistant research professor who encouraged her to think about her project ideas from the Societal Engineer perspective, i.e., how their work could make a difference and improve lives.

Stern proposed to her team that they develop a robotic guide dog, and that idea soon turned into a hands-free, wearable device.

The guide dog robot attaches like a belt, uses a camera to detect obstacles and relays navigation instructions to the user via a Bluetooth headset.

In order to relay information fast enough, the robot doesn’t store any route information but rather refreshes its data and map every few seconds to give the next direction. The students tested their device on themselves, seeing if they could navigate a room with only the robot’s directions—and they were generally successful.

Stern says that even though the class is over, she and another member of the team will continue to work on the project to further develop the prototype. She envisions that future iterations of the device will be able to track moving objects, use cloud computing to store room maps and pair with a shoe insert that vibrates to give directions.

A wearable device enables people who are visually impaired to safely navigate the world hands-free.

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A computer engineer by training, Mohammed Uddin expanded the scope of his education by joining a synthetic biology team competition last summer.

“If my life goal is to be involved in energy storage and batteries, I need to understand where it’s coming from,” she says. “That’s the idea of the broader picture and understanding the entire chain of the engineering problem.”

LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF EMILY STERN

STUDENTS BUILD WEARABLE “GUIDE DOG” DEVICE FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED

The Louisville, Kentucky, native started doing research at the University of Louisville in chemical engineering—which was also the major she first declared before transferring to BU for her second semester of freshman year.

“I wanted a place that had a broader perspective on engineering, as well as influence locally and internationally,” she says. “That was really important to me and the main reason I chose BU.” Appleberry lived in the South Campus Earth House, where undergraduates learn how their everyday actions have an environmental impact and how those practices can be made more sustainable. Faculty from sustainability@BU, the College of Arts & Sciences and the Pardee School of Global Studies teach seminars and guide projects like implementing solar energy into the Earth House.

“We talked about sustainability from a local perspective,” she says. “One of the professors, Dennis Carlberg, hired me to do data analysis on the energy usage in buildings for a project they were working on that turned into the BU Climate Action Plan. It was really cool to see my data analysis turn into this whole initiative to completely redo BU’s energy usage and fuel a lot of their projects.”

While living in the Earth House, she and another student worked on putting up solar panels and making a business case for them on South Campus. But because the older buildings couldn’t be fitted with the panels, an alternative plan was developed.

“What BU decided to do instead was buy their renewables from places offsite, buy enough to subsidize our energy needs, and then count that as our renewable energy in an effort to go 100 percent solar by 2020,” she explains.

Appleberry says there’s a new kind of solar cell in development that is translucent, similar to how a piece of laminate feels. Those organic solar cells are light and could be put on the sides of buildings, solving one of the stopgaps in solar panel adoption many cities like Boston experience.

These are the types of problems that Appleberry wants to solve.

She says that during her study abroad program junior year in Sydney, Australia, she got closer to her idea of the Societal Engineer.

“As I’ve grown into BU, I realized this was really a focus of mine,” she says. “How can I integrate problem solving in my own life, and through all of my engineering endeavors? But also, how can I use what I’ve learned when looking at a problem and expand that in many different ways?”

While studying in Australia, she also took on a research assistant position at the University of Sydney, which solidified her interest in energy storage and battery technology.

Appleberry’s three internships, all with companies seeking to improve solar energy storage methods, have exposed her to the commercial side of renewable energy. She has worked on modeling and product engineering teams for new types of batteries and also on the business end of engineering, integrating workflow management tools into engineering groups and building market research tools for solar energy teams.

She’s currently taking an international relations course, global resource geopolitics, which has helped her see energy from an entirely different perspective. By examining energy as a resource, the class opens the conversation up to discuss the political economy of resources through the lens of conflict, security, populations and development.

THE TEAM PLAYER Mohammed Uddin (CE’19) loves to solve problems. Excelling in math and science since childhood, he always enjoyed the tangibility of coming up with an answer to a question, which turned into a love of engineering.

Uddin says that realizing his ultimate ambition of becoming a professor is far off. First, he’d like to find a position working in consulting or software development before going back to graduate school and finding his place in academia.

“I think communication is integral to the success of any project or venture, and I want to continue learning how to be an effective communicator, collaborate and broaden my reach to fields outside engineering,” he says. “I want to be able to collaborate and talk to people with varied experiences because that’s how problems are solved.”

He’s also exploring opportunities at BU that are outside of his current expertise. As a student in Associate Professor Douglas Densmore’s (ECE, BME) class, he learned about the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition—iGEM holds an annual challenge for engineering students to build synthetic biology projects, and Densmore advises BU’s iGEM chapter.

Uddin says his team was only able to successfully complete the project because of their diverse skill set.

“It was interesting to see all the different disciplines come together,” he notes. “Mechanical engineering to build the platform, electrical engineering for the circuitry and then, of course,

biomedical is demonstrated throughout the entire system. Then, we had to do a lot of backend coding in order to sync everything.”

He sees a Societal Engineer as someone who understands their own value as well as recognizes what others bring to the table.

“Sometimes I think people can devalue software engineers—they believe that sitting behind a desk all day writing code isn’t contributing to society in any way,” he says.

But he thinks about it from a different perspective.

“I don’t have to make the big impact myself,” he says. “If I can make small improvements on a program that could help people now, those small strides contribute down the line—that is solving the big problems by working with others.”

Many of the classes ENG students take are project-based, and Uddin believes the main goal is to develop a solution to a problem that no one has tackled before.

“You have a certain set of skills, or a toolbox,” he says. “You have to identify what tools you have and what’s possible, and then attack this problem from all angles and come up with a solution. I might not have all the solutions, but someone else might.”

He views conversations with engineers of other disciplines as essential—computer engineering doesn’t exist without the actual machine to run the program he built. By combining toolboxes, they would be able to tackle a problem more effectively.

“What drives me to be an engineer is that there are all these realworld problems—like the wildfires in California,” he says. “How do we solve that huge problem? It’s not only engineering, but a combination of engineering, environmental policy and more.”

“I think that’s what being a Societal Engineer is,” he concludes.

“Working with others by collaborating, and bringing different aspects of different disciplines and fields together, and culminating to the solution that helps everyone.”

