November 2011

Volume VI, Issue 3

November/ December 2011 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:

Georgia Tech TI:GER Program Selling and Protecting Ph.D. Student’s Research

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Ph.D. student’s worst fear is that all the work [in research] he/she did over many years will end up as some manuscript in a drawer… and nobody is going to ever care about it again,” said Melissa Li, a Ph.D. candidate in the Wallace H. Coulter

www.thepioneer.gatech.edu

inside this

Issue

Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. To avoid this discouraging scenario, Li has been seeking to promote the commercialization of her research as a participant in the TI:GER® program housed at the Georgia Tech College of Management.

Since its creation in 2002, the TI:GER® (Technological Innovation: Generation Economic Results) program has...

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3 PRE-HEALTH COLUMN Evaluating Your Options

Team SpherIngenics From Left to Right: Natalie Dana, Christopher Lee, Christopher Palazzola, Bryan Stewart, Eric Diersen.

(Photo: Jacob Khouri)

4 ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT Ann Ensley 4 BIOTECH CAREER FAIR Job Hunting

Paul Benkeser, Ph.D.

6 RECENT PUBLICATIONS

New Senior Associate Chair for Operations

7 NASA INTERN Bethany Clement

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9 GRADUATE SCHOOL APPS Plan of Action 10 NOBEL LAUREATE Aaron Ciechanover 11 ENGINEERING REIMAGINED Innovation and Invention 12 DESIGNING FOR GOOD GT Case Competition

Jaemin Sung

temming from the tremendous growth of the department, several changes were made within the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering’s administration faculty shortly before the commencement of the 2011-2012 academic year. Paul Benkeser, Ph.D. was the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies for almost ten years, and has been with the Coulter Department since its creation in 1997. Benkeser is now the current Senior Associate Chair for Operations. In this position, Benkeser will work together with the Department Chair, Larry McIntire, Ph.D. in providing greater oversight on operations throughout the department while addressing needs more efficiently. His previous position is now held by Associate Professor Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D. Over the past decade, Benkeser oversaw the creation of the undergraduate curriculum for biomedical engineering, was instrumental in providing a vision for the department,...

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Subhendu De

Paul Benkeser, Ph.D, the outgoing Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies.

(Photo: Nicole Cappello)

WORDS

“T ha t ’s So BM E!”

from the editor in chief The cooling weather this Fall also brings with it the last issue of The Pioneer for 2011! As we face the promise of Thanksgiving and Winter Break and the hurdles of finals and various applications, I hope The Pioneer continues to serve as a source of advice and information. For students with further schooling in mind, please refer to Jennifer Kimble’s Pre-Health column and this month’s feature on Graduate School applications. For others headed towards industry, draw from alumni and students before you as resources. For all, explore the innovation and collaboration that continues to define our biotechnology community.

The BMES Annual Meeting in Hartford, CT this past month assembled the wider biomedical engineering community to unveil the vast array of research topics and industry products that continues to evolve and define biomedical engineering. Still resonating with the success of the Hartford Meeting, we cannot help, but look forward to the 2012 Meeting hosted by our very own Georgia Tech community!

Best of luck with the last months of 2011!

Sincerely,

Willa Ni Willa Ni Interim Editor-in-chief The Pioneer

Staff Members EDITOR IN CHIEF Willa Ni FACULTY SPONSOR Dr. Wendy Newstetter OFFICERS Debika Mitra WEBMASTERS Timothy Lin Sara Khalek

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STAFF WRITERS Alex Cooper Dhruv Vishwakarma Amrita Banerjee Subhedu De Belane Gizaw Sarah Gonzales Christine Hang Cathy Heo Asra Rehan Harish Srinimukesh Rachel Stewart Jaemin Sung Guergana Terzieva Steven Touchton Jr.

Iva Zivojinovic EDITORS Gopi Patel Shalv Madhani Nida Dharani Jackson Hair Ayesha Patel Elina Sarmah Kristen Weirich LAYOUT EDITORS Kevin Lam Yeonghoon Joung Kelli Koenig Candace Law

Summer Lee Chang Hyeon Lim Xurong Liu Alexandra Low Eesha Mathur Anum Syed PHOTOGRAPHERS Virginia Lin Saranya Karthikeyan Arthur Lo Jacob Khouri Sheridan Carroll William Sessions

COLLABORATORS Karen Adams Paul Fincannon Sally Gerrish Marty C. Jacobson Jennifer Kimble Megan McDevitt Mark P. McJunkin Colleen Mitchell Adrianne Proeller Shannon Sullivan

Events and Deadlines Pre-Health Column GAP SEMINAR SERIES The Graduate and Post-Doc (GaP) Seminar Series is a weekly event of research presentations by two graduate students or post-docs conducting bio-related research. ibb.gatech.edu Brandon Chaffins and Stephen Goldman Nov 2 Hyewon Lee and Catera Wilder Nov 30 Every Wednesday at 12:00pm in IBB 1128 SCEC SEMINAR SERIES Jeffrey Karp, PhD - Harvard Stem Cell Institute Sharon Gerecht, PhD - Johns Hopkins University

Nov 8 Nov 22

BIOE SEMINAR SERIES Design, Synthesis and Evaluation of Surgical Biomaterials and Vaccine Adjuvant Systems David A. Putnam, PhD - Cornell University IBB 1128 November 3, 2011 - 11:00am 8TH GEORGIA TECH-EMORY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON BIOINFORMATICS: FROM GENOMICS TO SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Bringing together leading, world-renowned researchers in genomics and bioinformatics to present recent advances in the field and to discuss open problems. ibb.gatech.edu November 10, 2011 - 8:30am

Pre-Health Column Evaluating Your Options: Other Health Careers

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f you ask children who takes care of sick people, they will say “doctors and nurses.” When those same children go to college, they might be interested in working with sick people. Once again, they gravitate to doctors and nurses and thus, they decide to be doctors.

