BU ENGineer magazine - spring 2024

EMBRACING THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE AND COLLABORATION.

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

TOP 20% OF ENGINEERING SCHOOLS IN THE U.S.*

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

20 INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH CENTERS 20%

$150 MILLION IN ENGINEERING-RELATED RESEARCH EXPENDITURES

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RANK AMONG ALL GRADUATE ENGINEERING PROGRAMS IN THE U.S.*

Why an Engineering Degree Matters

BY DEAN AD INTERIM ELISE MORGAN

As societal challenges continue to require technology solutions, there is an increasing need for engineers. At a recent meeting of engineering school deans organized by the American Society for Engineering Education, some key statistics were presented: two-thirds of jobs in the United States are supported by Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines; and the demand for engineers outstrips the supply. One estimate indicated a 10 percent growth in the need for engineers, but only a 5 percent growth in the number of engineering undergraduates.

Despite these trends, skepticism about the value of a bachelor’s degree is rising among high school students and others

without a college degree. A growing refrain is that a college degree is overvalued and that certificate programs or on-the-job training will serve a high school graduate just as well or better.

But the reality is that an engineering degree remains enormously valuable in terms of financial and career benefits that last a lifetime. According to a recent study published in the American Educational Research Journal by Liang Zhang and colleagues, engineers came out on top when the career earnings of college graduates from different majors were compared to those of high school graduates.

Beyond financial security, an engineering degree brings professional and personal fulfillment through the opportunities that engineers have to create solutions that transform the lives of many. The chance to work on the problems that matter the most to people, to develop technologies that lift up individuals, their communities and the world, is a reward like no other. I don’t have to look far to see several examples.

Professor Ed Damiano spent many years developing a bionic pancreas for type 1 diabetics. His device—which monitors blood glucose levels and adjusts them up or down as needed every few minutes, thus mimicking the natural pancreas—was recently approved by the FDA and will soon reach patients through a company he cofounded.

Professor Irving Bigio has created a skin cancer detector. Using his expertise in optics and working with a company, he developed a handheld device that a primary care doctor can use to scan a suspicious spot and determine if a referral to a dermatologist is needed.

These innovations exemplify the Societal Engineer. Our researchers employed the skills and imagination of the engineer, leveraged expertise from other disciplines to develop the technology, then partnered with the business community to bring their innovations into use. As a result, these technologies have the potential to improve, extend and save countless lives.

Beyond financial security, an engineering degree brings professional and personal fulfillment through the opportunities that engineers have to create solutions that transform the lives of many.

At Boston University, our emphasis on creating Societal Engineers is paying dividends even among our undergraduates. For example, last year, a team of four mechanical engineering seniors designed a jet engine fueled by aluminum powder that produces no carbon dioxide. They took first prize in a national NASA-sponsored competition to find clean ways to power aircraft.

You can read about more examples in the pages of this magazine. I invite you to learn more about how the Boston University College of Engineering provides value and fulfillment through engineering education and research.

MORGAN PHOTO BY DOUG LEVY

Converging on Training Tomorrow’s Bioengineers

NATION’S FIRST TRAINING PROGRAM FOR BIOLOGICAL CONTROL WORKFORCE WINS NSF GRANT

With a competitive National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award, Boston University is positioning itself to become a major hub not only in the emerging research field of biological feedback control, but also in the training of tomorrow’s engineering biology workforce

“A Convergent Training Program on Biological Control,” codirected by ENG Dean ad interim Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME) and Associate Professor Mary Dunlop (BME), aims to train a diverse group of PhD students—approximately 75 over the next five years—for tomorrow’s workforce in biotech, synthetic biology, manufacturing, robotics, sustainability and other sectors. Professors Christopher Chen (BME, MSE) and Ahmad “Mo” Khalil (BME) are PIs along with Morgan and Dunlop.

Researchers working in biological control focus on understanding and replicating the remarkable abilities that living systems have to self-regulate and adapt by using feedback to respond to changes in their environment. From salamanders that can regrow a lost limb to bacteria that sense and move toward food sources, examples of feedback control abound in nature.

In recent years, researchers have been digging into the complex workings of feedback control as it occurs in nature, with an eye to effecting similar processes artificially. Potential applications include tissue regeneration, sustainable farming, decontaminating polluted water, designing microbes to produce sought-after chemicals in a sustainable manner, and developing assistive devices for the disabled.

However, despite all that promise, opportunities to learn feedback control as it applies in biological contexts are limited

and ad hoc. Control theory traditionally sits within mechanical and electrical engineering curricula, where there isn’t room to delve into nature’s infinite array of biological control strategies. Meanwhile, biology students don’t typically get trained in the quantitative analysis of feedback mechanisms.

To bridge this gap, the BU team has proposed to create—and the NSF is investing nearly $3 million to facilitate—a first-of-itskind graduate training program in biological control. The NRT program will feature all-new courses, boot camps, workshops, co-mentored research and industry internships, all geared to advancing both the field of biological control and the position of BU graduates within it. The program will recruit students from underrepresented demographic groups as well as varied academic backgrounds, including mechanical, biomedical, and electrical engineering, biology, physics, chemistry and data science, among others.

Through the integration of the disciplines involved, faculty and students will “develop a common language and shared body of technical skills in the fundamental underpinnings of biological control,” the team wrote in their proposal to the NSF. Moreover, the team expects new discoveries to result from the transdisciplinary

research projects, broadening researchers’ understanding and potentially leading to new technologies in areas such as molecular-level control algorithms, microbial feedback control systems, self-powered hybrid systems that combine living and engineered parts and advanced robotic systems that can heal and evolve.

The NRT award is one of just 22 the NSF granted this year. The program encompasses a wide range of experts from departments and centers across BU, including not only researchers but also participants from the Newbury Center, the Professional Development and Postdoctoral Affairs office and STEM Pathways. Other ENG faculty involved include Professor Calin Belta (ME, SE, ECE), Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE, BME, MSE), Assistant Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), Assistant Professor Emma Lejeune (ME), Assistant Professor Sheila Russo (ME, MSE),

“BU ENG’s focus on convergence,” says Morgan, “makes us uniquely positioned to bring the field of biological control from an emerging area to a mature discipline.”

Assistant Professor Tommaso Ranzani (ME, MSE, BME), Assistant Professor Michael Albro (ME, MSE, BME), Assistant Professor Brianne Connizzo (BME) and Assistant Professor Jeroen Eyckmans (BME). Other BU faculty collaborators include LaDora Thompson (physical therapy), the Travis M. Roy Professor at the Sargent College of Health & Rehabili-

More Honors for Zhang

Distinguished Professor of Engineering Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE) has garnered an epic string of illustrious honors in the past year. Most recently, she was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA), a learned society of 2,000 members, including more than 30 Nobel Prize laureates. Members are elected for outstanding achievements in science, arts and governance, and their exceptional standing in society as a result of their scientific work, publications or leadership. Zhang was elected to the academy’s technical and environmental sciences class. She was officially inducted as a member of the EASA this spring at the organization’s annual inauguration ceremony in Salzburg, Austria

Zhang is a pioneer in metamaterials— materials with properties not found in nature. Among her most noteworthy accomplishments, Zhang has invented a metamaterial that markedly boosts the

signal-to-noise ratio of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and thus significantly improves the performance of MRI; and a metamaterial that can curtail noise without blocking airflow, addressing long-standing noise issues in a wide range of mechanical systems, in which highly efficient airpermeable sound silencers are required.

In the fall, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, bestowed on Zhang its prestigious Walston Chubb Award for Innovation. Zhang received the honor and delivered the Walston Chubb Award Lecture at Sigma Xi’s annual International Forum on Research Excellence, held in Long Beach, California.

Remarkably, the Chubb was Zhang’s second high-profile award in the space of a week. She received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Per Brüel Gold Medal for Noise Control and Acoustics just days earlier in New Orleans at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

tation Sciences, as well as Assistant Professor Joe Larkin (biology), Assistant Professor Maria Kamenetska (physics) and Associate Professor Zeba Wunderlich (biology) from the College of Arts & Sciences

“BU ENG’s focus on convergence— bringing people from many disciplines together to work on societal challenges— makes us uniquely positioned to bring the field of biological control from an emerging area to a mature discipline,” says Morgan, who is also the Maysarah K. Sukkar Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation, and former director of the Center for Multiscale & Translational Mechanobiology, where the project will be headquartered. “We look forward to educating tomorrow’s leaders in this area and creating a training program that can be replicated at other universities too.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

PHOTO BY CYDNEY SCOTT

Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE)

College Honors Distinguished Alumni

The College of Engineering and Dean ad interim Elise Morgan conferred the Distinguished Alumni Award on three alumni last fall, recognizing their impact on their professions and communities as well as their outstanding service to the BU Engineering community. Recipients exemplify the core values of the Societal Engineer and demonstrate an enduring commitment to the College of Engineering and Boston University.

TYE BRADY (ENG’90)

Brady received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from BU in 1990 and, subsequently, a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from MIT. He was instrumental in creating ENG’s Master of Science in Robotics & Autonomous Systems degree program.

As chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, Brady heads advanced technology and research efforts. Prior to Amazon Robotics,

he spent 15 years with Draper, advancing robotics and spacecraft engineering. In 2009, he was honored by NASA with the Exceptional Public Service Medal.

During his time at Amazon, Brady helped shape the inaugural Robotics Day One Fellowship, which supports uniquely talented students from multicultural backgrounds who are pursuing master’s degrees in technology-related fields at several universities, including BU.

MANUEL MENDEZ (ENG’91)

Mendez earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from BU in 1991 and received his MBA from Northwestern University. He is chief executive officer of Quotient, the world’s leading provider of diagnostic information services.

In 2020, he spearheaded a COVID-19 testing partnership between BU and Quest, which was integral to keeping BU operational during a critical time.

Dedicated to equity, Mendez was involved in the creation of Quest for Health Equity, partnering with Choose for Healthy Life in addressing the health disparities within communities of color in major cities across the United States.

LOUVERE WALKER-HANNON (ENG’00)

Walker-Hannon received a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from BU in 2000 and a master’s degree in geographic information technology from Northeastern University. She has a long history of serving as a STEM advocate and mentor, especially to underrepresented groups. She is a member of Black Girls CODE, the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and Women in Data Science.

As an application engineering senior lead at MathWorks, Walker-Hannon provides technical guidance and strategic direction on the implementation of AI and data science workflows for various applications. She has worked in three different engineering roles throughout her more than 20-year career at MathWorks.

— ISABELLA BACHMAN

Left to right, ENG Dean ad interim Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME), Louvere Walker-Hannon (ENG’00), Tye Brady (ENG’90) and Manuel Mendez (ENG’91).

Some Words of Advice

ALUMNI MENTORS SHARE THEIR WEALTH OF EXPERIENCE WITH CURRENT STUDENTS

Mary Bertrand knew she had put together a good mentoring program when she ran into mechanical engineering sophomore Patriot Berisha (ENG’26) outside ENG’s Career Development office (CDO), asked him how things were going, and Berisha’s face lit up as he talked about his mentor, Arun Srinivasan (ENG’97,’98). Drawing upon a quarter century of engineering and management experience at Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace, Srinivasan had patiently helped Berisha hone his elevator pitch, helping the student develop the confidence he would need to make a strong impression at career fairs and internship interviews

“I think I have one of the better mentors,” Berisha said in a confidential tone, as if he had gotten away with something. After all, more than 70 students were matched with alumni mentors that semester—surely, they couldn’t all have lucked out the way Berisha did.

Bertrand smiled and said, “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.” As ENG’s assistant director for career advising, she has good reason to believe all the mentors are stellar.