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Taking His Time

IAN SCHON (ENG’12) MAKES ANALOG WATCHES IN A DIGITAL WORLD

BY MEGAN WOOLHOUSE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

Ian Schon

(ENG’12) hunches over a workbench in his Allston studio holding the tiny hour hand of a wristwatch with tweezers.

Shaping the delicate part, just a fraction of a millimeter wide, takes hours of painstaking work. And the sliver of stainless steel is just one small piece of a mechanical watch that will take 100 hours of finger-aching work before the finished product can be worn on someone’s wrist.

Fortunately, Schon’s in no rush. In fact, he seems to relish the tedious task, transfixed for hours as he buffs the face of a watch or refurbishes the movement.

“I take my sweet time,” he says.

In an era where smart watches offer up-to-the-minute headlines, text messages and heart rate information with the flick of the wrist, a young watchmaker is a rarity. For every 10 watch repairmen retiring in the US, just one enters the business, according to the American Watchmakers—Clockmakers Institute, an industry group. And the institute doesn’t even track the number of people who actually practice the ancient craft of making watches in the US because they are so few and far between.

But Schon, just 28, is a millennial clinging to an analog tradition the way some people still collect vinyl records or ride fixed-gear bicycles. His one-man company, Schon Horology, which he launched in 2018, creates old-fashioned, wind-up wrist watches. They are not powered by quartz, they do not offer a calendar or a chronograph, and they perform one function: telling time. They also sell for $5,200 each.

A former corporate product designer, Schon says he has already sold a dozen of his unique creations this year by word of mouth alone.

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“I think in business school, they use watchmaking as a case study to talk about what not to do, what industry not to enter,” Schon (pronounced like “loan”) muses. “I believe there is space for people who are willing to do watchmaking differently. If you’re willing to do it differently, people will take notice.”

He began tinkering with watches in 2013 after purchasing a watch online that was not as advertised. He took it apart and decided to use the metalworking and machining skills he had developed as a mechanical engineering student at BU to build a new case for it.

Soon he started making other parts, too, and found that he was hooked. He spent hours lost in his newfound hobby.

While he would engineer sound systems and medical devices by day, at night he made watch parts in his Brookline apartment, slowly acquiring the highly specialized tools he needed, like vintage lathes from the 1940s and drill bits to make holes no wider than an eyelash.

But turning his new hobby into a small business required help.

Watchmaking can be a very closed, even secretive business, and Schon needed a mentor. He sought out Nicholas P. Trahadias II, a Swiss-trained, high-end men’s watch repair specialist working in Downtown Crossing in Boston’s Jewelers Building.

Trahadias says he will never forget the day Schon arrived at his office by bike and showed him his work.

“Ian brought product in and showed me what he had done,” he says, recalling how surprised he was by the quality of Schon’s work. “The minute he did, I knew he would be able to meet his objectives.”

The arcane world of watchmaking terminology can also be confusing. Trahadias is a watchmaker, an industry term describing a person who repairs and refurbishes watches. Schon, who makes watches, is a horologist, which is “quite rare,” Trahadias explains.

Schon has met with Trahadias and worked at his side for the last five years. “Each time I described or explained something, you could see the gears moving in his head,” Trahadias says. “You could see his mind working.”

Schon says tactile objects have long fascinated him, whether that means the look and feel of a watch, a pen or the frame of a bike. As a student at BU, he designed and manufactured a line of aluminum pens and raised nearly $70,000 on Kickstarter to finish and sell them in stores for $55 each.

That venture, called Schon DSGN, took off. His pens now fetch as much as $188 each and are sold in boutiques around the world.

Feeling burnt-out in his full-time job, and making enough income from his pen business, Schon left his job as a product designer in 2017 to devote himself to making pens and watches.

“I wanted people to appreciate me for what I can do,” he says.

“Not just what I can do for them.”

Schon displays some of the elements from his current watch collection, The Dot, a reference to the hole in the watch face above the numeral 6 where a dot circles into view every 10 seconds to let the owner know the watch is keeping time (there is no second hand).

The watch contains expensive NOS Doxa Swiss-made movement, which Schon says he has obtained through industry connections, declining to elaborate. (Remember, this can be a secretive business.) He refurbishes the movement, the watch’s engine. He also designs and manufactures the face, hands and case, which are machined in Massachusetts and then finished in excruciating detail at his studio workbench.

A single day can be spent on the watch bezel, the grooved ring holding the glass cover of the watch’s face. Or, he’ll spend hours trying to get the hour hand to a specific thickness and weight so that it “presses on exactly correctly” to the watch’s movement.

“It’s physical, and emotionally exhausting,” Schon says. “You’re spending so much energy making sure it’s right and as you do it, the risk keeps going up that you might ruin it. You get a scratch or overpolish it, and you have to start over. It’s painful.”

Mike Stone (ENG’12), a friend since their undergraduate days in the mechanical engineering program, says the intensity of the work suits Schon, who’s the type to leave “no conceptual stone unturned” in a project.

“I joke that the watch is the ultimate engineer nerd object, and Ian embodies that archetype,” Stone says. “His attention span seems infinite in a particular direction.”

Located in a building occupied mostly by artists, Schon’s Allston workroom overlooks the Mass Pike. Except for the white noise from the traffic outside, it’s quiet and surprisingly dimly lit.

He is readying a shipment of pens before he goes to work on a watch face that will occupy him for the afternoon.

“Time at the bench is my favorite way to spend time,” he recently told his 943 Twitter followers.

Schon says he’s not antidigital or extremely sentimental about watchmaking, although it’s a line of work that’s fading fast; recently Apple’s Tim Cook said that Apple Watch sales have outpaced the Swiss watchmaking industry’s.

Schon wears his watches and carries an iPhone—plus one of his pens and a notepad for sketching in his back pocket. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter help him get the word out about his watchmaking process and prowess, but he says he is always mindful of the time he spends online, preferring the analog world.

He recently married, and says he’s not trying to get rich or thinking about how to scale his operation to boost profits. It’s about spending his time the way he wants to spend it.

“People say I could make a hundred watches a year and slay it, but that’s not the point,” he explains. I make these watches, which will be a lifetime’s pursuit.”