People are often surprised to learn that there are over 200 health professions out there! One reason that health profession schools don’t accept students at age 18 is that they want you to EXPLORE and find the right career path for you while in college.

I’m always more than happy to discuss the different career options with you. One starting website I urge you to look at is explorehealthcareers.org. This website is hosted by the American Dental Education Association, but gives a snapshot of careers ranging from chiropractic medicine to veterinary medicine.

Another website I recommend is www.georgiahealth.edu/ahec/healthworkforce/healthcareers.

Please click the link that says “Health Careers in Georgia” manual.

Created by the Area Health Education Centers of Georgia, this manual shows you where in Georgia you can go to advance your education. Both of these websites highlight the career growth and average salaries of potential health careers.

Sadly, not every pre-med student goes to medical school. For some applicants, they weren’t strong enough to stand out in a competitive application cycle. Our average GPA for accepted students to medical school hovers around a 3.6 with MCATs of about a 31.

Optometry Personally, I would choose optometry out of all the health professions. For those of you who want to establish a strong relationship with your patients, optometry has that. Think about it - your patients see you every 12 months for a contact or glasses

IBB BREAKFAST CLUB SEMINAR SERIES Creating Therapeutic Materials from Proteins Julie Champion, PhD - Assistant Professor, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering IBB 1128 November 15, 2011 - 8:30am Swimming in Sand Daniel Goldman, PhD - Assistant Professor, School of Physics IBB 1128 December 13, 2011 - 8:30am 3RD ANNUAL WORKSHOP FOR MAGNETIC RESONANCE IBB INDUSTRY PARTNER’S SYMPOSIUM Open laboratory demonstrating the MRI scanner and a discussion forum for students, postdocs and research scholars. ibb.gatech.edu December 13, 2011 - 9:00 am CAREER SERVICES Managing Your Money Internship Information Session www.career.gatech.edu

Nov 5 Nov 15

GT NEURO Newsletter Info Session Whitaker 1103 November 9, 2011 - 8pm

By Jennifer Kimble prescription. And, really, who fears going to the optometrist?!

Also, you occasionally diagnose hypertension and diabetes, which manifest themselves in vision issues because patients are scared to see their M.D. Some optometry schools offer summer programs to highlight their career. One year, I had a pre-med student who did an “OptoCamp” which opened his eyes (no pun intended) to a career in optometry. When he got back to Tech, he took the Optometry Admissions Test and was accepted to several optometry schools. For additional information on optometry, please go to www.opted.org.

Podiatry Many students aren’t aware that podiatrists attend a separate medical school leading to the Doctor of Podiatric Medicine (D.P.M.) degree. In total, it includes four years of podiatric medical school and a residency of about 36 months. A career bonus is that podiatrists not only do patient consultations (check a patient’s gait, deal with skin ulcers, cast broken bones, etc.), but also perform surgeries. Some podiatrists are in private practice, but others work for hospitals, spine centers, military, athletic teams, etc.

Also, opposed to the 42,000+ applicants for 18,000 M.D. seats, approximately 1000 applicants vie for almost 600 seats. The average salary for a podiatrist is about $189,000 and it is a field with high career growth. If interested, www.aacpm.org is a great website for you to peruse. One of my former pre-med students realized her interest in podiatry by shadowing who she thought was an M.D., but was actually a podiatrist specializing in foot and ankle!

I hope that highlighting two of the lesser known health professions plants the seed that you don’t have to go to medical school to make a difference in patients’ health.

Jennifer Kimble is the Georgia Tech Pre-Health Advisor.

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Ann Ensley

By Christine Hang

Product Specialist at W.L. Gore & Associates

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nn Ensley is an alumnus of the Georgia Institute of Technology currently working for W.L. Gore & Associates, a company with electronic, industrial, fabric and medical products divisions.

Ensley first entered Georgia Tech as an undergraduate in the school of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

As an undergraduate, she had the opportunity to perform research under Ajit Yoganathan, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering and Associate Chair for Research and Regents’ Professor. From her second year until she graduated, her research focused on fluid mechanics and biological situations, which shaped her professional and educational career. Ensley took her interests a step further by entering the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University as a Ph.D. candidate. During her time in graduate school, she participated in sailing club and the IBB Regenerative Club, which was instrumental in bringing the L.I.F.E. seminars (Learning about Industry from Experts) to Georgia Tech.

After receiving her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, Ensley began working in Philadelphia as a product specialist with W.L. Gore Medical Products Division, the largest division, which focused on implantable medical devices. According to Ensley, “[W.L. Gore] makes implantable devices from applications in cardiology to dialysis, as well as general surgery applications, and even medical electronics.” Some of the products made by W.L. Gore include hernia repair meshes, hernia plugs and staple-line reinforcements.