The ENG Mentors program is an alumni-student mentoring effort coordinated by the CDO. Bertrand and her staff recruit alumni and match them with students. Mentors must commit to meeting with their students six times a semester, acting as sounding boards and sharing their wisdom and experience as they help students talk through their short- and longterm goals. They dispense tips on résumé writing, guidance on course selection, and advice on grad school, job applications and other career development milestones.

Most meetings are virtual, accommodating alumni in 66 cities in thirteen countries. Mentors are professionals working in high-level roles at top companies across engineering fields—from software to biotech, aerospace

Mentors must commit to meeting with their students six times a semester, acting as sounding boards and sharing their wisdom and experience as they help students talk through their shortand long-term goals.

to electronics—and even non-engineering fields, such as law and finance.

Since Bertrand launched the program in spring 2021, a total of 350 students have been matched with mentors. When the semester concludes, many mentor-student pairs stay in touch and even continue to

meet periodically, such as when a student is mulling a career change or is at a crossroads.

“The door is always open,” says Denise Schier (ENG’81), retired vice president and general manager of AMETEK Inc. A member of the BU Alumni Council and a recipient of a 2017 ENG Distinguished Alumni Award, Schier has mentored multiple students and still checks in with all of them. “I have reached a point in my career where I want to give back to the organizations, the people and the institutions that helped me build a successful career. And BU, particularly, is at the very top of that list.”

Schier is among the 60 percent of mentors who have returned to help students.

“They really are a value-add to our advising capacity,” says Bertrand. “It’s like we’re deputizing these additional career advisors.”

Alumni like Schier boast decades of experience, but even young alumni have much to offer as mentors. In fact, Schier’s

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STEF KANE

Left to right, Jose Lara (ENG’14) meets with his mentee Cesar Jimenez (ENG’25).

first mentee, Jorge Suarez (ENG’20), is now a mentor.

“Having a mentor who is both knowledgeable regarding and active in the industry has helped assuage some of my nerves over entering the workforce,” says aspiring robotics engineer and software developer Jordan Koseki (ENG’24) of his mentor, Ashley Reischman (ENG’17), a software engineer at Amazon Robotics. “As someone who was in my same position relatively recently, she has been able to provide many specific pieces of advice that directly relate to where I am in my career.”

Students and their mentors need not necessarily share a major, especially considering that cross-disciplinary relationships are an ENG hallmark.

“I feel so fortunate to have been paired with an amazing mentor,” one student wrote in a survey response. “Though our business fields were completely different (medical devices and consumer software), the principles of how to present oneself to a future employer are universal, a valuable lesson that I learned through this program.”

“I was glad to be able to help a graduate student deal with the complex issues of finding direction and balance in his life and sorting his priorities,” wrote one alum on the survey. Another noted, “It was a great opportunity to reassure a student that they are

heading in the right direction and that they should be optimistic about their future.”

Mentoring is its own reward, but it can also serve as professional development even for seasoned alums. One mentor’s company subsequently asked him to develop an onboarding curriculum for new hires fresh out of college.

Recruiting alumni for the role has been “surprisingly easy,” says Bertrand. “Alums want to do this; they want to talk to students about their experiences. Part of it is that as professionals, they realize, ‘I wish

Recruiting alumni for the role has been “surprisingly easy,” says Bertrand. “Alums want to do this; they want to talk to students about their experiences. Part of it is that as professionals, they realize, ‘I wish I had had someone to talk to.’”

I had had someone to talk to.’ Or they did have someone to talk to, and now they want to be that person for someone else.”

As the program continues to expand, Bertrand encourages more alumni to consider spending the two or three hours a month required to get involved. “If you want to connect with a student, this isn’t a huge commitment,” she says. “It’s pretty casual.” The CDO also helps by offering an outline for the semester and suggestions for getting the ball rolling. “And it’s pretty joyous,” she adds. “Alumni feel very valuable in the conversations they’re able to have with students, and students value what they get from the alums.”

“Many, many alumni tell us they want to find ways to pay it forward, essentially, and so this is such a nice way to reconnect with their alma mater and support budding engineers,” says Coralie Eggeling, ENG’s assistant dean for development and alumni relations. “And for many of our alumni who credit BU Engineering as a significant reason they are where they are today, having a really meaningful way to give back to current students has been incredibly valuable.”

ENG Mentors is powered by BU Connects, the University’s exclusive online networking platform. To learn more or to sign up to be a mentor, visit buconnects.com.

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY, MICHAEL OUELLETTE

Left to right: Zoe Perkins (ENG’25), Roger Finnerty (ENG’24,‘25), Denise Schier (ENG’81) and Martin Dimo (ENG’23).

Roblyer to Helm New SPIE Journal

Associate Professor Darren Roblyer (BME, ECE) has been appointed editor in chief of Biophotonics Discovery, the newest Gold Open Access journal of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. SPIE is launching the journal as a peer-reviewed outlet for the extensive range of innovative research presented each year at the Photonics West BiOS Symposium

“The goal of this journal is to provide a venue for cutting-edge biophotonics research focused on novel findings, especially as related to basic science and clinical translation,” says Roblyer. “This differentiates the journal from others in the field, as it is less focused on the development of methods and more focused on what can be accomplished with emerging biophotonic

technologies over a wide range of biological questions and clinical applications. I couldn’t be more excited about working with SPIE to launch Biophotonics Discovery.”

Roblyer knows a thing or two about translating biophotonic tech into clinical applications. His inventions include a device that noninvasively images breast tumors and evaluates their response to chemotherapy. In collaboration with physicians, physiologists, biologists, and physicists as well as engineers, the BU Biomedical Optical Technologies Lab, which he runs, develops wearables, remote patient monitoring technologies and custom frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy techniques to address unmet clinical needs in cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and autoimmune diseases.

A recipient of the NIH Trailblazer Award and the Department of Defense Era of Hope Scholar Award, among others, Roblyer earned his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in bioengineering from Rice University.

“Darren Roblyer’s enthusiasm for this

Darren Roblyer (BME, ECE)

new journal will be contagious for the community,” said SPIE Publications and Platform Director Patrick Franzen. “The editor in chief search committee has overwhelming confidence that he has the experience, creativity and leadership drive to successfully launch a new journal in a competitive space.”

Roblyer will appoint the journal’s editorial board, encompassing established leaders and emerging researchers in the biophoton-

“Darren Roblyer’s enthusiasm for this new journal will be contagious for the community,” said SPIE Publications and Platform Director Patrick Franzen.

ics field. Biophotonics Discovery opened to submissions last fall, and the inaugural issue is expected to publish this year.

Founded in 1955 as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, SPIE is an international, not-for-profit professional society for technologists in the optics and photonics fields. SPIE publishes a dozen scientific journals, and its annual Photonics West gathering is one of the industry’s largest combined conference-and-tradeshows.

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Translational Biomedical Advances Highlighted at Inaugural BTEC Symposium

Promising advances in biological engineering were discussed at the Bioengineering Technology & Entrepreneurship Center’s (BTEC) inaugural symposium last fall. The event featured former BME faculty member and current dean of the Brown University School of Engineering Tejal Desai, as well as several BME faculty members and an industry executive

In her remarks at the event’s outset, Dean ad interim Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME) noted that a kick-off event for BTEC had been planned for the facility’s opening in the spring of 2020, but delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the time since classes resumed on campus, Morgan noted that BTEC has become a go-to destination for students and has a perfect home in one of the nation’s preeminent biomedical engineering departments.

“BTEC is a biological engineering makerspace, and the vision is for it to be a place where education and innovation are transformed for bioengineering students

through hands-on learning in partnership with industry,” said BTEC Executive Director Diane Joseph-McCarthy.

BTEC has become a go-to destination for students and has a perfect home in one of the nation’s preeminent biomedical engineering departments.

A member of the BME faculty from 2002 to 2005, Desai gave a talk titled “A Fantastic Voyage: Combining Nanoengineering, Biology, and Clinical Translation to Improve Therapy for Patients.” She noted that her field is at an inflection point as it moves to apply data collection to understand biological processes and aid patients.

One area of focus is modulating the epithelial barriers of the skin and eyes to introduce therapeutics less invasively and more enduringly; Desai cited the eye as an example. Currently, patients suffering from macular degeneration must endure injections into the eyeball because therapeutic antibodies cannot cross the eye’s surface. What’s more, the antibodies dissipate quickly, requiring patients to undergo the uncomfortable procedure several times a year. Desai is working on developing a nanopore delivery device that would release medication slowly and at a constant rate—and would require just one injection per year.

She also outlined an effort to dial up (or down) the body’s immune reaction, which produces inflammation. The approach involves nanometer-scale wires with attached antibodies, which can capture cytokines. In so doing, they have the potential to increase the immune response to kill cancer cells, or to mitigate it to treat diseases like diabetes and psoriasis.

BME faculty making presentations included William F. Warren Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering Christopher Chen on “Models: The Path from Ideas to Impact”; Associate Professor Mary Dunlop on “Optogenetic Feedback Control of Gene Expression and Antibiotic Resistance in Single Cells”; Assistant Professor Hadi Nia on “Crystal Ribcage: A Platform for Probing Real-Time Lung Function at Cellular Resolution in Health and Disease”; Assistant Professor Timothy Shea on “Sweet Biomaterials for Neural Repair”; and Assistant Professor Michelle Teplensky on “Harnessing Nanoscale Engineering to Program Immunology for Potent Vaccines.”

BTEC industrial advisory board member Jeremy Jenkins, US head of discovery sciences at BTEC-member company Novartis, spoke on “Mining Unbiased Compound Profiling Data for Drug Discovery.”

Consisting of three suites—Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Engineering; Biosensors and Instrumentation; and Digital and Predictive Medicine Design—BTEC offers bioengineering students hands-on learning and advances cutting-edge technologies identified in partnership with industry.

— ISABELLA BACHMAN

Left to right: BME Chair and Professor John White, Dean ad interim Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME), keynote speaker and dean of the Brown University School of Engineering Tejal Desai and BTEC Executive Director Diane Joseph-McCarthy.

Nia, Economo Teams Earn Kilachand Fund Awards

WINNERS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH FUND GRANTS AIM TO IMPROVE STUDY OF LUNG DISEASE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

“This innovation will enable us to visualize the entire lung with an optical microscope at different scales, from cell level all the way to the entire organ.”

When infection or disease strikes the lung—through cancer, pneumonia, or COVID-19, for example—it’s tough for researchers to see what’s going on inside the organ. Even if they simulate in a lab the disease in a lung, they can’t recreate the forces the rib cage places on it without blocking their view of what’s happening. That’s about to change

A crystal rib cage, developed by a Boston University engineer—and being refined in collaboration with a BU medical researcher specializing in pneumonia—will enable scientists to visualize in real time how the

lung develops immunity against infection.

“This innovation will enable us to visualize the entire lung with an optical microscope at different scales, from cell level all the way to the entire organ,” says Hadi T. Nia, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

The crystal rib cage is one of two projects to win a 2023 Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering award.

Since its launch in 2017, the fund has awarded $14 million to support projects that have advanced science, built collaborative structures for interdisciplinary research and expanded funding opportunities. Past Kilachand award winners have made important scientific breakthroughs, secured patents, founded companies and sparked important spin-off research.