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PLOT

TWIST SOLVING AN ENG ALUM’S CAREER PATH

BY LIZ SHEELEY

PHOTOGRAPH BY LESLEY ARAK

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athleen Pellegrino’s (ENG’62) career path reads much like the plot of a mystery novel, with its unexpected twists and turns, and a surprise ending that no one was expecting.

After graduating as one of the first women engineers from Boston University, Pellegrino has now retired four times and pubpub lished two murder-mystery novels, with two more on the way.

Although Pellegrino bounced around in her professional life, she retained an unwavering love for mysteries. During her time as a professor more than 20 years ago, she used novels as a break from the sometimes-monotonous task of grading papers. “I would read a chapter, and then I would go back with a refreshed brain and read five more papers, and it worked very nicely for me so I could be fair to my students,” she recalls.

She didn’t want to unravel only fictional mysteries; the plot thread that ties her life together is her passion for solving problems and creating solutions. She says she uses her BU engineering training as an approach to every problem she’s faced in her career and life.

“There was no better preparation for the kind of thinking that you need to survive in life than I got at Boston University,” she stresses. “The professors at BU taught me process versus answers. They taught me, you have a process to solving. You must do critical analysis. You must think about, ‘How do I solve something unknown?’ And, it’s okay if you don’t get the right answer, because eventually you’ll get the right answer, if your process is good.”

When Pellegrino started at BU—she initially enrolled in the College of General Education, but was interested in the School of Fine and Applied Arts—she was an actor. At the time, the School of Fine Arts and the College of Industrial Technology (now the College of Engineering) were in the same building. One day in the common lunch area, she sat at a table with some engineers who were discussing their work, and she thought, “Oh, I can do that!”

“I don’t think young women, definitely back then and even today, are brought up with the idea that they can do anything,” she says. “I think it’s really important they understand, ‘Yes, you can do that.

Don’t listen to anyone that says you can’t do that.’”

That is something her father, a mechanical engineer, taught her.

He passed down his love of problem solving to his daughter. He also passed down his love of mystery novels.

“My dad traveled all over the country for the stainless steel fabrication business, and when he would come home from his business and sales trips, my mother would unpack his bag and there would be detective novels in there,” she remembers. “I had a special relationship with my father; he took me to his machine shops and I saw how he jumped in to help employees and worked with his hands—and if there was anybody in this world that I wanted to emulate, it was my father.”

After completing her degree in general engineering, Pellegrino took a job at GE Aviation, then left to get married and be a stay-athome mom to her four children. And rather than seeing her absence from the working world as a setback, she viewed it as an opportunity to then return to school and learn something new when her youngest began preschool.

She earned an MBA and taught business at Springfield Technical Community College and Western State University while running her own tax accounting firm on the side. After 22 years, she took advantage of an opportunity to shift career gears again, this time into government. She accepted appointments as a police commissioner in Springfield, Mass., and later as head of the city’s parking authority.

“I was one of five police commissioners and I don’t think many people understand how difficult it is to manage the police department because we were an independent commission that did the hiring and firing—almost like the board in a corporation,” she points out.

“I have always been fascinated with policing. I had an uncle who, when I was a little girl, was a police captain. If I was born in another time, I would’ve wanted very much to be a major crimes unit detective over anything.”

The Springfield commission, which she joined in 1996, hired the first woman police chief of a major city in the Northeast and made changes that kept the Springfield Police Department from what would have been a mandated federal takeover.

“For years I’d been teaching business management, and I understood the concept of managing myself—I ran my own business. I don’t think I ever worked so hard, and it’s a volunteer position. I can’t tell you how many nights I worked until 9 o’clock at night, writing

things or trying to figure things out and to be helpful to the chief,” she says.

After three years on the commission, the mayor asked Pellegrino to take over the Springfield Parking Authority, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. She helped pay off $5 million in bonds over three years and saved the authority from financial ruin.

“I had all the ramps in one of the major garages repaired because the city couldn’t afford to tear the parking garage down,” she explains. “And I brought in a new material so that we could protect the rebar that was already in the concrete and stop the advancement of already damaged rebar.”

Based on her research, interviews and understanding of chemistry, Pellegrino discovered this newer material that hadn’t been widely used yet. And although the government bidding process for the materials to repair the garages was grueling, she never settled.

“That was 24 years ago, and the parking garage still stands there,” she says. “I will tell you, the engineering training did me very well for everything I went into.”

SHE KNOWS THAT ALL THE EVIDENCE POINTS BACK TO HER TRAINING AS AN ENGINEER AT BU. Her engineering background was also valuable when she became a licensed construction supervisor after becoming interested through her work on the Springfield Preservation Trust. Over 13 years, Pellegrino and her business partner rehabbed many historic commercial and residential buildings in and around Springfield that were over a century old.

After her most recent retirement, Pellegrino decided to take a creative writing course at the Springfield Museum. She says that although she’d always written as part of her varied professional life, she’d had restraints on the content—but now the handcuffs were off.

The last novel in her Evil Exists in the West Side trilogy will be published next year, and she’s in the midst of writing a fourth book.

The series takes place in the fictional town of West Side, Mass., outside of Springfield. All crime mysteries, her books feature serial murder plots and are tied together by the main investigator, major crimes unit Captain Rudy Beauregard.

She takes her wide range of life experiences, like being a police commissioner, and uses them as material for her novels, almost as if she went undercover in her own life to do background research for her book plots. “I have an understanding of the law—my husband’s a retired justice from Massachusetts trial court and I have a son who’s a lawyer,” she notes.

Pellegrino doesn’t have to search far and wide for clues as to how she had success over such a wide range of professions; she knows that all the evidence points back to her engineering training at BU: “That training, that analysis of self-criticism, looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Well, you know that’s not really right, go back to the beginning and try again.’”

“So many people think engineers can’t write, but writing, like engineering, is about forming a beginning, middle and end,” she says.

“When you don’t know who the murderer is and you have to stop and figure out what’s going on and look at the evidence, that’s critical thinking, and that’s an engineer.”

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Q&A WITH NAI FELLOW VINOD SARIN

Chen Recognized with Pritzker Award as Outstanding

Researchers Win $900k NSF Grant to Predict Heart Disease, Diabetes Using Machine

and optimizing treatment protocols for chronic diseases.