A section of the medical division is also dedicated to new product development in which Ensley must “work with physicians to understand what their current needs are” to see if W. L. Gore can help make appropriate products for their specific needs.

As a product specialist, Ann acts in a “central role for a given product.” She must keep in mind the commercial and marketing aspects of each device by meeting with manufacturing associates and technology groups. The device must also be profitable and create business revenue. Ensley also deals with new product development. “My role is to work with an engineering team, to develop these new products… Problem-based learning is what we do every day.” Some topics discussed with engineering teams include creating physiologically-relevant tests, tests ensuring the

reproducibility of every device, device functionality, physiological need and reliability. Ensley testifies that many of the tasks she performs in her every day job are analogous to BMED 2300.

Lastly, Ensley has some advice for current Georgia Tech students. Undergraduate research is “an opportunity for folks to get involved in. It was really helpful to me.” This was especially the case for her graduate school and occupational interviews.

Also, “practice effective teaming. [You] don’t always have to lead but improve the team to be more effective.”

Christine Hang is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

Ann Ensley (Photo: Sheridan Carroll)

Job Hunting Season in Full Swing Biotechnology Career Fair

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nxiously waiting to meet representatives of their dream companies, hopeful students compared networking tactics and resumes while in line at the 7th Annual Georgia Tech Biotechnology Career Fair, which took place on September 15, 2011. Three levels of the Molecular Science and Engineering building were full of professionally dressed students filed in long winding lines. Judging by the length of the lines, most popular companies included Medtronic, Epic, and Proctor & Gamble.

Other companies that also attracted attention included Eli Lilly and Company, Edwards Lifesciences, and C.R. Bard. The majority of these organizations looked to fill positions for full-time graduates.

However, after speaking with a few representatives, the general consensus from employers was that they wanted students to gain experience throughout their college education via internships or co-ops because learning in a lecture hall and putting that knowledge to practice are two different skills. For this reason,

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By Belane Gizaw some firms provide such opportunities for undergraduates to allow them early exposure to the corporate world. Among these are Eli Lilly and Company, Medtronic, Proctor & Gamble, and C. R. Bard’s medical division. A resume with such experience gives many students looking for full-time jobs an advantageous edge over their competition.

Those who attended this year’s Biotechnology Career Fair may have found their first internship or the job that will launch their career. For those who missed this year’s career fair, keep your eyes open for other career fair opportunities this coming spring and look to company websites for applications. By bringing these companies on our campus, the Biotechnology Career Fair Committee has aided many biotechnology students in gaining early and easy access to job applications and interviews that open the door for post-graduation success.

Belane Gizaw is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

Designing for Good

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a member of the “Viable Designs” group said, “We didn't expect it at all! Especially after third and second place were announced. It was an incredible feeling.” She continued with a hopeful look, “As a future architect and/or civil engineer it was really a dream come true to hear that our design would be built and would help 250 families. I'm very excited to be able to help build and live in our design for a week!”

Saving All Families Endeavor, or “SAFE” camp, also participated in the competition and their focus was distribution of water supply to the refugees. “Our ultimate goal was to provide clean water to 250 family members in refugee camp with [a] cost and energy efficient, portable and sustainable solution that incorporates the community,” said Mijin Lee, who is a pursuing a 2012 Master’s degree in the Georgia Tech College of Management. Lee said she was inspired by simple designs with simple solutions and “appropriate technology,” such as the life straw, a portable water... filter for areas without clean water supply and the Q drum, a rolling water container for developing countries which eases the burden of fetching water over long distances.

“Students should definitely get involved with this competition because it's an opportunity to design for a problem that exists in the world today,” said Wong. “It really gets you thinking about the current issues and how we can address these issues as future leaders in innovative solutions. It was also really nice to be able to work with disciplines and majors outside of [my] own and to interact with mentors who are already working in the field.”

This experience could even have an impact on career goals, since the exposure is so different from other college experiences.

“Personally, I was never exposed to something like this when I was a student. And if I had [been], I think my career choice would’ve been [a] lot different. I was never exposed to anything like global issues and for most students, they end up going to school, get their degree and end up in an office somewhere,” said Parks. “We have the opportunity to be aware of these global issues and the opportunity to affect them in a positive way. And, in this circumstance, potentially improve the lives of millions of people.”

The teams presented their design to a panel of judges familiar with the issues at hand, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Peace Corps, CARE, Siemens, Inc. and more. The top designs will be combined to construct a refugee camp in rural Georgia using nonprofit and student labor. The camp will be populated with volunteers for one week to assess its functionality and the living

conditions and camp logistics will be documented thoroughly. The camp will then be disassembled and reconstructed in Arizona so that the UN can evaluate the mobility of the camp as well as the final design. Through these camps, UN standard operating procedures for mobile refugee camp construction, oversight and management will be improved.

“Designing For Good” will hopefully become an annual event – one of Georgia Tech’s first design competitions that focuses on the global level. Additionally, a focus on successful implementation will allow students to feel connected to those they are helping and to make a difference in the world.