“Our research is exactly the type of interdisciplinary work the Kilachand Fund was designed to support,” says Joseph Mizgerd, a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medi-

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CYDNEY SCOTT

From left: Michael Economo (BME), Brian Cleary (CAS), Hadi Nia (BME, MSE) and Joseph Mizgerd (CAMED).

cine professor of medicine, who is leading the crystal rib cage project with Nia. “Hadi can engineer systems that allow us to study lungs in ways that nobody else on Earth can. And I have immunological and respiratory infection expertise from decades of work on this topic. Working together, we can potentially transform how pneumonia is treated, and possibly other respiratory diseases and cancer.” They were awarded $500,000 per year for up to three years.

BU trustee Rajen Kilachand (Questrom’74, Hon.’14) established the fund with a historic gift of $115 million with the aim of driving solutions to some of the biggest challenges in the life sciences, including heart disease, cancer and degenerative brain diseases. The second 2023 winning project will investigate genetic and neuronal networks of healthy and diseased brains.

DEFENDING AGAINST PNEUMONIA

A result of respiratory infection, pneumonia is a massive public health concern and more common among the elderly and in children. “Pneumonia is the number one cause of death globally for children under five,” says Mizgerd. “In the US, it’s the top cause of hospitalization for children under nine, as well as the top cause of death for hospitalized people over 65 years of age.” A person’s age and history of prior infection are two key factors contributing to the incidence and severity of pneumonia.

But scientists aren’t sure why some people have immunity when others don’t. Mizgerd says that understanding the impacts of age and prior respiratory infections on someone’s immune response to pneumonia has been a long-standing challenge. People can be exposed to the same microbe and have vastly different outcomes—a phenomenon also seen with COVID-19. “There’s something different within us that determines the outcome of these respiratory infections,” says Mizgerd, “and we’re trying to understand exactly what those differences might be.”

The crystal rib cage “will allow us to visualize every step of disease progression in real time,” says Nia. The researchers will also test how changes in the bloodstream and within the lung itself impact immu-

nity. “In addition, we can evaluate the role of cells that are resident in the lungs and those circulating inside the bloodstream in order to evaluate how differences in age and infection experience affect immunity.” That deeper understanding of exactly how immunity against pneumonia works could help inform further studies on prevention and treatment, from improving vaccines to developing new therapeutics.

The research being done by Economo, Chen and Cleary is high risk, but has the potential for big rewards—it’s very new, highly interdisciplinary, and could open up lots of fresh ground for other researchers. The team has been awarded $250,000 per year for up to two years.

UNDERSTANDING CONNECTIONS IN THE BRAIN

The brain is a complex network made up of thousands of cell types, each expressing a different set of genes. While these patterns of gene expression are associated with cellular connectivity, information processing and susceptibility to disease, scientists still don’t fully understand how they work. This year’s other Kilachand Fund award winners intend to change that with a new approach to exploring how genes express themselves in the brain.

The traditional way of defining the impact of genetic expression on brain development and disease involves taking out one gene at a time from an animal and then seeing what happens. Does its brain wire up correctly or does it end up with a disease? “The downside of this classic approach is

that it’s just very, very slow,” says Michael Economo (ENG’12), an ENG assistant professor of biomedical engineering. “And disease states often have multigenic sources, so isolating just one gene is limiting.”

Instead, Economo and his colleagues are trying a novel investigative approach, building upon a technique called Perturb-Seq, which allows researchers to perturb (in other words, to prevent from working) multiple genes at once in a bunch of cells. The team’s goal is to pool technologies developed in their respective labs to create a new tool kit—a platform they call Spatial Interrogation of Neurons and Genes, or SING—for better understanding connections in the brain.

The investigators will work to interpret not just how the manipulation of genes changes gene expression, but also how these changes impact cell connection and disease progression. “This is a very enabling technology that builds upon new developments across a number of different domains, including in experimental neuroscience, molecular genetics, virology, and more,” says Economo, who is leading the project with Jerry Chen, a BU College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of biology, and Brian Cleary, a Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences assistant professor.

The trio views its work as potentially applicable “for investigating a large number of problems across domains, including the development of the normal functioning of the brain, how the brain wires its connectivity, and what happens in disorders of the nervous system,” says Economo. “We’re trying to attack those problems in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”

The research being done by Economo, Chen and Cleary is high risk, but has the potential for big rewards—it’s very new, highly interdisciplinary, and could open up lots of fresh ground for other researchers. The team has been awarded $250,000 per year for up to two years.

“Federal funding agencies are so often hesitant to support this kind of research,” says Economo, “but funding from the Kilachand award has been vital for seeding so many new ideas across multidisciplinary interests and expertise. We couldn’t do this work without the fund’s help.” — CHUCK LEDDY

INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION OF ENGINEERS

SNAPSHOTS OF STEM OUTREACH EFFORTS AT BU ENG

BY CASSANDRA DUMAY AND PATRICK L. KENNEDY

PHOTOGRAPH BY CYDNEY SCOTT

ithout diversity in engineering, unconscious biases might get baked into technologies, with results like pulse oximeters and facial recognition programs that are stymied by brown skin. In today’s world, engineers of all backgrounds are needed to bring the full range of human perspectives necessary to solving humanity’s biggest problems. That’s why the Boston University College of Engineering has launched a multitude of initiatives to get local kids from historically overlooked demographics interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers.

Robot battles, real-world lab experience and STEM fairs are just a few of the ways that ENG reaches out to the community with an eye to diversifying the workforce and bringing equity to engineering.

BATTLE ROYALE: U-DESIGN

On a weekday morning at the Boston University Photonics Center, middle school students prepare the robots they’ve designed for a battle royale.

Layers of yellow and orange tape form a large rectangle on a classroom floor, setting the boundaries for this morning’s arena as the students line up their creations on the edges of the colorful battlefield.

And…GO! The robots start to whirr. Some speed toward the middle of the rectangle and crash into other robots. Others wander out of bounds. A couple of the robots buzz in place.

“I think I uploaded the wrong program,” one student laughs.

Their creators cheer on the machines, realizing their own mistakes and announcing plans to fix them in real time. Once a victor—the last robot standing—is declared, students get 20 minutes to reconfigure their machines before the next round.

This competition is part of ENG’s U-Design summer program, which brings middle school students to campus for a week to explore STEM concepts, inspire imaginations and increase diversity in technological fields. It’s also a lot of fun.

Michael Kelly, ENG’s STEM outreach manager, says U-Design’s structure lets students get creative with their projects so they can enjoy the process of learning. “There are no quizzes,” Kelly explains. “We allow them to explore their imagination.”

High schoolers Thomas Ghile and Hadeeqah Qazi got hands-on lab experience in STEM Pathways.

When signing up, students can choose one of three U-Design workshops: Robo-Alley, for those interested in a battle royale; Flight School, which helps students custom-design model rockets and gliders; and Electrical & Mechanical Gizmos, which teaches the inner workings of wire circuits and electromagnetism.

Gizmos students start the week off learning the basics of electricity, circuits and switches before creating electronic locks for secret candy safes and electromagnets to make high-powered gumball dispensers. By Friday, they’re building their own electric motors.

Casey Phalen, a Boston Public Schools middle school math teacher and a team leader overseeing the Gizmos workshop, says U-Design’s curriculum is accessible to all interested students, regardless of their existing STEM knowledge.

“You can come in with no previous experience in engineering [or] circuitry and jump right into it,” Phalen says. “All it takes is observation and excitement to try stuff out.”

Pamela Audeh, ENG assistant dean for outreach and diversity, says the program is designed for students who haven’t had the opportunity to explore engineering: “The idea is really to inspire the next generation of engineers, with a focus on diversity.”

To recruit its campers, U-Design offers scholarships for families that qualify for government assistance programs and reaches out to local Boston public schools—where, according to organizers, engineering isn’t often a focus in the curriculum.

Liala Jama (CAS’26), who mentored and helped out at U-Design last summer, participated in similar programs before coming to college and believes that opportunities like U-Design help students from underrepresented backgrounds feel confident in engineering spaces. “It really starts with kids just knowing that they have a place in the STEM world,” she says.

Organizers say that U-Design is part of ENG’s long-standing commitment to outreach and inclusion. During the school year, the college’s Technology Innovation Scholars Program (TISP) sends ENG undergraduates to elementary, middle and high schools across the country to facilitate learning opportunities for young students and expand their horizons.

Having participated in both outreach programs, Anushka Rathi (ENG’23) believes that seeing wider representation in STEM fields is important for young minds.

“I love working with kids and seeing them get all these opportunities that I wish I had at their age,” Rathi says. “It’s really impactful to see people of color and women entering these spaces, because there’s a lack of that.”

Rathi is right. According to 2021 findings from the Pew Research Center, women, Blacks and Latinos remain underrepresented in the STEM workforce. For instance, Latinos make up 17 percent of total employment across all occupations, but just 8 percent of all STEM workers.

“IT REALLY STARTS WITH KIDS JUST KNOWING THAT THEY HAVE A PLACE IN THE STEM WORLD.” --LIALA JAMA (CAS’26), STEM MENTOR

According to Kelly, addressing inequity in STEM fields like engineering can help address injustices in the world at large. “The main focus of our outreach is to make the engineers of tomorrow look more like how America is going to be. This helps combat things like systemic racism,” he says. “Old civil engineers put highways through Black and brown neighborhoods. If some of those engineers were Black and brown, they could have said, ‘No. I don’t think so.’”

PHOTOGRAPH BY ISABELLA BACHMAN

Brooklynn Marcelin learns how to pipette under the guidance of BME doctoral student Arun Nambiar (ENG 26,’26).

Kelly and Phalen say ENG’s outreach coordinators are looking into options like bilingual classes, expanding scholarship opportunities, and introducing biomedical engineering curricula to the program.

“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Phalen says. “The students here in Boston will be the next students here at Boston University, [and then] the next engineers—hopefully in Boston, and globally as well.”

THIS IS SOMETHING I CAN DO: SUMMER RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

Teen Nicolas Rojas Taborda says that in a typical summer, he would “probably just be at home, or maybe working a part-time job.”

Instead, Taborda and 10 other Boston-area high school students spent five weeks last summer working full time in the labs of BME faculty researchers Alex Green, Erica Pratt and Wilson Wong. Mentored by BU undergrad and graduate students, they helped Wong in his ongoing efforts to develop cancer-killing T-cells. The teens also attended workshops and seminars where they learned about the work of other faculty researchers, who opened their eyes to the many sub-fields that crisscross within and around synthetic biology.

“This program convinced me to major in biomedical engineering,” says Taborda, a native Colombian who is on track to be the first member of his family to attend college.

This is the summer research experience at STEM Pathways, an ENG outreach program whose mission is to broaden the pipeline producing tomorrow’s engineers, with a focus on synthetic biology. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, and administered by Professor Doug Densmore (ECE, BME, MSE), the program is affiliated with Boston University’s Biological Design Center (BDC).

The high school juniors and seniors accepted into the summer program are demonstrably gifted, academically qualified, demographically underrepresented, aspiring first-generation college students.

According to Hailey Lenn Gordon, executive director of STEM Pathways, while college admissions officers today expect would-be STEM majors to boast wet-lab experience, “There’s a disparity. Not all schools have an AP Biology class or a lab that can do centrifuging, while other students are able to pay to do summer internships.”

And even in a high-quality high school, lab work must be crammed into periods of 45 minutes or so, spaced weeks apart.

“What’s different about STEM Pathways is that we’re paying the students to do research here on campus. Here, it visibly all comes together every day. Because they’re here from 9 to 5, they can see an experiment run from start to finish,” says Gordon.

“It gave me a better view on what career paths are available,” says Hadeeqah Gazi. “It got me thinking about engineering as a major.”