“Protocols of this type are typically empirical, using a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Cassandras. “They assess the stage of the disease and adapt medication based on that, but not the patient. By incorporating specific, personalized interventions with recommendations, clinicians can intervene before a patient’s condition reaches a critical phase.”

In addition to methodological and algorithmic development, the project will pilot the new algorithms by integrating them into the electronic health-record system at BMC and 14 affiliated community health centers.

“Personalized, predictive healthcare is the future of medicine,” says Mishuris. “Our research is geared toward providing clinicians with powerful, interpretable data to achieve that goal. Physicians are drowning in data and administrative processes. Our research approach will help physicians manage the deluge of clinical and patient data to make decisions in a more systematic fashion.”

—maureen stanton

From left to right: Professor Christos Cassandras, Professor Ioannis Paschalidis and Assistant Professor of Medicine Rebecca Mishuris

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Professor and Director of the Biological Design Center Christopher Chen.

Wong and Holt Awarded $1.59M to Advance New Treatment for Surgical Adhesions NEW FUNDING WILL HELP DEVELOP A NONINVASIVE METHOD USING TARGETED MICROBUBBLES

B PHOTOGRAPH OF CHEN BY CHITOSE SUZUKI

of Medicine Rebecca Mishuris will lead the new, interdisciplinary research collaboration.

They will create a new generation of predictive methods based on supervised machine learning techniques that are interpretable, have higher predictive power and can handle more data.

The researchers will develop an approach based on novel mathematical methods and the requisite algorithms where electronic health records and real-time health data—including wearable, implantable and home-based, networked diagnostic devices—can be used to develop prediction analytics that anticipate future events such as hospitalizations, readmissions and transitioning to an acute stage of a disease.

These predictions trigger personalized interventions, ranging from increased monitoring and doctor visits to optimized treatment policies adapted to each patient.

They will also focus on enabling personalized treatment based on learning

PHOTOGRAPHS OF PASCHALIDIS AND CASSANDRAS BY FRANK CURRAN

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esearchers from the College of Engineering and Boston Medical Center (BMC) will use a three-year, $900,000 NSF grant to develop and pilot a health informatics system to predict patients at risk of heart disease or diabetes and enable early intervention and personalized treatment.

“Our research vision is to deliver personalized healthcare, from prediction to diagnostics to population health management,” explains Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE), director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE).

Diagnosing these chronic diseases requires complex sets of clinical and pathological data, which often are not comprehensive, consistent or up to date for treating physicians. As a result, higher-risk patients often don’t receive necessary treatment while lower-risk ones do, leading to poor patient outcomes and unnecessary costs.

Paschalidis, CISE member Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) and BMC Associate Chief Medical Information Officer and BU School of Medicine Assistant Professor

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rofessor Christopher Chen (BME, MSE) has been selected to receive the 2019 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society’s (BMES) premier recognition for outstanding achievements and leadership in the science and practice of biomedical engineering.

“I’m honored to receive the Pritzker Award and join the highly distinguished list of past recipients to champion the importance of biomedical engineering,” says Chen. “I’m looking forward to sharing our work at the annual BMES meeting in October.”

Chen’s research focuses on regenerative medicine, specifically how everyday physical and mechanical forces that cells and tissues

experience affect how they organize, function and go awry in disease. In his early work, he developed microfabrication-based cell culture technologies and used them to elucidate how cell shape affects whether a cell lives or dies, or which types of cells stem cells become; these studies inspired an entire field at the interface of micro- and nanotechnology and biomedical research. Most recently, his research has focused on organizing cells and biomaterials to mimic tissue architecture and using those biomimetic cultures to advance the understanding of disease and regeneration.

Chen is also the director of the Biological Design Center and deputy director for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cellular Metamaterials, both housed at BU. He is also a member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

BU is one of only two institutions to have two professors receive the prestigious award— James Collins, a pioneer in synthetic biology, was honored in 2014. —liz sheeley

etter known as scar tissue, adhesions are a long-known side effect of surgery. But when adhesions form after abdominal surgery, they can sometimes cause pain and further health complications, and doctors cannot predict whether a patient will develop adhesions that cause painful symptoms.

Professor Joyce Wong (BME, MSE) and Associate Professor R. Glynn Holt (ME) have discovered a possible noninvasive, preventative treatment to keep abdominal adhesions from forming after surgery—and with a new NIH grant for phase II of their project, they hope to continue working to develop it for clinical use one day.

A relatively new innovation in the medical field, microbubbles have been used for

diagnostic imaging with ultrasound and drug delivery. Funded by the Dean’s Catalyst Award (DCA) in 2015, Wong and Holt originally sought to see if microbubbles could be used to noninvasively diagnose surgical adhesions, and their research showed surprising results.

“We are grateful to the college because this work was seeded by a DCA and it successfully led to phase I and now, phase II funding,” says Wong. Both phases are collaborations with Nanovalent Pharmaceuticals, a small company that will be licensing the technology.

After injecting the microbubbles into rats with abdominal adhesions and using ultrasound to image where the bubbles localized,

they discovered that the microbubbles had destroyed the adhesions.

“Bubbles can destroy just about anything, depending on how hard they collapse,” says Holt. “We’re not sure if that’s the mechanism behind this, but it’s definitely a possibility.”

In addition to examining that question, this new phase of the study will also look at the optimal formulation for the microbubble shell and the most effective frequency and duration of the ultrasound.

“We’re hoping down the line that this treatment could be used as prescriptive, and be performed maybe 24 hours or so after surgery to prevent adhesions from forming and break up early adhesions,” says Wong.

—liz sheeley ENGINEER SPRING 2019 BU.EDU/ENG

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Sen and Han Win NSF Grant to Advance Study of the Cocktail Party Effect

Ji-Xin Cheng Elected OSA Fellow

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P Associate Professor Kamal Sen

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he NSF has awarded two ENG professors nearly $1 million as part of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative. Principal Investigator Associate Professor Kamal Sen (BME) and Coprincipal Investigator Associate Professor Xue Han (BME) will study the neural networks that allow the brain to distinguish sounds from each other.