Cathy Heo is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

Designing for Good 2011 Winners Shelter

Water Treatment and Distribution

Sanitation

Viable Designs: Moinak Banbyopadhyay, Chandim Chatterjee, Mudit Palival, Shaleen Jain, Catherine Wong

J & J: Ho Cheong Leung, Jasdeep Singh, Jon Callura, Onika Anglin, Julian

Nomad: Bilal Bari, Kate Wharton, Joshua Lee, Ke Du, Kristen King

Two-Hearted: Daniel Schuetz, Jiwoong Son, Ariel James E. Livica, Jiwoo Son, Christy Seerlwy

Vumilia: Thejas Hiremath, Sushanth Reddy, Silvia Roscot

Communitas: John Zelek, Tomas Leon, Emma Bones, Aaron Greenwood, Mike Donohue

D: Sabrin Stein, Christopher Orlando, Jessica Vanterpool, Ahmed Hamed, Andrew Ivey

E: Alfonso Hernandez, Ritika Thapar, Cessunica Ivey, Ali Perry, Mohan Rajendran

CEDC-1: Amelie Cardon, Marcela Preininger, Murray Fisher, Paul Duhhan, Donald West

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Recent Coulter Department Publications AAPS PHARMSCITECH

DISABILITY AND REHABILITATION. ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Recovery of Skin Barrier After Stratum Corneum Removal by Microdermabrasion.

Andrews S, Lee JW, Prausnitz M.

Dusty: an assistive mobile manipulator that retrieves dropped objects for people with motor impairments.

King CH, Chen TL, Fan Z, Glass JD, Kemp CC.

ANGEWANDTE CHEMIE

INVESTIGATIVE OPHTHALMOLOGY VISUAL SCIENCE

Fiber-Based Hybrid Nanogenerators for/as Self-Powered Systems in Biological Liquid.

Pan C, Li Z, Guo W, Zhu J, Wang ZL.

Computerized macular pathology diagnosis in spectral domain optical coherence tomography scans based on multiscale texture and shape features.

Liu YY, Ishikawa H, Chen M, Wollstein G, Duker JS, Fujimoto JG, Schuman JS, Rehg JM.

ANNALS OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Effect of Zinc and Nitric Oxide on Monocyte Adhesion to Endothelial Cells under Shear Stress.

Lee S, Eskin SG, Shah AK, Schildmeyer LA, McIntire LV. ANTIOXIDANTS AND REDOX SIGNALING

THE JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE

Cortical Excitation and Inhibition following Focal Traumatic Brain Injury.

Ding MC, Wang Q, Lo EH, Stanley GB.

Systemic redox regulation of cellular information processing.

Dwivedi G, Kemp ML.

LAB ON A CHIP

ARCHIVES OF BIOCHEMISTRY AND BIOPHYSICS

Microfluidic chamber arrays for whole-organism behavior-based chemical screening.

Chung K, Zhan M, Srinivasan J, Sternberg PW, Gong E, Schroeder FC, Lu H.

Manipulating substrate and pH in zymography protocols selectively distinguishes cathepsins K, L, S, and V activity in cells and tissues.

Wilder CL, Park KY, Keegan PM, Platt MO. ARTIFICIAL ORGANS

Laser Flow Measurements in an Idealized Total Cavopulmonary Connection With Mechanical Circulatory Assistance.

Chopski SG, Downs E, Haggerty CM, Yoganathan AP, Throckmorton AL. BIOMATERIALS

Engineering fibrin polymers through engagement of alternative polymerization mechanisms.

Stabenfeldt SE, Gourley M, Krishnan L, Hoying JB, Barker TH. BMC BIOINFORMATICS

caCORRECT2: Improving the accuracy and reliability of microarray data in the presence of artifacts.

Moffitt RA, Yin-Goen Q, Stokes TH, Parry RM, Torrance JH, Phan JH, Young AN, Wang MD. BMC SYSTEMS BIOLOGY

Systemic remodeling of the redox regulatory network due to RNAi perturbations of glutaredoxin 1, thioredoxin 1, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase.

Kippner LE, Finn NA, Shukla S, Kemp ML. CURRENT PROTOCOLS IN BIOINFORMATICS

Eukaryotic gene prediction using GeneMark.hmm-E and GeneMark-ES. Borodovsky M, Lomsadze A.

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MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING AND COMPUTER-ASSISTED INTERVENTION

An analysis of scale and rotation invariance in the bag-offeatures method for histopathological image classification.

Raza SH, Parry RM, Moffitt RA, Young AN, Wang MD. NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH

Genome-wide prediction and analysis of human chromatin boundary elements.

Wang J, Lunyak VV, Jordan IK. NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH

Integration of sequence-similarity and functional association information can overcome intrinsic problems in orthology mapping across bacterial genomes.

Li G, Ma Q, Mao X, Yin Y, Zhu X, Xu Y. PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY

A switching mechanism in Doxorubicin bioactivation can be exploited to control Doxorubicin toxicity.

Finn NA, Findley HW, Kemp ML. PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE USA

Large area and structured epitaxial graphene produced by confinement controlled sublimation of silicon carbide. de Heer WA, Berger C, Ruan M, Sprinkle M, Li X, Hu Y, Zhang B, Hankinson J, Conrad E.