“Before I came to this program, I had no idea what I wanted to do,” says Thomas Ghile. “I knew I liked science, coding and math, but I didn’t know how to tie all that into a career.” Now, Ghile hopes to become a bioinformatics software developer.

In addition to the five-week research experience for qualified students, STEM Pathways hosts Saturday STEM workshops yearround, open to all high school students curious about science and engineering. That’s what brought many of these bright young people

to campus in the first place.

“Being here and learning about specific fields like cancer research and CAR-T cell therapy,” says Taborda, “has really helped me realize that this is something I can do in the future.”

“BEFORE I CAME TO THIS PROGRAM, I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WANTED TO DO. I KNEW I LIKED SCIENCE, CODING AND MATH, BUT I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO TIE ALL THAT INTO A CAREER.”--THOMAS GHILE

SEEING THEMSELVES IN ENGINEERING: STEM WEEK

On a cool fall day, Boston University hosted Massachusetts Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler and students from all over Boston to kick off Massachusetts STEM Week. Public elementary, middle and high school students filled the 17th floor of the Center for Computing & Data Sciences to peruse posters and displays highlighting BU STEM research projects, and to hear about the work directly from BU student researchers, many of them not much older than the high schoolers.

The idea was to encourage a diverse community of local students to envision themselves in STEM fields and show them concrete examples of the educational and career opportunities available in those fields. Tackling climate change was the theme for STEM Week.

“We depend on the math, science, technology and engineering students of today to be the industry leaders of tomorrow,” Driscoll said in her remarks. “And in the context of the global climate crisis, Massachusetts also depends on future STEM leaders and innovators to deliver progress and sustainable solutions as we fight for a cleaner planet.”

For example, ME students Nahiyan Muhammad (ENG’25) and Inal Shomakhov (ENG’26) presented their project, a water surface litter collector to trawl the Charles River for trash, especially for nondegradable plastics. Lorenzo Barale and Benjamin Pedi (both ENG’25), also ME students, pitched their bicycle-mounted air pollution monitors for collecting data that could inform city policy makers.

In addition, several ENG students participating in BU’s Technology Innovation Scholars Program set up a table to demonstrate Lego Robotics, Arduino, mini PCR, 3D printing and other projects that they teach in some 14 Boston Public Schools.

“Teaching engineering to young students is a dual gift, nurturing the minds of the next generation while simultaneously enriching the college students involved,” Audeh says. “As a result, young students see themselves as future engineers, learn about the field and the path to becoming an engineer, gain experience and confidence in their abilities and envision themselves as problem-solvers contributing to their community and world.”

The Race to a Battery-Powered Future

ENG FACULTY COLLABORATE TO MAKE BETTER, MORE SUSTAINABLE BATTERIES—A TECHNOLOGY THAT IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR CLEAN ENERGY TRANSITION.

BY JESSICA COLAROSSI

“BATTERIES ARE A LOT MORE COMPLEX THAN THEY SEEM, BECAUSE THEY HAVE ALL THESE

know that to have a green future, the world needs to shift from fossil fuel–generated power to renewable energy. And as

tripling solar and wind capacity, there are still major hurdles in the plan—included among them, existing batteries aren’t good enough.

The idea of storing energy for later use is old, but in order to move society toward clean energy, scientists and engineers are experimenting with the fundamental elements of batteries, creating new materials and testing more outlandish energy storage ideas—like electricity-conducting ceramics. Experts agree that batteries will be a vital resource to ensure power is always on tap, no matter when energy is collected from renewable sources—whether in very sunny months or in cloudy rainy seasons. And in the United States, where transportation is responsible for the largest share of carbon emissions, making the shift from gas-powered to electric is an essential step forward.

It’s projected that the US will have at least 26 million batterypowered electric vehicles on the road by 2030, most of which use lithium-ion batteries, the same kind as in laptops, phones and other electronics. This will make the demand for battery minerals and metals higher than ever before. But is our current technology enough to power the future, and is it truly sustainable?

“If we look at really transitioning to electric vehicles, and to renewables that need more grid-level storage, we won’t be able to get there with just lithium ion,” says Associate Professor Emily Ryan (ME, MSE), who studies alternative materials for constructing batteries. Mining current raw materials, like lithium and cobalt, can cause major environmental hazards and unsafe working conditions.

“Batteries are a lot more complex than they seem, because they have all these impacts beyond where you’re using them,” says Benjamin Sovacool, director of Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS). “Truly sustainable solutions integrate mining, the design of batteries, all the way into waste.”

The future of batteries impacts us all—from the materials they use, to where the metals are sourced and mined, to how they’re disposed of and reused. And all the decisions and scientific discoveries made now will impact our future. For example, how much will greenhouse gas emissions be averted by charging a car instead of filling the tank with gas? The race to better batteries can change everything.

POSITIONING LITHIUM METAL AS A BETTER OPTION

Whether it’s in a phone, a plastic toy or connected to a giant solar array, every battery’s purpose remains the same: store electricity until it’s ready to be used. And in all batteries, no matter the size or strength, there’s a delicate combination of chemistry and electrical engineering at play. Ryan and others at BU are figuring out how to improve the design of current batteries—for instance, by swapping out the active layers of metal and adding different elements to make an old idea new again.

In her lab, Ryan uses complex computer models to test alternative battery materials, like lithium metal instead of lithium ion. According to Ryan, lithium-metal batteries, which use solid lithium metal as the anode (positive side), could have substantially higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries, which use a graphite anode. So, you can store more energy in the same size battery.

“If we started using lithium-metal batteries in your cell phone, instead of charging it every day, you would charge it once a week. Or in a car with the same size battery as we have now, you might get 600 miles instead of 300 miles,” says Ryan, who is also associate director of the IGS. That also means a much smaller battery could be used to provide the same capacity we have today (about a 300mile range), so less materials would have to be sourced.

But lithium metal is far from perfect. It’s highly reactive and unstable, causing tree-like structures, called dendrites, to form as the battery goes through charging and discharging cycles. (All batteries get dendrites, but they’re more common in lithium

metal.) Dendrites degrade the battery life and cause it to shortcircuit. Along with researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, Ryan and her team are researching the root cause of dendrites by analyzing the interfaces of the material and the chemistry at play. Through a joint National Science Foundation (NSF)–Israel Binational Science Foundation grant, they’re studying the chemical-physical processes occurring during battery operation with the aim of making things more stable.

This study is part of the research Ryan has helped lead in recent years—exploring the complex interfaces involved in batteries. She has collaborated with Associate Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh (ECE, MSE), Associate Professor Brian Kulis (ECE, SE) and CAS Professor of Chemistry Aaron Beeler to understand dendrite growth and learn how to prevent it, in order to make lithium metal a viable alternative to lithium ion. This research has benefited from the combination of expertise brought by various faculty, as well as computer modeling from the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

“If you look at all the faculty involved, you have electrical, mechanical engineering, computer science, mathematics and statistics, chemistry, materials science and engineering,” Ryan says. “So, you really have a diverse group of people looking at these problems.”

Similar collaborations have flourished at ENG, where convergent research has been a conscious choice. “It is bringing together faculty from different disciplines with different

Emily Ryan and Jörg Werner are just two of many mechanical engineering professors collaborating in the BU Energy and Sustainable Technologies Laboratory.

outlooks to solve some of these really big problems,” Ryan says. “Complicated systems need expertise from multiple fields—one person just can’t do it.”

Besides lithium metal, Ryan is also testing other materials to figure out how to make batteries nonflammable, since fires are an all-too-common issue for e-scooters and other battery-powered devices.

“We know right now we are not on a sustainable path,” she says. “So, I think it’s on us to try and come up with solutions to help us get to a more sustainable energy generation and energy use.”

REINVENTING BATTERY ARCHITECTURE

In addition to dendrites and fires, there are other consequences of design flaws in batteries. For a battery to have a lot of energy storage, it needs large electrodes—the anode and cathode on either end that the ions and electrons move between. But for a battery to charge quickly, the electrodes need to be the opposite—they should be in a small layer, so the ions don’t have to travel as far from one side to the other.

“It’s really a conundrum in batteries, this idea of having as much energy as possible, but also being able to charge it quickly,” says Assistant Professor Jörg Werner (ME, MSE), who studies what’s happening inside a battery cell (called the architecture of the battery). Werner is focusing on how to make the layers of materials inside the battery as thin as possible, and interdigitated, like two interlacing hands. This shortens the distance between the negative and positive layers, allowing ions to move faster while making sure the positive and negative sides don’t touch, which would short-circuit the battery.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BATTERY CELL AND ALL OF ITS COMPONENTS HAVE A HUGE IMPACT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THE BATTERY THAT WE AS CONSUMERS ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT.”

“That structure would allow us to have a very large fraction of active material—the material that stores all that energy within our battery cell—but at the same time, we can have very short distances between the negative and positive active material to give us very fast charging,” he says. A design like this could help fuel the charge (no pun intended) of people adopting electric vehicles, since batteries would charge significantly quicker than current models.

The problem is making this new battery. In a project supported by the NSF and Toyota, Werner is working with Associate Professor Keith Brown (ME, MSE, Physics) to speed up the process of testing thousands of separator materials—the permeable membrane between the anode and cathode that prevents electronic short circuits—using an autonomous system.

“You need this delicate balance—the thinner you can make the layers, the better,” says Brown. “Jörg’s team are talented chemists and have figured out a way to make beautiful thin polymer films, but now we have this challenge: What polymer? What choice of

Left to right, Sean Lubner, Jörg Werner, Emily Ryan and Keith Brown (all ME, MSE).

properties gives us the best battery electrolyte? So, we built a robot that basically deposits and tests these electrolyte films,” using Brown’s expertise in automation and machine learning as well as materials science.

It’s another exemplary convergent project, says Brown. “The problems we’re facing nowadays are those that really require you to have not just one skill set but multiple skill sets,” Brown says. “Some combination of collaborating with experts across disciplines, and having students who are fearless in learning skills that are outside what is traditionally considered in their departments, is crucial.”

The team plans to test thousands of thin polymer separators, and Werner hopes to build a more advanced prototype in the near future.

“The architecture of the battery cell and all of its components have a huge impact on the performance of the battery that we as consumers actually care about,” Werner says.

HEAT AS ENERGY STORAGE

Large-scale battery storage capacity is expected to skyrocket over the next three years. And start-ups abound with long-shot battery

“THERE’S A LOT OF COMPLEMENTARY EXPERTISE NOW, WHERE WE CAN FILL IN THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION AND ENGINEERING-DESIGN PROCESS.”

solutions, like storing energy in cement to charge electric cars and converting iron to rust, and back again, as a method of storing and releasing energy.

“The bottleneck of going fully renewable is not a lack of technologies to harvest that energy,” says Sean Lubner (ME, MSE), an ENG assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “One of the biggest technological barriers right now is energy storage.”

Imagine if the electricity powering your home was coming in from giant batteries charged with solar and wind energy, instead of from oil, gas or coal, which contribute most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Lubner is researching how to use heat energy as a reliable and cheaper large-scale energy storage solution, as opposed to building expensive lithium-ion batteries. He’s developing an inexpensive, ceramic-based material that can safely store and conduct electricity even as it heats up to more than 1,200 degrees Celsius.

“The heat itself is the form of energy you’re using for storage,” he says. “Then later, that energy can be converted back into electricity, or be released as heat.”

The idea is that electricity generated from wind and solar would be captured and converted into high-temperature heat that

A researcher in Werner’s lab operates a glovebox filled with argon gas to assemble batteries without exposing the materials to moisture or air.