“I’m really excited about launching this new interdisciplinary collaboration with Xue,” says Sen. “By merging our expertise in computational analysis and modeling with Xue’s expertise in powerful optogenetic techniques to probe neural circuits, we can combine theory and sophisticated experiments to work towards solving the longstanding cocktail party problem.”

The cocktail party effect, an auditory phenomenon where the subject can selectively choose to listen to one sound source while in a noisy environment, is not a well-understood biological process. Even when hearing is restored with medical devices in patients with hearing loss, they still have a difficult time concentrating on one sound source at a time; this suggests a neurological basis for the cocktail party effect.

As part of the NSF Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems program, the grant will expand on Sen’s previous work with songbirds while transitioning to using optogenetic techniques in mice, Han’s expertise. Optogenetic techniques use light to control neurons

Q&A WITH PROFESSOR VINOD SARIN

Associate Professor Xue Han by switching them on and off, and allow researchers to isolate specific neuronal pathways for study. Sen’s previous research with songbirds looked at the electrical activity of neurons in the auditory complex while the birds listened to a song from one source, either in isolation or in the presence of noise interference from another source.

The researchers found that there are auditory neurons with different response properties that are used to react to multiple sound sources. Depending on the location of the multiple sounds, different neurons are activated in the bird’s brain to allow it to detect the single song over the noisy interference.

These results suggest a network of neurons, each with slightly different response properties that fire depending on the locations of both the sound the listener is detecting and the noise source. This study laid the groundwork for the grant proposal, showing that similar neurons

hen Professor Vinod Sarin (ME, MSE) isn’t conceiving of a new surface coating, you might find him trying to grow orchids in his apartment. Those two activities aren’t totally disparate from one another in Sarin’s eyes, since plants provide him with endless inspiration for new ideas in his materials science lab. In honor of his creativity and relentless passion for innovation, Sarin has been elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

rofessor Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE) has been elevated to the rank of Fellow by the Optical Society of America (OSA) for his outstanding contributions to the invention and development of label-free optical spectroscopic imaging technologies with groundbreaking applications to biology, medicine and materials science.

According to the OSA, “Fellows are members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics.

No more than 10 percent of the total OSA membership may be chosen as Fellows, making the process both highly selective and competitive.”

A world leader in molecular spectroscopic imaging, Cheng is also the Theodore Moustakas Professor of Optoelectronics and Photonics, an American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering Fellow and received the Craver Award from The Coblentz Society in 2015.

Cheng has authored over 220 peerreviewed articles and holds 10 US patents— including one for the coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering microscope—and is lead editor of the first book on coherent Raman scattering microscopy. In 2014, he cofounded Vibronix, Inc., a company with the mission of saving lives through medical device innovations. Read more about Cheng’s work on pages 8 (Breast Cancer Beacon), 27 (BRAIN Initiative) and 31 (DOE Grant). —tami lawless

exist in mice, presenting the opportunity to probe the underlying circuits in mice using optogenetic tools for silencing or activating specific neuron types.

Uncovering the neural circuits involved in these processes could lead to developing better hearing aids and cochlear implants, and also push speech recognition technology forward.

“Technologies like Amazon’s Alexa Echo or Apple’s Siri have difficulty functioning when there are multiple speakers,” notes Sen. “But once we understand the biological circuit, we can translate that into an electronic one.”

—liz sheeley

BU Research: How did you first become interested in materials science and surface coating technologies?

Sarin: After graduating from high school in India, I entered my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin as a 17-year-old with no background, so to speak, in either science or engineering. My first materials science course led me to immediately switch my major from electrical engineering to metallurgy, which is the study of the physical and chemical behaviors of metals.

Several years later, after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with

my ScD, I joined Sandvik in Stockholm, Sweden, where my first assignment was to improve and develop new wear-resistant surface coatings using chemical vapor deposition technology, a method commonly used to produce thin films.

You’re a prolific inventor, holding more than 80 patents. What are some surfaces you’ve encountered throughout your life that have provided you with the inspiration for (or frustration leading to) new ideas?

For me, the challenge lies beyond the surface, in the depth and understanding of the material within. Inspiration comes from nature (especially how plants—specifically flowers—develop and bloom), the exchange of ideas and the will to never give up. My frustration comes from never being truly satisfied with my results—I am always striving for the next level or improvement and as a result, sometimes moving backwards.

If you had to choose only one material to work with from now on, which one would you pick? Why? The application really determines the choice of material. Keeping that in mind,

if I had to focus on one thing, it would be developing better transparent optical ceramic thin films to enhance the detection of breast cancer.

Let’s go beyond the surface (pun intended).

What was the most meaningful (or the most challenging) moment of your career?

The most meaningful thing has been to pursue my passion for research and technology without sacrificing family time and all my other passions. I approach challenges with an open mind, trying to analyze and learn from my mistakes—to me, that and the desire to solve problems is the path to innovation.

These days many people feel like work mode is never turned off. As you hinted above, family is clearly important to you. How have you prioritized making time outside of your career?

We can all find time for what we consider to be important—the key is being flexible and not making all your decisions based on career optimization. My greatest passion—a notch above all others—are my three grandchildren, Maya, Nina and Zian.

When you’re not with your grandkids or working in the lab, what else do you enjoy doing?

Photography, tennis, and trying to grow orchids. —kat j. mcalpine

$3.3M Awarded to ENG Researchers under NIH BRAIN Initiative CHENG AND HAN WILL STUDY THE MECHANISM OF ULTRASOUND NEUROSTIMULATION

P PHOTOGRAPH OF XUE HAN BY SCOTT NOBLES

LONG-KNOWN AUDITORY PHENOMENON REMAINS LITTLE UNDERSTOOD

Materials Scientist Elected to the National Academy of Inventors

rofessor Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE) and Associate Professor Xue Han (BME) have been awarded a five-year, $3.3M grant from the NIH under the BRAIN Initiative, a collaboration between government agencies, private foundations and research institutes and universities.

“This award is a great example of the highly collaborative research environment at BU,” Cheng, who joined the faculty in 2017, notes.

“Here, I am able to collaborate with bright scientists like Xue, who I am extremely grateful for, as she brought me into the BRAIN Initiative.

