January 2010

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The Pioneer Newsletter is brought to you by the students, faculty, and staff of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. The newsletter staff and its collaborators strive to bring you the latest news from all aspects of the BME community. To submit articles, opinions, ideas, or events for publication and for more information about the newsletter, please visit:

www.thepioneer.gatech.edu

Inside this issue: Parting Words: 3 Reflections from Graduating BME Seniors

January 2010

Volume IV, Issue 4

Work Worth the Toil: Senior Design II Presentations

By Karan Patel & Rosemary Song

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s our beloved seniors have gone on to pursue their dreams, we wish them all the best. However, they did not say goodbye without a final senior design presentation. Winding our way through a valley of posters, we witnessed solutions to pressing medical and clinical research issues. The first of many great design projects was titled, “Development of Rapid and NonInvasive Testing Kit for the Determination of Cocaine Intoxication Levels in Overdosed Patients via Incremented Saliva Test” by seniors Tayaba Ahmed, Hsuan Chen, James Molini, and James Wang and advised by Emory toxicologist, Dr. Chang...

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Pre-Health Students: Next Steps to Health School Applications

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PURAWinners Spring 2010 BME Awardees

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A Glimpse of Graduate Life: Ph.D. Student Tiffany Chen Shares Her Experiences

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Young Investigator Awardee Todd McDevitt, Ph.D.

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Tour Outside The Quad: A Glimpse at the Nanotechnology Building

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(Photo: Adrianne Proeller)

Faculty Spotlight: By Willa Ni

Charlie Kemp, Ph.D.

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And More !

l-E, pronounced “Ellie,” approaches a lamp and tugs on the pull cord after a brief pause. The mounting excitement accompanying such a simple action is because El-E is a two-year old with a silver trunk extended in front of her – a robotic trunk. As Dr. Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab (HRL) and an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University explains, El-E is a “service robot that performs tasks to benefit people with limited mobility.” Specifically, collaboration with the Emory ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) Center has allowed the HRL to not only compile a prioritized list of objects for robotic retrieval, but also conduct multiple user studies...

Charlie Kemp, Ph.D., and El-E (Photo: GTRC / GIT)

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