TI:GER® Program

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assembled and trained teams that each consists of one Ph.D. candidate and two M.B.A. students from Georgia Tech and two J.D. students from Emory University. In the frame of this two-year interdisciplinary program, each team works with a goal of commercializing a Ph.D. student’s innovative research and obtaining legal protection of the product of the research. The program is designed to benefit second or third year Ph.D. students who have a strong interest in business or legal aspects of the product development process and want to acquire entrepreneurial skills.

Li’s research is focused on using microfluidics to make personalized point-of-care devices that diagnose platelet activity in blood. Platelets that tend to clog and form a blockage in the blood vessel prevent the flow of blood and thus, cause heart attacks.

During her first semester in the program, her team, Cardiam, examined the current biotechnology market, learning what biomedical companies might be interested in Li’s research and where the big areas of growth for her research could be.

The program provides tools for making a business out of the research product for each TI:GER® team. For instance, Li “had a lecture in how to write a license agreement, and how to get money from venture capitalists.” Besides learning about the commercialization of her research from the courses, she finds her team members to be an excellent resource. The M.B.A. students have “a great deal of knowledge about how to develop your product and whether its profitable in the market, [while] the J.D. students will give you an idea of what a good patentable part of your research idea is.” Li thoroughly enjoys her experience with TI:GER® as “it gives you appreciation for technical aspects of other people’s work.”

Christopher Lee, also a Ph.D. candidate in the Coulter Department, is part of the TI:GER® team SpherIngenics. His team has won third place in the 2011 Georgia Tech Business Plan

Competition for its microencapsulation technology for cell-based therapies, specifically using adult stem cells to regenerate tissues that are orthopedic in nature. At the onset of its path to placing in the competition, Lee’s team had to determine the first application of its cell delivery technology and the first target market. After the market analysis, the J.D. students worked on drafting patents for the technology. SpherIngenics is now a start-up company which holds five U.S. patents pending.

The most important aspect about this program is the educational diversity on the team. Lee describes his experience with the TI:GER® as completely different from his prior research environment. For him, “working with two J.D. and two M.B.A. students is entirely different from working with typical researchers or biomedical engineers.” As the diverse educational backgrounds mesh together upon one long-term project, Lee feels that it has been a great experience to work with people with different ways of thinking and different ways of working.

Furthermore, “learning how to present and market [himself] for future jobs” is one important career-oriented skill that Lee took away from his experience with the TI:GER® so far. The program has taught him to talk akin to a businessman’s manner of speaking and helped him adopt a lawyer’s mindset in evaluating his own technology. With all the valuable skills that the program has offered, Lee feels that the TI:GER® has solidified his goal of becoming an entrepreneur. His team SpherIngenics is now in Munich, Germany and consults for a start-up research company who is seeking to expand to the market in the United States.

The TI:GER® program is open to Ph.D. candidates who are highly interested in tailoring themselves towards the development of their research and marketing. For interested applicants, look for the admission application for the program to be released around February.

Jaemin Sung is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

NASA Intern: Bethany Clement Taking the Road Less Travelled

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very semester, Tech students strive to become involved with a variety of research, co-ops, and internships whose topics begin to seem repetitive – device design, tissue engineering, computational modeling, etc... Bethany Clement, a fourth year biomedical engineering student, travelled a less worn path and undertook an internship program with NASA’s space medical division last spring in Houston, TX. As part of her internship program, she worked on medical kits to be sent up to the space station with the goal of updating them and improving methods of inventorying supplies.

Clement was able to redesign the kits as well as familiarize herself with government paperwork that is required for projects such as these.

Applicants are normally placed into a division most closely related to their major; however, due to Clement’s biomedical engineering major, the program coordinators allowed her to choose from a wide variety of projects. She eventually chose one related to her interest in the health field. The application process required basic information, essays on why each applicant would like to work at NASA, what they would bring to the program, transcripts, a resume and letters of recommendation. The program is available throughout the year and is targeted toward third and fourth year students although exceptions can be made for second year students. Due to geographical inconveniences, the interview

By Harish Srinimukesh process is conducted by the Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP) over the phone.

While heavily involved in the research project, Clement was also able to shadow other areas of NASA and even help other internship divisions with their projects whenever she had a free day. Clement discussed how her coursework with computer programming was useful for these other projects. She also found the team-oriented skills she obtained from BMED 1300 and BMED 2300 essential to her work at NASA’s campus where she handled problems such as questioning the efficacy of a packaging method for medical kits.

Coming out of the program, Clement shared that she was really able to develop her time management skills. She discussed that she “is now able to get as much done as possible between 9 to 5, [rather than] being up until the crack of dawn [working].”

With so much to offer to interested interns, NASA has projects available for a variety of majors. Back at Tech, Bethany has taken on research in the McDevitt lab doing working on stem cell research this semester. Her post-graduation plans include jumping into industry, which will be guided by exposure to the various aspects of biomedical engineering and finding her niche.

Harish Srinimukesh is undergraduate student in the Coulter Department

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Benkeser

from Page 1

and laid the groundwork for the integration of the successful problem based learning (PBL) education model into the curriculum.