Image shows the cross-section of a battery electrode with an architecture that Werner’s team has engineered for fast ion transport.

can be stored for hundreds of hours until it’s needed, then used in different types of industrial processes or converted into electricity by a heat engine. When you zoom out from household needs to those of heavy industry, using the stored heat as heat could be an enormous part of the sustainability equation, Lubner says.

“Most people, when they think of energy, think of electricity, because that’s the average citizen’s day-to-day interaction with energy,” Lubner says. “But that’s only a small slice of the energy picture. As a country, we primarily use energy as heat. It’s in all these invisible background processes, such as the industrial production of aluminum, steel, glass, cement. Heat is actually the far more natural and convenient form in which to store energy.”

In a recent paper, Lubner investigated the promising potential of thermal energy storage, describing how these systems would offer a cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries. He and his team have shown that it’s possible to charge and discharge their ceramic-based material over 700 times, with the material able to withstand temperatures ranging from about 500 degrees Celsius to about 1,600 degrees Celsius. Even after such heavy use, “we saw negligible degradation to the properties, which is not typical of most materials,” Lubner says. “It will be necessary to make sure these materials have a long life, but I’d say it’s very reasonable to expect these to last 20 or 30 years with appropriate engineering.”

Lubner has also collaborated with Werner on the latter’s architected batteries, and he has begun discussions with Ryan and others on their battery solutions.

“There’s a lot of complementary expertise now, where we can fill in the entire scientific investigation and engineering-design process,” says Lubner. “We have enough people that there are no holes, so to speak.” Lubner also collaborates with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. “Science is a team sport,” he says.

THE BEST LAB IS A COLLABORATIVE LAB

With better design, industry standards, and affordable solutions, the future of batteries could be far different than we imagine now. And if we all want to do our part to prevent a climate disaster—with electric cars and solar-powered homes—it’s a future that can’t come soon enough.

Doing their part at the College of Engineering, a number of faculty and students involved in energy and sustainability efforts recently founded the BU Energy and Sustainable Technologies (BEST) Laboratory. It’s a collaborative lab encompassing researchers working on not only energy storage but also energy conversion, multiscale materials architectures, and negative emissions technologies.

“It’s a forum for us to more naturally and openly discuss our research and work towards more collaborative research in the energy and sustainability space,” says Werner. “The faculty meet frequently to discuss projects and potential collaborations and proposals, and the students get together to discuss research.”

The group shares news and research on their website, sites.bu.edu/best.

Coin cell batteries are tested by charging and discharging them at a controlled rate over many cycles.

“Now there’s a clear point of contact for anyone interested in energy and sustainability, and it spans everything from batteries and fuel cells to decarbonization,” says Werner. “That’s the direction we as a larger group of faculty try to focus on, because it’s a very important topic for the world and will continue to be so.”

— ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

WITH

BETTER

DESIGN,

INDUSTRY STANDARDS, AND AFFORDABLE SOLUTIONS, THE FUTURE OF BATTERIES COULD BE FAR DIFFERENT THAN WE IMAGINE NOW.

COMPASSION CREATURES

IN THE SUPREME COURT AND THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION, EXPERT

NIRVA KAPASI PATEL HAS HER SAY ON ANIMAL WELFARE

BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

FOR ALL

Remember the pandemic? When a respiratory disease leapt from a wild bat in a live animal market and went on to wreak colossal damage to human society? Well, start getting ready for the next one, because the way factory farms jam together billions of cows, pigs and other livestock, they’re guaranteeing an outbreak of another new infectious disease with no known treatment.

That’s the message of a recent report by the Animal Law & Policy Program of Harvard Law School, where teams of law students, attorneys, faculty and researchers churn out research, analysis, briefs and litigation in the public interest, related to animal welfare. They’ve helped battle the pork lobby in the highest court in the land, tangled with park rangers to save dying elk and challenged the USDA on the treatment of primates in research. And all these efforts are overseen by the center’s executive director, Nirva Kapasi Patel (ENG’00).

Not only that, Patel is an executive producer of several documentaries, including The Game Changers, which features Arnold Schwarzenegger and a pantheon of power lifters, Olympians and other elite athletes who train on a vegan diet. The film is one of the most-watched documentaries on Netflix. Patel has also chaired the board of animal rescue nonprofit Farm Sanctuary. And she’s the mother of four, kids who inspired (and helped) her to wage

PATEL IS ALSO A FORMER BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER WHO BELIEVES THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY HAS A PART TO PLAY IN MAKING THE WORLD SAFER FOR ANIMALS AND HUMANS.

successful campaigns to ban the sale of fur in Weston and Lexington, Massachusetts.

Patel is also a former biomedical engineer who believes the scientific community has a part to play in making the world safer for animals and humans. After all, it was scientists who pushed the European Union to ban animal testing for cosmetics, she points out. “You can find your place,” she says. “If you care about animals, you don’t have to give up that passion to continue your path in engineering. It’s not binary.”

DOING NO HARM

Patel grew up in Ashland, Massachusetts, practicing her father’s Jain religion, a key precept of which is nonviolence. That respect for life very much extends to animal lives. “On road trips, if we saw roadkill, we would sometimes stop and say a prayer and give that animal some sort of honor or respect.”

That also means Jains are vegetarian. “I didn’t even know what bologna was until I started school,” Patel recalls. “My sisters and I got teased because we brought Indian food to lunch. It had strong flavors, it smelled different—it was really, really good food, but sometimes we were like, ‘Can we just do PB&J and a bag of Doritos?’”

When applying to colleges, Patel—the daughter of a chemical engineer—was drawn to BU’s College of Engineering. “The idea of problem-solving and then having real-world impact was fascinating to me,” she says, and her biomedical engineering studies did not disappoint. “I had the most amazing teachers. The interdisciplinary work was fantastic.”

But she was bothered by the role—common across biological and medical research everywhere— of animals in the lab.

“I witnessed a lot of surgeries on mice,” Patel says, “and I remember being traumatized and sad, just watching these cute little mice being flipped upside down and injected and then dead. I remember scanning the room, thinking, ‘Is anyone else upset by this? Maybe we should say a prayer and at least acknowledge this little animal?’”

TO MUMBAI AND BACK

Years later, Patel would read studies on the subject and find she was not alone. “The mental toll animal testing takes on the human researchers is a somewhat hidden experience in labs,” she says.

After graduating from BU, Patel worked for the Genetics Institute, while studying patent law part time at New England College of Law, initially hoping it would aid her in inventing alternative methods to animal testing. Upon passing the bar, she worked for the Boston law firm Nixon Peabody as an associate in their Technology & Intellectual Property Practice Group.

In 2006, Patel moved with her husband to Mumbai, India. There, she had four children, went fully vegan, and became more involved in animal welfare issues.

After the family returned to the US in 2014, Patel started volunteering for the Animal Rescue League. In time, she joined the board of Farm Sanctuary, which cares for escaped and cast-off farm animals.

Patel has contributed to animal rescue efforts, among other work. Here, she visits Dudley, a white Scottish Highland cow, at Unity Farm Sanctuary in Sherborn, Mass.

“I THINK IT’S CRITICAL THAT EVEN IF A SCIENTIST IS NOT AN ANIMAL ADVOCATE, NECESSARILY, AS HUMAN BEINGS WE HAVE THAT ABILITY TO INVOKE OUR COMPASSION AT SOME POINT IN THE PROCESS, AND I THINK WE NEED TO ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN.”

Cows, pigs, ducks, goats and other critters “get to stay with their babies,” says Patel. “They get to experience life. They get to grow old!” Eventually, Patel served as chair of the board for a year.

Along with James Cameron, Patel and her husband were among the executive producers of The Game Changers, a documentary about the nutritional benefits of a plantbased diet—even for NFL linebackers, champion log lifters and other tough guys. After all, protein and calcium are found in the plants that big, strong animals like cows eat in the first place, argue the elite athletes, scientists and medical professionals interviewed in the film. Patel was also an executive producer of The End of Medicine, a documentary that focused on the threats posed to human health by factory farming— pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and antibiotic resistance.

ALL THE EVIDENCE

To gain more expertise in the field, Patel went back to school, earning a master’s degree in animals and public policy from Tufts University in 2021. Patel began working for the Animal Law & Policy Program (ALPP) at Harvard Law first as a volunteer, then as a global

policy fellow, before her promotion to executive director last July.

With Patel’s involvement, the ALPP sued the National Park Service for failing to protect the native tule elk dying of starvation and dehydration in Point Reyes National Seashore—cut off from forage and water by a fence erected across the public land by private cattle ranchers. The fence may soon be coming down thanks to pressure from ALPP and other advocates.

The ALPP also filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court in a case the pork lobby brought attempting to overturn a California law banning confined spaces where pigs couldn’t turn around.

“Because the court reads the brief, it’s an opportunity to magnify the issue and put into the public record all these pictures, details, data, and evidence of cruelty,” says Patel. The court upheld the law.

Next, Patel has her sights set on the animal experimentation that so upset her as an undergrad—and she rejects the false dichotomy that concern for animals means you’re in favor of cancer ravaging humans. In many cases, animal testing isn’t even reliable, she says, citing growing evidence of alarmingly high failure rates in human clinical trials—even one case where a hepatitis B drug did well in rats, dogs and even primates, but when it went to clinical trials, seven people died.

“There are promising alternatives, like organs on a chip,” Patel says. “These are highly sensitive, miniaturized versions of the human organs, they’re adaptable to high-throughput design, and it’s more accurate than an animal organ.”

“Ultimately, scientists will convince other scientists in their community to take a closer look at whether animal experimentation is actually worth it,” Patel says. “I think it’s critical that even if a scientist is not an animal advocate, necessarily, as human beings we have that ability to invoke our compassion at some point in the process, and I think we need to allow that to happen.”

Patel visits Wallace, a red Scottish Highland cow. Unity Farm Sanctuary is a favorite spot of Patel’s four children, who helped her campaign to ban the sale of fur in Weston, Mass.

Cellular Engineering Built to Last

KHALIL AND TEAM MIMIC A WINNING STRATEGY

Pr ofessor Ahmad “Mo” Khalil (BME) and colleagues have developed a more precise and effective gene circuit engineering method that might boost the field of synthetic biology to the next level, ultimately resulting in more effective and enduring cell therapies for cancer and other diseases, among other applications.

The potential benefits of gene circuits are well established. Built of biological parts rather than silicon, a gene circuit makes use of cells’ innate regulatory abilities, which can be commandeered to instruct cells to carry out specified tasks. “Programming” cells in this way, Khalil and other researchers have begun paving the way for safer and more effective cellular therapies, as well as tissue and organ regeneration.

However, these methods face hurdles on the road to application and clinical adoption.

“We need the synthetic circuits that are being introduced into cellular hosts to be robust and stable,” says Khalil. “This can be a challenge. Synthetic circuits don’t live in a vacuum. When they are introduced into cells and organisms, they interact with host

Ahmad "Mo" Khalil (BME)

“We need the synthetic circuits that are being introduced into cellular hosts to be robust and stable,” says Khalil.

native machinery and pathways.” Often, this “cross-talk” mucks up the whole system, says Khalil, leading to mutations and gradual degradation of the circuits as the engineered cells stop replicating themselves over time.

In a study recently published in Cell, the team—which was co-led by a bioengineer at Rice University (Caleb Bashor) and researchers from Boston University (Meghan Bragdon and Nikit Patel) and includes a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and a mathematician at Dartmouth College—discovered a solution to this problem: a way to engineer “circuits that are more insulated from these negative crosstalk interactions and, thus, retain functional stability over long time scales,” says Khalil. Their method investigates and synthetically mimics a way by which naturally occurring proteins are thought to regulate gene expression—a fundamental process that determines the formation of different cell types during development and produces different cellular behaviors. In particular, the team studied and made use of transcription factors (TFs), which are molecules that kick off the gene expres-

Loss of Circuit Function

sion process. To make it happen, TFs must seek out and bind to specific regions of a cell’s genome. But researchers have been mystified as to how exactly TFs make those connections in just the right combination to turn the right genes on and off to drive the right behavior or cell type (for example, a white blood cell vs a nerve cell).