Collaborations like this one have helped me quickly build up a new research direction.”

Their research proposal has three specific aims, but overall plans to deliver a systematic understanding of the effects of a noninvasive brain stimulation technique, ultrasound

neuromodulation. By developing extensive knowledge of how this technique works, the researchers will build a new foundation for the design of ultrasound neuro-stimulators for basic neuroscience research as well as treatment of neurological disorders.

Han first started exploring this research through a 2015 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, which funded her examination of the biophysical mechanisms of ultrasound neuromodulation.

“We are very excited to continue this research effort using the novel opto-acoustic technique developed by Ji-Xin,” she says.

Cheng’s expertise in imaging and optoacoustic technology complements Han’s in neuroengineering and neuroscience. Combining these areas of research will allow them to study

ultrasound effects with high precision in space and time at single cell and sub-cellular levels.

Understanding ultrasound at a cellular level has wide-ranging implications, as it’s been shown to stimulate peripheral nerves, the spinal cord and important circuits in the brain such as the cortex that relays sensory messages to the body and the auditory complex.

The team plans to use novel technologies to stimulate an area less than one millimeter wide and record the effects. They will finely tune the ultrasound frequency in the experiment and record how neurons react and then communicate with each other. They will also be able to see how individual neurons behave. This detailed map will let them see how a neuron closer or further away from the ultrasound stimulation behaves and what kind of communication signals are sent off in response. —liz sheeley ENGINEER SPRING 2019 BU.EDU/ENG

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Three ENG Professors Named IEEE Fellows

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Katherine Yanhang Zhang Named ASME Fellow

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ssociate Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME, BME, MSE) has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Just three percent of ASME members become fellows. To be nominated and elected, a member must meet qualifications in at least one of nine categories; Zhang was chosen for her accomplishments in research and education. “I am honored by this recognition of my impact in research in the community,” she says.

Zhang’s research focuses on the mechanics of blood vessels and how

at Princeton University to build a mathematical model of how feedbacks between these types of communication allow individuals in groups to coordinate their behavior.

To study this phenomenon, the researchers will use a long-standing model organism for collective behavior, the social amoeba—a type of slime mold that communicates between cells through a molecule that is used for communication inside the cells of many different organisms. Because it’s a common signaling molecule, there are existing sensors that the researchers can re-engineer to visualize long-range communication dynamics between the slime mold cells. The short-range communication will be

cardiovascular diseases such as diabetes affect them. She combines experiments and computational modeling to understand how various biomechanical, biochemical and structural factors interplay in vessel injury and healing. In addition to her research, Zhang performs educational outreach, develops undergraduate and graduate curricula and mentors students.

An international, nonprofit membership organization founded in 1880, ASME promotes the art, science and practice of multidisciplinary engineering. The society holds multiple conferences, courses and workshops throughout the year to promote continuing education from the undergraduate to professor level. In addition to being academics, ASME members are business leaders, entrepreneurs and industry engineers. —liz sheeley

Assistant Professor Allyson Sgro

mapped by visualizing how the cells control how well they stick together when they interact and touch each other.

Sgro hopes that with a mathematical framework that captures how single cells use feedback to work together in groups, they will be able to identify general practices by which all organisms control group behavior.

—liz sheeley

Associate Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang

PHOTOGRAPH OF SHARIFZADEH BY MICHAEL D. SPENCER. CASTAÑÓN BY FRANK CURRAN. RAMACHANDRAN AND SALIGRAMA BY CYDNEY SCOTT

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ssistant Professor Allyson Sgro (BME) has been awarded a two-year, $150,000 grant under the NSF’s 10 Big Ideas program to elucidate how cells work together to form groups.

“One of the goals of the Biological Design Center at BU, which I am a part of, is to understand life’s design principles,” says Sgro. “When I saw this call for proposals, I realized that my work and the center’s goal fit perfectly.”

Sgro’s research focuses on understanding how cells work together and make decisions to form groups; she’ll study how they use both short- and long-range communication to do things like synchronize behaviors and cluster together. Then, she’ll work with a collaborator

A series of time-lapse images show how social amoeba cluster together for survival after starvation.

IMAGES PROVIDED BY ALLYSON SGRO. PHOTOGRAPH OF SGRO BY CYDNEY SCOTT

Sgro Lands Grant to Study One of the NSF’s 10 Big Ideas

rofessors David Castañón (ECE, SE), Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE, MSE) and Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE) have been named fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology.

“It is a great honor to be recognized as a fellow by IEEE,” Castañón says. “I’ve the highest regard for the accomplishments of the many IEEE Fellows I have interacted with, and I am delighted that IEEE has included me in this select group.”

Castañón’s research has focused on dynamic decision-making in uncertain environments and how to synthesize incoming information to make those decisions. This means developing algorithms—which can be used in applications such as threat detection, multi-target tracking, sensor management and object recognition and control— that extract maximal information from noisy sensors and select optimal decisions in real-time scenarios.

Professors David Castañón, Siddharth Ramachandran and Venkatesh Saligrama

Ramachandran’s research involves the study of the spatial complexity of light—how photons that twist and turn, rather than travel in a straight path, fundamentally alter light-matter interactions. His work has impacted and spawned applications in disparate areas ranging from quantum communications and sensing to high-power lasers and biomedical imaging. He calls being named a fellow “an immense honor and privilege.”

Head of the data science and machinelearning lab, Saligrama has been recognized for his contributions to detection and estimation theory for structured signals, a subfield of machine learning, which relies on engineers’ supervision to train algorithms to accurately predict outcomes or behaviors. When that data is limited or unavailable, they are unable to guide those algorithms towards correct

decisions; his recent work deals with machine learning that accounts for limited resources.

He has made important strides in understanding such non-ideal scenarios to deal with these and other resource-constrained environments.

Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. The institute publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 1,300 active industry standards.

According to the IEEE, the number of fellows selected in any one year “does not exceed onetenth of one percent of the total voting institute membership.” —liz sheeley

Sharifzadeh Touted as Emerging Leader

she can detail the atomic-scale properties and define the characteristics of materials.

“Not all materials behave in the same way when exposed to light energy,” she explains.