With the rest of the faculty available at the time, Benkeser began to conceive an u n d e r g r a d u a t e c u r r i c u lu m w h i l e simultaneously hiring faculty. As he reflects on being the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Benkeser says, “A lot of time and effort has gone into shaping individual courses and the curriculum as a whole. It was made through a partnership of faculty, students, and now a sizable number of alumni that have all contributed to what we now call the undergraduate program.”

He initially worked with faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University about learning the challenges of developing a functional undergraduate program in biomedical engineering. Georgia Tech, according to Benkeser, was “one of the first big engineering schools with a BME undergraduate program.” Because they were able to start with a “blank slate,” the faculty was able to develop a unique underg ra duate cu r ricu lu m which

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incorporated PBL. This parallels how many medical schools use PBL to develop diagnostic skills in students. In order to adapt it for an undergraduate engineering curriculum, some fundamental changes were necessary. “What was different was that we weren’t interested in students just learning facts or theories,” said Benkeser, “but in developing the students’ biomedical engineering problem solving skills.” This vision has come to define the undergraduate BME curriculum.

However, the road to reaching the current curriculum was not smooth.

Benkeser recalled early tensions amongst the faculty, over whether the degree would focus on students seeking either a premedicine track or an engineering track.

Another concern was that the nature of the curriculum might not allow students to explore options of technical electives as much. There were also concerns that the undergraduate BME curriculum, while offering diversity and breadth, did not offer enough depth in any one area. Despite these concerns, Benkeser, along with the BME faculty, were able to meet each and every challenge head on.

Their success was shown in the positive response from hundreds of alumni in

recent survey conducted by Benkeser, which he regards as his greatest success.

The alumni stated that the BME undergraduate experience “helped them get to where they wanted.” Benkeser also consulted with engineers in industry in regards to the curriculum, noting that industry consistently ranks “good communication skills, team work skills, problem solving skills, and self-directed learning” as key fundamentals of education.

Furthermore, he observed that the trend in industry “is not on people who have a narrow focused depth in one area,” but is on “students who have both breadth and depth.” With these revelations from alumni and industry, Benkeser spearheaded the recent overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum, which now incorporates both breadth and depth electives. The new curriculum is the most flexible curriculum so far, and is ultimately the result of Benkeser’s vision for the undergraduate BME experience.

Subhendu De is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department

Graduate School Applications

By Dhruv Vishwakarma

Plan of Action

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tressful doesn't even begin to describe the environment surrounding a Biomedical Engineering student in his/her last year. For the prospective graduate student, a heaving spoonful of graduate school application just adds to an already overflowing schedule of classes and worries. Although the application process seems intimidating, it can be managed by tackling it in small chunks and thinking carefully about future goals.

In the broadest sense, the first few things to consider is whether to pursue a Master’s or a Ph.D. Master’s programs will generally have a higher proportion of classes to independent research, while doctorate programs usually involve classes and more research. In engineering doctorate programs, the entirety of work over the 4-6 years will be research, with the exception of a few classes.

Undergraduate research is the best way to find out which level of research is appropriate and graduate admissions committees put a lot of weight on an applicant's previous research experience.

After deciding, the next step is to make a plan to cover all the bases required for graduate school admission. The 4 categories that most affect your admission are GPA, GRE score, personal statement and letter of recommendation. Graduate schools use this information to make a decision on whether you have the right qualifications to succeed in their program.

If a school or a professor is going to invest time and money into training a Ph.D. student, they want assurance that the student will be motivated and responsible.

GPA is considered the biggest factor in admissions and for good reason. It reflects 4-5 years of consistent work and effort and informs schools of your standing compared

to other applicants. Even though not all schools have the same coursework rigor, top graduate programs do have a sense of the difficulty of undergraduate programs, though there is no official normalization of GPA. Normalization across the entire pool of applicants is done through the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) score. The GRE is a standardized test that tests verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing. A high GRE score could possibly offset some other factors, such as a low GPA. The new GRE introduced this fall is completely computerbased, includes section-based difficulty adjustment, and relieves students from questions types like analogies or antonyms.

The 200-800 scale is now a 130-170 scale.

Take the GRE early on so that you can take it again if you are not satisfied with your score since schools consider only the highest scores per section.

Next up in order of importance are personal statements and a letter of recommendation. While GPA and GRE scores inform schools of your thinking skills, personal statements and recommendation letters reflect your performance in research. Personal statements should answer questions like "What skills do you possess that qualify you as a good candidate?" and "Why are you interested in your field or our program specifically?" This is the point in the application process where you have to "sell" yourself to the admissions committee. They want to know why you think you would make a good graduate student in their program.

After understanding your rationale for applying, the school then checks this rationale with other sources - your letters

of recommendation. These letters are a way for the committee to see why your research advisor thinks you would be a good candidate. The letter can tell the school how dedicated you are to research, how much effort you have put in, and whether they believe you will succeed in graduate school. The ideal candidate to write letters of recommendation is your research PI. If the reviewing faculty member at your prospective school has a personal relationship with your research PI, he/she may offer you special consideration.