Working in yeast cells, Khalil’s team discovered that TFs can pull off this trick with a strategy known as “cooperative assembly,” essentially pooling their resources. While an individual TF might not be specific or strong enough to find its target in the genome, when TFs assemble and work together, they manage to bind to their target regions accurately, triggering gene expression.

Once the researchers understood this, they succeeded in engineering gene circuits that mimicked the cooperative assembly strategy, thereby overcoming the defects that have hampered gene circuits to date. The result is long-term functional stability in engineered cells. Although the team applied this fix to yeast, the same principles should work for a variety of applications.

“We expect that our strategy, which is entirely generalizable and simple,” says Khalil, “will be useful for biotechnology and medicine to create engineered cells whose functions are robust and stable over many generations.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Whether introduced into a bioreactor (top) or a human, synthetic cell circuits tend to degrade over time. But Khalil’s team has developed a solution.

Clearing the Air

WERNER WINS DARPA YOUNG FACULTY AWARD TO MAKE MATERIAL THAT CAPTURES C02

Dozing in the classroom? That droopiness might not be due to the quality of the lecture, says Assistant Professor Jörg Werner (ME, MSE). The culprit could be carbon dioxide. While the amount of CO2 in atmospheric (outdoor) air is problematic enough at 0.04%, in an enclosed space it can rise to above 0.1%, affecting human focus, productivity, and even health

If that’s the case in an ordinary building with windows or vents providing some access to fresh air, imagine the situation in a submarine, an underground bunker or a spacecraft. This is what concerns the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Werner has won a highly competitive DARPA Young Faculty Award to help solve the problem with a novel material that would capture carbon dioxide in a targeted and efficient way.

“Especially for a space station, you need a very small, lightweight air purification system that uses very little energy,” Werner says. “I apply my chemistry training to make new materials. In this case, we’re trying to make new, ultra-thin polymer coatings that can capture CO2 very efficiently.”

In previous projects, Werner has collaborated with Associate Professor Keith Brown (ME, MSE, Physics) on thin electrochemical films for high-capacity battery technology. They created these films with the help of an automated experimenter that they built, similar to Brown’s Bayesian experimental autonomous researcher (BEAR) system. Capable of making and analyzing hundreds of films in a matter of hours, the tool will be useful in Werner’s DARPA project as well.

The air purification system—essentially, a filter—will combine two new materials. The ultra-thin polymer coating that absorbs CO2 will be layered atop a porous sorbent—a kind

Jörg Werner (ME, MSE)

“I apply my chemistry training to make new materials. In this case, we’re trying to make new, ultrathin polymer coatings that can capture CO 2 very efficiently.”

of sponge. The sorbent will be pockmarked with pores that plenty of carbon dioxide can get caught in. Inspired by the lungs, the architecture of the filter will ensure fast air flow and efficient capture of the CO2 in a relatively small package.

The project comes with some challenges, says Werner. One is ensuring the polymer doesn’t also absorb desirable molecules like oxygen and nitrogen. At the same time, it shouldn’t bind the CO2 too strongly, since DARPA would like to extract the gas later to efficiently regenerate the sorbents for reuse and potentially as a feedstock for microbes that will make other stuff needed in space or undersea.

To attain this Goldilocks material, the researchers will need to make and test

thousands of combinations of chemical groups with the help of Brown’s automated system and a novel method of electrodeposition—normally done with metals in jewelry making and other industries. “We figured out a way to use that kind of process, but for polymers,” Werner says.

Eventually, Werner hopes to work with fellow members of the larger BU Energy and Sustainable Technologies Lab to apply the technology to other decarbonization efforts.

“I would be interested in exploring how this could translate even to the atmospheric capture of CO2, if it could be done efficiently,” Werner says. “That’s well beyond the scope of this award, but it’s a very important topic and will continue to be so.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

An early iteration of the porous sorbent under development in Werner’s lab.

research

Hard to Picture

GOYAL AND TEAM BRING SNAPSHOT

SPEED TO NON-LINE-OF-SIGHT IMAGING

Us ing light and shadow to “see” around corners, as if through an invisible periscope, sounds futuristic, but it ’s a very real field of research. Now, Professor Vivek Goyal ( ECE ) and one of his star doctoral students have advanced this cutting-edge field even further. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications and presented at the Optica Imaging Congress, they report a new and much faster method of non-line-of-sight ( NLOS ) imaging—that is, reconstructing a picture of something that lies hidden from view. Beyond the obvious military and spycraft applications, Goyal hopes that eventually the technology will be used to enhance vehicular safety for civilians

“A lot of it is just super cool, to be able to extend your field of vision,” says Goyal. “But it might be highly impactful. If you can extend from just line-of-sight view to

a little bit beyond line-of-sight, that can make a big difference.”

NLOS imaging makes use of the surprising amount of information contained within an object’s shadow—even the narrow slice of shadow that is barely perceptible under a door or around a corner. Goyal’s new study builds upon his previous work, in which he used a pulsed laser scanned along a small arc, in conjunction with a photodetector, to reconstruct images of objects hidden behind an ajar door or around hallway corners. While that study was groundbreaking, setting up each shot was time-consuming.

In the present work, the team captured the data and reconstructed images at the speed of a snapshot—as fast as 0.4 seconds. Moreover, they were able to map out large areas of a hidden room in the background and track moving objects (again, hidden from view) in the foreground.

The work is still in its early stages, and Goyal would like to see improvements in the resolution of the images, but “conceptually, we have made large advances in non-line-of-sight imaging,” he says. “It’s the next step in making the data collection much faster.”

Goyal envisions search-and-rescue applications and perhaps more general uses like preventing traffic tragedies.

“A classic example,” Goyal says, “is being able to see if there’s a kid around the corner of a parked car, about to cross the street. Just a split-second difference in knowing that a child is there can mean avoiding a collision.”

NLOS imaging is an inherently convergent area of research, combining disparate disciplines. “It’s at the intersection of optics and photonics and computers and mathematics,” Goyal says. “Buried inside our computations are some deeply insightful numerical approximations by the lead author, Dr. Sheila Seidel.”

Seidel (ENG’23) won the 2023 BU Electrical & Computer Engineering Doctoral Achievement Award.

The co-lead author, Hoover RuedaChacón, was a postdoctoral researcher in Goyal’s group and is now an assistant professor at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia.

Other collaborators hailed from the Draper Lab and Politecnico di Milano.

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Non-line-of-sight imaging makes use of the information contained in a slice of shadow.

Vivek Goyal (ECE)

To Make the Internet Safe for Everyone

STRINGHINI’S WORK IS NEVER DONE

Associate Professor Gianluca Stringhini’s job of rooting out malicious internet users is like a digital WhacA-Mole. A computer engineer who focuses on cybersecurity, Stringhini (ECE) says he finds the ever-evolving problem of harmful online activity—and the persistent, anonymous antagonists causing it—intellectually stimulating

It’s a surprisingly plucky attitude. Any casual internet user who occasionally drops into the increasingly troll-infested playgrounds of online forums and social media sites might instead call his work “Sisyphean.”

“I got interested in this field because it seemed to me that it offered good opportunities to help people and make a difference,” says Stringhini. “The problem is constantly evolving, with adversaries adapting to whatever defense researchers might develop to keep carrying out their malicious activities. You can never say that your job is done.”

Stringhini and his colleagues have probed the extent to which spammers have infiltrated social networks, examined the relative influence of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns on X, and delved into communities of cybercriminals that misuse online accounts to spread harmful content or steal sensitive information.

His fascination with malicious activity online, and his drive to stop it, has traveled with him around the world. Stringhini, who grew up in Italy, earned degrees in computer engineering and science in his home country and the United States; he also taught computer science and security and crime science at University College London.

“I’m a computer scientist by training,” Stringhini says. “My research field is cybersecurity—or at least that’s where I started. I’ve always been interested in better understanding and mitigating malicious online activ-

Gianluca Stringhini (ECE)

“The problem is constantly evolving, with adversaries adapting to whatever defense researchers might develop to keep carrying out their malicious activities. You can never say that your job is done.”

ity. I started with things like online spam, malware, fraud, and so on. More recently, I got interested in a more nuanced and humandriven type of malicious activity: cyberbullying, cyber-aggression, misinformation and disinformation, influence operations, those sorts of things.”

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DEPLATFORMING

Lately, Stringhini has been digging into spaces on the internet that are designed for and by women. He was curious about two highly toxic websites that had sprung up after their users were banned from the discussion board platform Reddit. These two sites became a clubhouse for so-called gender-critical feminists (people who refuse to acknowledge transgender women as women) and femcels, the female version of the better-known incels, men who describe themselves as “involuntarily celibate.”

Stringhini and his colleagues were interested in these two groups because they’d been deplatformed, he says—banned from the popular social media sites that had once helped them connect and spread their messages to a wide audience. In other words, if Reddit gave

these groups a platform to broadcast their ideas, then kicking them off was akin to pulling that platform out from under them.

Deplatforming has become a fairly common consequence for bad actors online. It happened to former president Donald Trump, who was banned from X after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. X officials “permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” according to a news release. The suspension turned out not to be permanent: X’s new owner, Elon Musk, restored Trump’s account at the end of 2022

“What we are interested in, as computer scientists, as engineers and as security researchers, is, what are the consequences of these deplatforming events?” says Stringhini, who is also affiliated with the BU Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.

When Trump was forced off X, he turned to other sites with less stringent content moderation, eventually creating his own. But what about people who hadn’t been leaders of the free world, what would they do? What Stringhini found was surprising.

“When I was working on spam and malware and fraud, blocking content was a good thing. If you don’t see spam in your email anymore, that’s good,” Stringhini says. “But in this case, these people don’t go away, they just move somewhere else. These communities, they migrate, they create their own servers and their own websites after they are suspended—but only a fraction of the members of these communities will migrate, because those are only the ones that are very committed to the cause. Those who do migrate become more active, they become

more toxic. And, potentially, they come back and organize aggression attacks against their original community.”

In some cases, pushing a toxic group into the shadows only serves to harden its resolve. At the same time, he says, deplatforming to shield other users from these vitriolic viewpoints does seem to work. When certain topics or users are kicked off mainstream social media sites, fewer people see their posts. The catch-22 is that those posts, swept under the rug, tend to fester there.

FLAGGING HARASSMENT AND STOPPING TROLLS

Stringhini isn’t satisfied with just identifying the problem; he also wants to develop meaningful solutions. And, for some problems, he has.

In 2019, Stringhini and his collaborators built a machine learning tool that helps online platforms identify and flag coordi-

nated harassment attacks in their nascency. These sorts of pile-ons are typically the result of an organized campaign against a person or group, and result in a bombardment of hateful and aggressive comments from a brigade of online trolls. The targeted harassment that female game developers and gamers faced a few years ago is one such example.

There’s typically a pattern of posting and cross-posting in the lead-up to these types of attacks, Stringhini says, and he’s trained an algorithm to detect that pattern before the attack campaign can gain too much steam.

This work animates Stringhini, but it can also be exhausting at times, he says. He himself has been trolled, seen his image edited into “all sorts of unsavory poses,” and has received “weird and threatening emails” because of the work he does.