“We look at how a single electron is excited by light absorption and predict its movement once it is excited, which is how energy is extracted from light. Those data can tell us why a particular material would be good or not good for a specific device such as solar panels.”

As an electrical engineering and computer science major at the University of California Berkeley, Sharifzadeh became intrigued by how electronic devices work and why, which led her to study solid-state physics during her doctoral program at Princeton University. Her research interests evolved from her drive to understand how materials allow electronics to work on a deeper level. In 2014, she joined BU and, in 2017, won the US Department of Energy Early Career Research Award. —liz sheeley

A Assistant Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh

ssistant Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh (ECE, MSE, Physics) has been recognized

by Nature as one of 11 early- to mid-career scientists making an impact in their fields. Leaders were chosen from among 500 scientists and evaluated based on publishing and citation rate and quality, industry links, and coauthorship networks from Nature Index and the League of Scholars Whole-of-Web. “It’s an honor to be recognized in this way,” says Sharifzadeh. “What we can do in the field of computational materials science has grown significantly in the past few years, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Sharifzadeh’s research aims to understand how materials respond electronically to light.

Through computational models and analysis,

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Duan Wins DARPA Young Faculty Award

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ssistant Professor Chuanhua Duan (ME, MSE) has received the 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA).

One of 35 YFA awardees this year, Duan will receive close to $500,000 from DARPA over the next two years to help fund his research into replicating cell-tocell communication; he could receive an additional $500,000 based on the project’s progress.

“Cells talk to each other by releasing and receiving specific chemicals. If you can communicate with cells in their own language, then you can create new interfacing devices to control or interact with cells to keep all the cell functions intact,” explains Duan. “DARPA wants a new technology that can perform chemical-based communication between an

artificial device and real cells with sufficient temporal and spatial resolution.”

Duan’s research focuses on understanding ion and molecule transport in nanochannels and the development of new fluidic devices or approaches to control or improve transport for applications in healthcare, energy systems and thermal management. Current methods to study and re-create cell-to-cell communication rely on electrical or optical signals, but cells actually communicate through chemical signals, upon which Duan’s method is based.

The base of his proposal comes from a snag in another project—in the presence of unexpected large nanoparticles, a nanopore he was using to study cancer-related biosensing was acting like a voltage-gated ion channel, a ubiquitous channel in cell membrane that cells use

Researchers Win $1.5M DOE Grant to release signaling chemicals to communicate with each other. These channels are controlled by electrical signals, but then once triggered, they open up and chemicals are released by pure diffusion. By using a 3-D nanofluidic device with an individually addressable nanopore array as a stand-in for voltage-gated ion channels, Duan could re-create a more natural way that cells communicate. Rather than the current methods of using electrical signals to directly stimulate cells in a nonspecific and uncomfortable way, he can use electrical signals as triggers to talk to cells at specific locations and times. This new method would be more authentic and may pave the way for communication with any type of cell, resulting in advances in prosthetics, neural interfaces and sensors. —liz sheeley

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ssistant Professor Mary Dunlop (BME), Assistant Professor Wilson Wong (BME) and Professor Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE) were awarded a three-year, $1.5M DOE grant to develop technology to better understand and measure the synthesis of biofuels in living cells.

“This project uses complementary skills from each of our labs and the intersection is a really exciting interdisciplinary approach to an important problem,” says Dunlop, the project’s principal investigator.

Biofuels, including biodiesel, are renewable sources of energy, but producing them economically has been one of the biggest barriers to their widespread use. Scientists have managed to use synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to use living cells to produce the precursor to biofuels, fatty acids, but the production rate is relatively low and the process is imprecise.

The current way to quantify fatty acid production is through a method called gas chromatography—mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The alternative method Dunlop, Wong and Cheng are proposing would allow researchers to test hundreds to thousands of cell types at once and greatly improve the current throughput of GC-MS. The DOE-funded project uses an imaging method pioneered in the Cheng lab called stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) to image cells, which drives the potential to dramatically increase throughput while simultaneously providing a direct measurement of fatty acid biosynthesis.

“This new method would give us a lot more freedom to explore different types of cells, and change the DNA within them to increase or decrease cellular activities that we might think contribute to fatty acid production,” says Dunlop. “The ultimate promise

Longtime ECE Faculty Member Eric Schwartz Mourned

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University, he was the first to use the term computational neuroscience—a now-common phrase that encapsulates research areas such as neural networks, brain theory and theoretical neuroscience. These areas of research are the foundation for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Eric’s work beautifully illustrated the interdisciplinary goals of our unique department,” said Professor Stephen Grossberg (BME, Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences), who recruited Schwartz to BU when he was chair of the cognitive and neural systems department. “Eric was a devoted and inspiring teacher to most of our students, since he taught core courses to which they flocked. He was passionately committed to his scientific research and to teaching and training his students.”

Schwartz held three patents for algorithms and machinery that led to the development of the first miniature autonomous vehicle to drive the streets of Boston in 1992. Schwartz performed this research at Vision Applications, Inc., a company he founded in 1990 with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

NEWS BYTES FACULTY Assistant Professor Lei Tian (ECE) won the Best 3D Paper Award at the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) 2018 Conference for Defense and Commercial Sensing.

Professor Eric Schwartz

He was the author of many highly cited papers and a book on computational neuroscience, which was the first to lay out how research problems in neuroscience and computer science overlapped.

Schwartz also served on the editorial boards of three journals, Neural Networks, the Pergamon Press Series on Neural Networks, and the Journal for Intelligent Systems. He was also an advisor to DARPA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology study group on funding priorities in neural networks.

Originally from the Bronx, Schwartz received his doctoral degree from Columbia University in high energy physics in 1973, and performed postdoctoral research in a neurophysiology lab in the School of Medicine.

—liz sheeley

Professor Prakash Ishwar (ECE, SE), Professor Margrit Betke (Computer Science), Assistant Professor Lei Guo (Emerging Media Studies) and Assistant Professor Derry Wijaya (Computer Science) were awarded a $1 million, four-year research grant from the NSF to advance their work in deciphering media coverage

surrounding international events and public reaction.

Associate Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) and Assistant Professor Michelle Sander (ECE) were selected as speakers for the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Stars Workshop.