Though application time usually coincides with the busiest time of your college career, it can be broken down and handled in small pieces. It is important to get started as early as possible. By sophomore or junior year, you should be involved in research. Plan on taking your first GRE towards the end of junior year or earlier and take the last GRE at the beginning of your last year. The summer before the last year, pick out your prospective schools - usually around 3-5 schools, including a safety, a moderately competitive and a reach school. During that summer, make sure to contact your letter-writers to make sure they have enough time to put together a well-written one. Application deadlines are usually around December-January, and by February or March, you should know your options. In that last stretch of waiting, plan on missing a few days for campus visits and let your professors know. If you can smoothly distribute the application workload across a long time frame, you can minimize the stress you will incur during that monstrous last year.

Dhruv Vishwakarma is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

www.hiltonhead.gatech.ed Join us for the 2012 meeting which attracts leading scientists, engineers, clinicians and industry participants to discuss the latest cutting edge research in the regenerative medicine field.

Call for Abstracts November 1, 2011 - December 16, 2011

Summer Internship Program At the Institut Pasteur in PARIS, FRANCE Looking for motivated undergraduate summer interns in the biological sciences Application Deadline: December 16, 2011 www.pasteurfoundation.org

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Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover Will we cure all diseases?

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ill Emory University shut down its school of medicine? Will the Kettering Cancer Center close its doors?

These are just a few of the colossal implications of the question that Aaron Ciechanover, the co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, posed in his October 4 th talk entitled “Drug Development in the 21st Century: Are We Going to Cure All Diseases?”

Given a life expectancy of 50 years in the early 1900s, the 30 years added since seem like a great boon. However, the extension of life expectancy has hidden caveats. Whereas the people of a hundred years ago died of infectious disease, the people of today die of cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and heart disease, which come into effect in the sixth decade of life or later. Due to the lifespan

By Rachel Stewart required to develop these diseases, they have been defined relatively recently, and their research has only begun in earnest in the last hundred years. These illnesses of today are Ciechanover’s primary concern.

About half of all illnesses in developed countries are lifestyle diseases which could have been avoided with preventive care.

Before we cure all diseases, we have to learn to avoid preventable diseases. Right now, medicine is not structured to support preventive care, but in the future, Ciechanover predicts that preventive medicine will be consistently applied and it will be considered as important as curative medicine. Given current technology, how can such preventative powers be created?

Modern medicine as we know it began in the 1930s. This was an era of incidental discoveries, bringing forth aspirin and

Nobel laureate, Aaron Ciechanover speaks to students, faculty.

(Photo: William Sessions)

penicillin. The 1970s brought about a new era of brute force testing and experimentation, which brought about the awareness of heart disease and the creation of statins. The third era of medicine, today, is the most interesting; it will be the era of designed and fitted medicine. Medicine in this era will become personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory. With the development of new, more powerful, tools, such as the interpretation of the human genome, we will be able to better diagnose patients and suit treatments to their particular case.

The example Ciechanover gives to demonstrate this personalization is of breast cancer. A breast cancer patient with a particular type of mutated estrogen receptors can be treated much more successfully than a patient without it, but we currently do not differentiate between the two patients and their two cancers. In fact, the procedure of diagnosis renders us unable to distinguish between the two patients because we start diagnosis with screening. This is not a fitted method of medicine. In the future, an improved first step will start from the patient’s genome and use that to predict and detect diseases they may develop. This method will alter everything about medicine and diseases, including their very definitions. Today, diseases are defined as a set of symptoms.

In the era of fitted medicine, disease will be quantitative; it will be expressed in probabilities, susceptibilities, and capabilities.

In the end, will we cure all diseases?

We cannot be sure given current knowledge, but with the dawn of truly personal and preventive medicine, we may.

Rachel Stewart is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department

2012 ANNUAL MEETING October 24-27 Hosted by Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University At the Georgia World Congress Center Fostering Collaborative Academic, Clinical, and Industrial Research in Biomedical Engineering

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Engineering Reimagined in the BME An Open Community of Innovation and Invention

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veryone has had a “million-dollar idea,” but ideas are a dime a dozen. Marty C. Jacobson and Mark P. McJunkin, design instructors, along with Franklin Bost, Director of Design in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, specialize in turning these ideas into true innovation. While many people imagine innovation occurring at desks and in meetings, innovation in the BME Workshop is an iterative process, in which getting one’s hands dirty, is inevitable.

However, the BME Workshop is about a lot more than just building things; it is a complex learning environment that is founded on the belief that one can only learn engineering through one’s own fingertips. Most importantly, it is a collaborative environment where knowledge and experience are shared and developed.

The BME workshop, located in the basement of Whitaker, houses machinery for the students’ project needs.

(Photo: Virginia Lin)

In an increasingly digitized world, losing sight of the value of the intuition gained through hands-on work is easy. Brent Foster, a BME undergraduate student who is a regular in the workshop, stressed the value of this intuition. “What kind of tolerance is needed for a snug fit around a heart valve? What lathe tools should we use? These are just two of many questions we had to learn, that isn't taught in our classes. I can easily say [my work in the BME Workshop] was the first time I really felt like an engineer.” While the BME Workshop sometimes functions as an impromptu classroom, it also functions as a design studio where students collaborate on design and invention, working on anything from medical devices like heart valves and novel surgical tools to machining projects like the ‘Do - Nothing Machine,’ the final test for Guild chapters at the workshop.