“We try to do our best at keeping our sanity by taking breaks, talking to others about

For Poststroke Patients, a Better Way to Regain Movement

Roberto Tron (ME, SE)

“It’s been a very fruitful collaboration. . . . I always wanted to make some project that can help humans, not just robots.”

With adults over 65 forming the US population’s fastest growing segment, more Americans are bound to experience severe and complex health conditions. To meet the needs of this graying demographic, the current healthcare system must rethink its treatment approaches for older patients

This is where Associate Professor Roberto Tron (ME, SE) comes in. With core competencies in robotics and automatic control systems, he is pioneering a system that monitors and assesses the movements of poststroke patients to predict and prevent functional decline.

“I always wanted to make some project that can help humans, not just robots,” he says.

the issues we may get, and so on,” Stringhini says. “Luckily, I’ve never felt like there was a real danger. But this also shows how dangerous this can be. If I get these kinds of messages as a white guy, I can only imagine how more marginalized people may get targeted.”

As the line between our online and offline lives becomes blurrier, Stringhini feels a greater urgency to his work of making the web a safer place for everyone.

“Maybe these aren’t the biggest challenges we’re facing as a society, but it has become clear that these are important challenges,” he says. “The rise in conspiracy theories, especially around the [US] elections, is alarming. At the same time, as online life has become more important for people—especially during the pandemic—you should be able to feel safe there. If I can contribute to people feeling even a little safer, that’s what I want to do.”

— MOLLY CALLAHAN

For poststroke patients, movement can often be challenging as their muscles are weak or uncontrollable, which puts them at risk of slower reaction times or falls. But with electrostimulation suits that help activate and coordinate different muscles and accelerometers that help regulate the electrostimulation, these patients can achieve synchronized movement.

However, this system suffers from two deficiencies, Tron concluded in a study along with Lou Awad, a movement scientist at the BU Neuromotor Recovery Laboratory, and David Levine, a clinical investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. First, it only helps enable a limited range of movement. Second, it involves many standardized tests that require trained clinicians to administer.

By leveraging his knowledge in robotics, Tron seeks to automate this system.

“I try to branch out to other fields and find things that are at the intersection of different fields and see if I can bring my tools to problems that I find interesting, and make some progress there,” he says.

Tron’s upgraded, at-home system involves two components.

First, electrostimulation suits and accelerometers are placed on a patient’s legs, and the patient is monitored by a deep learning camera positioned where they spend most of their time. The information collected will then be leveraged by robotics to reconstruct 3D poses of the patient’s joints.

Second, the technology continually sends data to a secure server, where scores are measured against predetermined thresholds. If any score falls below these thresholds, the system will notify the patient’s doctor by email.

Tron and his team are also working to take the current system even further by making the electrostimulation assistance specific to a greater range of different activities. With this development, patients can be continuously assisted in the comfort of their own homes, instead of having to travel to a rehabilitation facility every week. It may also help them retain some muscle memory even when the electrostimulation suits and accelerometers are turned off, which can improve movement in the long run.

This upgrade turns a once-reactive system into a preventative one. Rather than wait for a catastrophic health event to occur before the patient is treated, the system’s consistent, extensive data tracking helps healthcare workers recognize subtle signs of functional decline and intervene early.

The project is challenging. Tron is used to conducting regular tests in the lab, but this time the team must conduct standardized tests in 50 different homes and 17 in the lab. Since the layout of every patient’s home is different, they also must optimize the setup of the deep learning camera.

While Tron brings the knowledge and technology to improve the system, he relies on Awad and Levine for their medical expertise and access to patients to truly make things work.

“It’s been a very fruitful collaboration,” Tron says. “I think we’ve learned a lot both ways on what’s possible, what we need to focus on and how to talk each other’s language.”

— EMILY TAN

Unlocking Insights into Tumors’ Defenses

ABU team has become the first to measure an important hallmark of cancer in vivo, a step toward better monitoring of tumor progression and treatment response. Doctoral student Sue Zhang (ENG’24), Assistant Professor Hadi Nia (BME, MSE), Professor Mark Grinstaff (BME, Chemistry, MSE, CAMED), Associate Professor Darren Roblyer (BME, ECE) and colleagues reported on their findings in Nature Biomedical Engineering

models, which is a huge step forward,” Nia says. “We can see how factors like breathing affect the tumor; we can see how a treatment will affect it.”

One of the characteristics of cancer cells that help them spread is a property that researchers call “solid stress,” which refers to the compressive and tensile forces inside tumors. Solid stress makes cancer cells stronger invaders and evaders both: it increases the cells’ ability to metastasize, and it helps them resist anti-cancer therapeutics.

So, it’s no wonder that a goal for many cancer researchers is to target solid stress in conjunction with standard cancer treatments. But so far, it’s been difficult to measure solid stress because that’s entailed resecting the tumor—taking a sample of it. “When you resect, it’s a snapshot,” says Nia, who co-advised Zhang, the paper’s lead author. “You don’t see the dynamics at work.”

That is, until now. The BU team has developed a noninvasive method of continuously monitoring the solid stresses within tumors. “We, for the first time, can measure the solid stresses in vivo in animal

Being able to monitor a tumor’s mechanical stresses in real time means that, for example, researchers might learn that when the stresses increase, so does the tumor’s ability to evade immune cells. “If you have more insights, more understanding of what’s going on as the tumor progresses,” says Nia, “then you will have a better idea of how to stop it—how, potentially, to find a therapeutic target.”

The project included researchers from three BU labs—the Grinstaff Group, the Biomedical Optical Technologies Lab and the Nia Lab. “Between all three labs, we have imaging capabilities, animal models of cancer, biomaterials and mathematics expertise,” says Nia.

Moreover, the fruits of the team’s efforts should be a boon to other classes of experts—and ultimately, to cancer patients. “It’ll help the oncologists who work with treatments,” says Nia. “And it will help the basic cancer biologists who are looking for targets and making exams. Cancer researchers want to better understand tumors’ development, progression and treatment response. Our method will provide more insights into all three aspects.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Sue Zhang (ENG’24) First author of the study

Hadi Nia (BME, MSE)

Mark Grinstaff (BME, Chemistry, MSE, CAMED)

The BU team has developed a noninvasive method of continuously monitoring the solid stresses within tumors.

This Soft Robot Might Save Millions of Lives

DEVICE CLEARS THE WAY FOR SAFER, MORE EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVES TO HEART-STOPPING SURGERY

“The walls are moving, you’ve got blood pumping constantly,” says Rogatinsky. “It’s difficult to maintain stability inside the heart.”

It ’s the world’s leading killer. Every year, according to the World Health Organization ( WHO ), nearly 18 million people die of cardiovascular disease. That includes arrhythmias, valve disorders, coronary artery disease and heart failure

Most of these conditions require open-heart surgery, which involves temporarily stopping the heart and is often risky. As an alternative, minimally invasive procedures hold some promise, but several key challenges make them much more difficult for surgeons, and less effective as well.

“We’re trying to mitigate these challenges using soft robotics,” says

Jacob Rogatinsky, a doctoral student in Assistant Professor Tommaso Ranzani’s ( ME, MSE, BME ) lab.

Ranzani and Rogatinsky have developed a millimeter-scale, multifunctional soft robot that overcomes three hurdles that have been hampering minimally invasive heart surgeries. They recently published their results in Science Advances (which featured the device on the journal’s cover), along with colleagues from BU’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Children’s Hospital. Rogatinsky is lead author.

In a minimally invasive procedure, a surgeon makes an incision at some distance from the heart—for example, in the femoral vein of a thigh—and threads a long catheter, just a few millimeters wide, through a blood vessel to the heart. “Think of it like a floppy pool noodle that you’re poking through the blood vessel and twisting around. It’s pretty clunky,” Rogatinsky says.

That tiny size doesn’t allow for a very robust tool once it’s inside the relatively more expansive heart, where there’s more room to work. Moreover, in a minimally invasive procedure, the heart is still beating. “The walls are moving, you’ve got blood pumping constantly,” says Rogatinsky. “It’s difficult to maintain stability inside the heart.”

Finally, the surgeon is trying to maneuver the tip of the catheter—for example, to repair a valve or deliver a stent—from the other end, somewhat like trying to write legibly while holding a pencil by the eraser. “There’s a loss in force transmission the longer your device is,” says Rogatinsky. “You can’t apply the same dexterity as you could by holding a device [close to the tip].”

Over the course of three years, with repeated rounds of feedback from clinicians and cardiovascular surgeons at Children’s Hospital and the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, the engineers in Ranzani’s lab developed a better system. They have outfitted a catheter with two critical improvements: a soft-robotic manipulator that

The BU team’s millimeter-scale, multifunctional soft robot for minimally invasive heart surgeries.

can guide surgical instruments to target sites safely and with precision; and a stabilization mechanism that anchors the instrument at the point of entry to the heart. Together, these innovations allow the surgeon to remotely operate with the force and dexterity required while the heart pumps away as usual.

The entire system is collapsible and expandable. From the surgeon’s end, the new device operates much like the existing instrument.

The team successfully demonstrated the device in two distinct types of heart surgery—pacemaker lead placement and tricuspid valve repair— in in vitro and ex vivo tests, and they’re moving on to several rounds of tests in live animal models.

Over the course of three years, with repeated rounds of feedback from clinicians and cardiovascular surgeons at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, the engineers in Ranzani’s lab developed a better system.

The work combined materials, manufacturing, robotics, electronics and biomedical engineering. “Soft robotics is inherently a very multidisciplinary emerging field,” says Ranzani. “There are so many aspects we have to look at at the same time to make this work.”

Eventually, Ranzani and Rogatinsky hope their device will make robotic-assisted surgery available to hospitals that lack such equipment today. “This is a very inexpensive system,” says Ranzani. “We’re very interested in exploring it as a low-cost but still effective alternative for rural areas and countries that don’t have access to all the great facilities we have here in Boston.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Assistant Professor Tommaso Ranzani (ME, MSE, BME), left, and doctoral student Jacob Rogatinsky.

A Saliva Test for Soldiers, Athletes and Others Aims to Predict Performance

GREEN LEADS A $17.7 MILLION DARPA PROJECT ANALYZING BIOMARKERS TO ASSESS READINESS FOR PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY CHALLENGING TASKS

Alex Green (BME)

“You’ve got experts from these different areas coming together to hopefully solve a problem that wouldn’t be possible without the same set of people,” says Green. “It’s exciting to move forward on this.”

You’re due to run a grueling road race in a few hours. Do you have the stuff to make it across the finish line or will you crash before the end? Or maybe it’s a ballet recital or a big speech— some demanding physical or cognitive challenge is looming, and you need to know that your brain and body are up to it. What if, instead of relying on a vague gut feeling, you could turn to cold, hard data?

That’s the goal of a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary project led by Associate Professor Alexander Green (BME). With up to $17.7 million in federal funds over four years, Green and colleagues plan to develop a fast, portable saliva test that will analyze an assortment of biomarkers associated with performance on challenging tasks. It could be used to test readiness and the likelihood of success—with results in just 30 minutes.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)–funded project aims to develop a test that will one day save lives and dollars by predicting a soldier’s performance on missions. For example, if a pilot isn’t in the optimal zone, the mission team can take extra precautions.

Like the internet, microwave ovens and aviator sunglasses, Green’s test ultimately might gain use far beyond the military.

“I see it as a platform technology,” Green says. “We demonstrate it here, in war-fighter readiness, but it’s something that could be applied to help everybody.”

Green and his team will start by testing volunteers as they undergo rigorous physiological tests.