STUDENTS Rachel Petherbridge (BME) is the first BU student to be awarded a George J. Mitchell Scholarship, given to 12 postgraduate students a year for outstanding erudition, leadership and commitment to public service.

Graduate students Boyou Zhou (ECE), Rasoul Jahanshahi (ECE) and Anmol Gupta (ECE) received the Best Paper Award for “Hardware Performance Counters Can Detect Malware: Myth or Fact?” at the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery ASIA Conference on Computer and Communication Security.

Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Kutys (BME) was awarded a K99 grant from the National Institutes of Health, which funds and supports new scientists in transitioning into independent investigators.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame named graduate student Jang Hwan Cho (BME) a finalist in this year’s Collegiate Inventors Competition.

Cho is being recognized for his work in developing a new chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, published earlier this year in Cell.

Graduate student Lu Lan (ECE) won the Optical Society of America’s pitch panel on laser science to photonic applications tech transfer during their annual Conference of Lasers and Electro-Optics.

IN MEMORIAM PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANK CURRAN

PROFESSOR ERIC SCHWARTZ (ECE), a longtime faculty member and pioneer in computational neuroscience, died on December 31 following an illness. He was 71.

Schwartz joined the BU faculty in 1992 with joint appointments in ECE and cognitive and neural systems, and a secondary appointment in anatomy and neurobiology. His research focused on the computational basis of brain function, neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the visual system as well as computer graphics and visual computation.

“Eric’s was a broad mind with a great passion for and understanding of many topics,” said ECE Chair Professor W. Clem Karl. “I had the personal pleasure of serving on the thesis committee of one of his doctoral students whose thesis focused on the organization of the visual cortex. It was through this interaction that I witnessed both the breadth and depth of Eric’s knowledge and understanding, which ranged from log-polar computational signal models, to Macaque monkey and human physiology, to issues in very-large-scale integration implementation of computational structures.”

Previously a professor in computer science, neural sciences and psychiatry at New York

of this type of approach is that it can be used on a wide variety of cell types.”

The project has three main objectives that blend into one ultimate goal: to design, screen and categorize thousands of genetic variants to optimize fatty acid production.

Along the way, they’ll use SRS in combination with genome engineering and gene circuit design to reach their goal of building a library of genetically different cell types categorized by the quality and quantity of their fatty acid production.

The library would contain data specific to each cell type tested, including which fatty acid the cell makes, the quantity and quality of the product and the byproducts made during synthesis. Down the line, a library like this could allow engineers to quickly pick the best genetic variant to produce high yields of their desired product, including biofuels.

—liz sheeley

Mr. Robert E. Perry (’47), Fall River, Mass.

Mr. Alfred J. French (’51), Lynnfield, Mass.

Mr. Paul R. White (’54, ’56,’60), Alva, Fla. Mr. Joseph H. Kundel (’57, ’59), Monroe Township, N.J. Mr. Alan W. Wigert (’57), Little Egg Harbor Township, Fla. Mr. David W. Brock (’59), Fort Collins, Colo.

Mr. Martin G. Stauss (’60), Windham, N.H. Major David J. Kempi (’64), Green Valley, Ariz.

Mr. Marshall E. Yudin (’64), Brewster, Mass.

Mr. Charles V. Rice (’69), Warrenton, Va. Mr. Maurice Allen Harris (’94), Layton, Utah

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WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! SEND YOUR CLASS NOTES SUBMISSIONS TO ENGALUM@BU.EDU OR VISIT WWW.BU.EDU/ENG/ALUMNI.

THE SOCIETAL ENGINEERING FUND

Your support funds initiatives that help deepen student education in Societal Engineering values.

The Technology Innovation Scholars Program, the Technology Innovation Concentration, the Imagineering Competition Awards, and our speaker series, Engineers in the Real World, are among the many programs the Societal Engineering Fund supports.

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cofounded the Colorado Nepal Alliance, a nonprofit based in Denver, Colo., focused on enhancing the lives of the people in rural Nepal.

Their current work includes teacher training at the schools they rebuilt after an earthquake and preparing for a medical camp in fall 2019.

Leszczynski accepted the award on behalf of Hines, who was in Nepal working for the alliance.

A principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP, Leatherberry serves Fortune 500 manufacturing, retail and consumer business clients and is responsible for supporting her clients across strategy, tax, enterprise risk, human capital and technology services. She was recently appointed the president of the Deloitte Foundation. She has served on the ENG Dean’s Leadership Advisory Board since 2017 and recently joined the BU Board of Overseers. —liz sheeley

bu.edu/eng/alumni IMAGES COURTESY OF BRENDAN BOURGEA

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uring BU Alumni Weekend in September, the College of Engineering honored three alumni for their career achievements and for the support they have given their alma mater and communities. After Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen’s welcoming address, two current students introduced the three 2018 honorees, Larry Leszczynski (BME’87), Anne Hines (BME’85) and Tonie Leatherberry (ME’85).

Ashray Mohan (BME’19), who participates in Engineers Without Borders, spoke about Leszczynski and Hines; Remi Shittu (BME’19), president of the BU chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, introduced Leatherberry.

Hines is a data analyst for a cardiovascular research group at the Department of Veterans Affairs; her husband, Leszczynski, is an e-Payment Technology Architect at Grant Street Group. They

The team received a $3,000 grant for product development, an invitation to serve on the competition committee the following year, assistance with patent filing and intellectual property and marketing analysis consultation.

Larry Leszczynski (BME’87) and Tonie Leatherberry (ME’85) receive their Distinguished Alumni Awards during Alumni Weekend 2018.

Anne Hines (BME 85), also a 2018 recipient, was unable to attend the ceremony.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANK CURRAN

Distinguished Alumni Awards Honor Three ENG Grads

Brendan Bourgea, captain of the winning 2018 Imagineering Competition team, values the prize money as a way to jump-start his entrepreneurial idea of creating wind turbines in highway medians (below).

facebook.com/BUengalumni.

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NONPROFIT US POSTAGE PAID BOSTON MA PERMIT NO. 1839

FACTS AND FIGURES

MILLION In research expenditures per faculty member according to U.S. News & World Report

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In new, cutting-edge research facilities

Among private engineering graduate programs according to U.S. News & World Report

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