By Alex Cooper As the BME Workshop grew in popularity, it quickly started to become a community. Seeing the untapped potential of students teaching students, McJunkin and Jacobson founded the BME Guild. The BME Guild enables students to receive training and experience in the BME Workshop through not only McJunkin and Jacobson, but also their fellow students. Students can start Guild Chapters, which after a series of training sessions get untethered access to the BME Workshop to continue to develop their skills as designers and engineers.

These Guild Chapters can then begin to teach and instruct other students during regular shop hours.

The BME Guild is founded on the belief that the ability to design and the ability to build are not two unrelated skills. “You can’t design something and get it built if you’ve never built anything.” Jacobson, when discussing this concept, also stated that “It’s more than just building things that somebody else came up with. It’s not a build shop; it’s an innovation shop.” The ability to build what you design also provides students with first-hand experience in manufacturability, something many students would otherwise graduate with no knowledge of.

While mentorship and collaboration are key principles to the BME Workshop, it is all founded on a firm belief in safety.

McJunkin, while explaining the structure of the BME Guild, explained that safety is a crucial element to cooperation and learning. Starting with a strict no late night hours rule, he continues to state that “Safety is based on community and responsibility for people that are in the shop. That’s why we have a two-person rule in the shop at all times…You create a safe work environment by making sure everyone has adequate training and being sure they have the maturity to know what they don’t know and be comfortable with asking questions.”

Knowledge, experience, and creativity are all things that students develop over their tenure at Georgia Tech, but in the BME Workshop it is something that is shared and crafted into tangible innovation.

At the end of the day, students do not leave the BME Workshop with a grade, instead they leave with inventions that have the potential to improve lives and redesign medicine.

Alex Cooper is an undergraduate student in the Coulter Department.

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Designing for Good

By Cathy Heo

Georgia Tech Case Competition 2011

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he warm light of the Klaus Advanced Computing atrium welcomed attendees on Sunday evening, October 1st as it filled with excited students, professionals and coordinators for the closing ceremony of the “Designing for Good” competition. The past week, students from all over Georgia gathered at Georgia Tech to come up with unique and innovative ideas to improve United Nations (UN) refugee camps. On this final day, all were eager for the announcement of the winners whose designs will ultimately improve millions of refugees’ lives.

This Georgia Tech Case Competition was established and hosted through the partnership of Siemens, Engineers Without Borders – Atlanta, Engineers Without Borders – Georgia Tech, Peacebuilding Solutions, and Georgia Tech Research Institute. The competition involved 24 teams of two to five students from multidisciplinary backgrounds. Together, they worked to innovate a solution to current UN refugee camp problems over the course of one week. Problems were divided into three categories: water, shelter and sanitation. The top three winners for best design in each category were awarded a total of $15,000 in prize money and will be given the opportunity to work with each other to simulate a combination of their designs. Eventually, these simulations will be presented to the UN for potential implementation.

Hundreds of refugee camps around the globe provide protection, shelter, and sustenance to individuals who have been forced to flee in wake of civil unrest, political persecution or natural disasters. These camps, however, are often rapidly

constructed. “The reason why we started a competition [was] because we were looking for improved design[s] for refugee camps. Most of the refugee camps last maybe about 6 months, and [the] problem with that is that the average amount of time the refugees need to stay in these camps is about a year,” said Andrew Parks, Vice President of Engineers Without Borders in Atlanta (EWB-ATL). The design groups all focused on developing revisions for an aspect of these camps.

For the competition, students were responsible for addressing the issue of providing transportable, reusable, robust and modularized refugee camps that can be constructed during a crisis and disassembled, relocated and reconstructed if required.

“Viable Design” won first place for their solution in the shelter category. Inspired by the SuperAdobe method, developed by the Aga Khan Award winner, Nader Khalili, the shelters utilize a basic sandbag design and fuse them with various other innovative technologies that allow for both modular designs and creative expression. The framework of the house is made up of polypropylene bags, barbed wire and a steel wire mesh to ensure solidity. The roofing is a salt box design and it is made up of corrugated zinc aluminum-coated galvanized steel for heat reflection, sturdiness and natural ventilation. The flooring utilizes more polypropylene sand bags laid out on polyethene sheets that keep the interior moisture-free. The interior space can be customized by each family to suit their needs; the placement of extra poles, polyethene sheets, and wire mesh creates walls within the shelter. Provisions for heating and cooling relative to the ambient temperature are provided within the house. The high windows and the corrugated roof act as passive cooling agents.

Conversely, a rocket stove acts as a heating source for the interiors of the shelter, and a solar cooker reduces dependency upon precious firewood. A simple gooseneck-shaped metal chimney extends down from the roof to the rocket stove, thus providing the shelter with an efficient exhaust system. All the doors, windows and exhaust openings are covered with fiber-glass screens to keep the insides hygienic and bug-free. Finally, a “liter of light” setup is implemented on the roof to provide cost-effective interior lighting solutions. The total cost for the design came out to be about $850 for each unit.

On winning first place in the shelter category, Catherine Wong, 3rd year undergraduate in the Georgia Tech College of Architecture and the Georgia Tech School of Civil Engineering, and

Left: Winning design for the shelter component. (Photo: Engineers Without Borders Atlanta) Right: Viable Design won 1st place and a prize of $4000 for their shelter design. (Photo: Peace Building Solutions)

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