“They might be running on a treadmill in the lab or out in the field doing military training exercises for multiple days with little rest,” says Green. “We’ll take samples

from people subjected to these challenges to see how their performance can be associated with different biomarkers,” such as testosterone, cortisol and myoglobin—in all, possibly a dozen or more biomarkers across three categories: RNA, protein and metabolites.

“It’s a complex challenge,” says Green. He has long experience in developing paperbased testing systems, known as assays, such as a test for the Zika virus. In the case of a virus test, however, the assay is evaluating one or, at most, two biomolecules, indicating whether a pathogen is in the body.

“But in the present work, all the biomarkers are in all of us all the time. So, it’s really a challenge of quantification,” says Green’s colleague Keith Pardee, a former BU postdoc now at the University of Toronto. “It’s maybe 20 or so different things that are always in the body to varying extents. But is the combined profile of those things predicting high or low performance, or something in between?”

Although DARPA’s priority is armed forces readiness, the device could have a variety of uses in civilian homes and clinics. An obvious application is in elite athlete training. “In the lead-up to some big competition, like the Olympics, you could test yourself daily to find out what the conditions are when you have peak performance,” Green says.

The researchers also envision the test being used to assess maternal health during a pregnancy, or even the likelihood of a transplant organ’s rejection, among other health applications.

“We’re looking at extreme physical stress and the impact of that on physical and cognitive wellness, but that has broad potential,” says Pardee. “And the infrastructure we’re building can then be repositioned to any other set of biomarkers.”

In addition to the University of Toronto, other collaborators on the project hail from GE HealthCare’s Technology & Innovation Center, University of Connecticut, and the National Research Council Canada.

“You’ve got experts from these different areas coming together to hopefully solve a problem that wouldn’t be possible without the same set of people,” says Green. “It’s exciting to move forward on this.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

MSE),

Unveiling a New Era of Imaging

CHENG AND TEAM LEAD BREAKTHROUGH MICROSCOPY

When microscopes struggle to pick up faint signals, it’s like trying to spot subtle details in a painting without your glasses. For researchers, this makes it difficult to catch the small things happening in cells or other materials. In new research, BU Moustakas Chair Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, MSE) and collaborators are creating more advanced techniques to make microscopes better at seeing tiny sample details, without needing special dyes. Their results, published in Nature Communications and Science Advances, respectively, are helping scientists visualize and understand their samples more easily and accurately. In this Q&A, Cheng winner of the 2024 Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture—delves into the findings uncovered in both research papers

WHAT ARE THE PRIMARY FINDINGS OF EACH PAPER?

These two papers aim to address a fundamental challenge in the rising field of vibrational imaging that is opening a new window for life science and materials science. The challenge is how to push the detection limit so that vibrational imaging is as sensitive as fluorescence imaging, so that we can visualize target molecules at very low concentrations (micromolar to nanomolar) in a dye-free manner. Our innovation to address this fundamental challenge is to

TECHNIQUES

deploy photothermal microscopy to detect the chemical bonds in a specimen. After excitation of chemical bond vibration, the energy quickly dissipates into heat, causing a rise of temperature. This photothermal effect can be measured by a probe beam passing through the focus.

Our method is fundamentally different from coherent Raman scattering microscopy, a high-speed vibrational imaging platform described in my 2015 Science review. Together, we have established a new class of chemical imaging tool box, called vibrational photothermal (VIP) microscopy. In the Nature Communications paper, we devel-

Their results, published in Nature Communications and Science Advances, respectively, are helping scientists visualize and understand their samples more easily and accurately.

oped a wide-field mid-infrared photothermal microscope to visualize the chemical content of a signal viral particle. In Science Advances, we developed a novel vibrational photothermal microscope that is based on the stimulated Raman process.

DID THE PAPERS IDENTIFY ANY LIMITATIONS OR GAPS IN THEIR FINDINGS?

Certainly, nothing is perfect. In pursuing SRP microscopy, we found that each beam can have absorption, which causes a weak non-Raman background in the SRP image. We are developing a novel way to remove this background.

DO THE FINDINGS OF ONE PAPER COMPLEMENT OR CONTRADICT THE FINDINGS OF THE OTHER?

The methods reported in these two papers are complementary. The WIDE-MIP method is good for detecting IR-active bonds, while the SRP method is sensitive to Raman-active bonds.

DO THE PAPERS SUGGEST NEW DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE MICROSCOPY RESEARCH THAT COULD HAVE SIGNIFICANT LONG-TERM IMPLICATIONS?

Yes, indeed. These two papers together indicate a novel class of chemical microscopy. VIP microscopy offers a very sensitive way of probing specific chemical bonds; thus, we can use them to map molecules of very low concentrations without dye labeling.

ARE THESE IMAGING TECHNOLOGIES CURRENTLY AVAILABLE OR BEING USED BY OTHER RESEARCHERS OUTSIDE OF YOUR LAB?

We have filed provisional patents for both technologies via BU’s Technology Development office. At least two companies are interested in commercialization of the SRP technology and one of those is interested in the WIDE-MIP technology as well.

WHO ARE YOUR KEY RESEARCH COLLABORATORS?

In the WIDE-MIP paper, the virus samples were provided by John Connor, associate professor of microbiology at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. The WIDE-MIP technology development is in collaboration with Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE) in ENG. Thus, this is a collaborative work within Boston University.

— KATHERINE GIANNI

Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME,

winner of the 2024 Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture.

Updating the Science of Bloodstain Analysis and Forensics

HOW BU ENGINEERS ARE CHANGING THE WAY BLOOD EVIDENCE IS INTERPRETED AT CRIME SCENES

As fans of all good cop shows know, blood evidence can help detectives crack even the toughest of cases. The century-old science of bloodstain pattern analysis—using the configuration of blood left at a crime scene to reconstruct details of the incident—is as critical to crime scene investigation as fingerprinting or DNA analysis. But it’s having to update its playbook to keep up with the modern materials found at crime scenes. A century ago, blood evidence was found on plain wooden floors, simple textiles; today it’s also found on scratch-resistant cell phone screens, antiglare windshields, and hydrophobic surfaces specifically engineered to repel fluids

“As with any science, it’s constantly evolving,” says Kenneth Martin, a retired 33-year veteran of the Massachusetts State Police and a clinical instructor in BU’s Biomedical Forensic Sciences program. Martin often testifies as an expert witness in court cases that depend on blood evidence, and he is increasingly seeing crime scenes where blood has

come into contact with different hydrophobic surfaces. “That has been an area where I’ve thought that we could use a lot more research,” says Martin.

How important can a single drop of blood possibly be? It turns out, very important.

Associate Professor James Bird (ME) has made a career out of studying the interaction between fluids and their surroundings—and his latest research could help give forensic scientists like Martin new tools for analyzing bloodstains. With support from a National Institute of Justice grant, his lab is doing a range of experiments designed to simulate the kinds of blood evidence found at crime scenes: everything from the complex scatter patterns associated with stab wounds to the dynamics of a single drop

of human blood falling onto a surface.

“If the surface coating is playing a role, will that lead to differences in the stains that would fundamentally change how a crime scene is interpreted?” Bird asks. “Blood is a complex liquid. It’s a combination of proteins and blood cells, which end up leading to a very different type of behavior” than a simple fluid like water.

Because a drop of blood only takes a few milliseconds to make contact with a surface, Bird’s lab uses special highspeed cameras that can film tens of thousands of frames per second.

How important can a single drop of blood possibly be? It turns out, very important. One key question at many crime scenes is whether a victim was standing, sitting or lying down when they were assaulted, and the size of a bloodstain is often used to answer that question. According to current models, two drops of blood that fall from the same height onto the same surface will leave the same-sized stain. But what if two drops of blood fall from the same height onto the same surface, but some parts of that surface are coated differently than others? (For example, if a floor has been waxed, or scorched in some spots.)

“What the bulk material is, is somewhat irrelevant,” says Bird. “It’s really the wax, or soot, that the blood is interacting with, not the floor underneath it.”

Bird and his students found that if a blood drop falls on a waxed surface, instead of latching onto irregularities in the wood and spreading, the blood recoils, trying to pull itself back into a sphere. And the drop actually bounces off scorched wood. Once these drops of blood dry, they will result in completely different stains.

“And that is something that is not accounted for in any of the current models,” says Bird.

Already, Bird’s findings are being discussed in Martin’s classroom. Eventually, they might make a difference in the courtroom.

— DEVIN HAHN

PHOTOGRAPH BY CYDNEY SCOTT

From left, doctoral student Garam Lee (ENG’25), Associate Professor James Bird (ME) and Kenneth Martin, a clinical instructor in BU’s Biomedical Forensic Sciences program.

dean’s leadership advisory board

John Abele

Founder & Director, Boston Scientific

Jill Albertelli ’91

President, Military Engines

Pratt & Whitney

Omar Ali ’96

Director of Operations, Petra Engineering Industries Co.

Carla Boragno

Former SVP, Global Head of Engineering & Facilities, Pharma Technical Operations, Roche

Tye Brady ’90

Chief Technologist, Amazon Robotics

Deborah Caplan ’90

Executive VP, Human Resources & Corporate Services, NextEra Energy

Vanessa Feliberti ’93

Corporate VP, M365 Services Platform Engineering, Microsoft

Mikhail Gurevich ’07, Questrom ’12

Managing Partner, Dominion Capital

Joseph Healey ’88

Senior Managing Director, HealthCor Management LP

Dean Kamen

President & Founder, DEKA Research & Development

Anand Krishnamurthy ’92,’96

President and CEO, Affirmed Networks

Ezra Kucharz ’90

Chief Business Officer, DraftKings Inc.

Abhijit Kulkarni ’93,’97

COO, Cellino Biotech Inc.

Antoinette Leatherberry ’85

Principal (Retired), Deloitte Consulting Trustee, Boston University

Daniel Maneval ’82

Chief Science Officer, January Therapeutics

Kathleen McLaughlin ’87

Chief Sustainability Officer, Walmart Inc.

President, Walmart Foundation

Manuel Mendez ’91

CEO, Quotient Limited

Rao Mulpuri ’92,’96

CEO, View Inc.

Girish Navani ’91

Co-Founder and CEO, eClinicalWorks

Emeritus members include Roger Dorf (‘70), Richard Reidy (Questrom ‘82) and Venkatesh Narayanamurti

Boston University College of Engineering

Elise Morgan

interim dean

Solomon R. Eisenberg

senior associate dean for academic programs

Coralie Eggeling

assistant dean for development & alumni relations

John White

biomedical engineering chair

Anton Papp ’90

Vice President & Head of Corporate Development, Ping Identity

Nirva Kapasi Patel ’00

Exec. Dir., Animal Law & Policy, Harvard Law School

Sharad Rastogi ’91

Chief Product Officer, JLL

Avanish Sahai ’89

Fellow, Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute

George M. Savage, MD ’81

Former Chief Medical Officer & Co-Founder, Proteus Digital Health Inc.

Binoy K. Singh, MD ’89

Exec VP & CMO, Gentiva Health Services

John Tegan ’88

President, CEO, Communication Technology Services

Francis Troise ’87

Pres., Trading & Connectivity Solutions; Vice Chair, Capital Markets Broadridge Financial Solutions

William Weiss ’83,’97

Michael Seele editor

Patrick L. Kennedy managing editor

Boston University College of Engineering

Ayse Coskun

interim associate dean for research and faculty development

Ajay Joshi

interim associate dean for educational initiatives

Richard Lally

College of Engineering

senior associate dean for finance and administration

Pamela Audeh

assistant dean for outreach & diversity

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