Department of Biomedical Engineering 2011 Newsletter Welcome to the 2011 newsletter from Tulane’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. I’m very proud to bring you up to date on the status of our department. We’ve completely rebounded from the interruption that Katrina caused us, thanks in large part to the eight new faculty members who have come on board in the past five years. Our newsletter, edited by Cedric Walker and the External Constituency Committee , focuses on three themes: People, Research and Outreach. 2011 Events Our website bmen.tulane.edu has more information, and we’d love to hear from you. If come to New Orleans, please feel free to come by, otherwise drop me a note at dpg@tulane.edu. With best wishes, Donald Gaver Alden J. “Doc” Laborde Professor and Department Chair
January 29th - Senior Research Day
February 26th - Team Design Show (see page 2)
March 17th - Suhren Lecture, Dr. George Truskey, Engineering Endothelial Progenitor Cells for Vascular Repair
April 20th - Annual BME Awards Ceremony
May 11th - Annual Order of the Engineer Induction
May 12th - 2011 Commencement BME will be awarding 15 BS degrees to our senior class, 4 MS degrees and 2 Ph.D. degrees.
October 9 - 11th Come visit our Tulane BME booth at the BMES Conference in Harford, CT.
Research Shevkoplyas Receives Prestigious Grant to Study Red Blood Cell Deterioration Dr. Sergey Shevkoplyas, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a $74,900 grant by the National Blood Foundation. The Foundation awarded only 8 new grants this year. Shevkoplyas is one of 3 engineers among the 8 recipients. Priority is given to new investigators and innovative projects with the potential to have a practical impact on transfusion recipients and blood donors. The quality of red blood cells (RBCs) during storage deteriorates as the cells lose certain functional abilities and accumulate oxidative damage over time. This “storage lesion” decreases the ability of RBCs to deliver oxygen effectively in the transfusion patient. With the NBF grant “The Relationship between the Ability of Stored Red Blood Cells to Perfuse Microvascular Networks and their 24-hr Post-Transfusion Recovery in vivo”, Shevkoplyas and colleagues will assess the ability of artificial microvascular networks, or AMVNs, to detect the deterioration in red blood cells that takes place over time. The researchers are taking advantage of an ongoing clinical study in which RBCs will be collected from volunteers, stored and re-infused back into participants at two-week intervals to determine their 24-hour in vivo recovery. They will measure the AMVN perfusion parameters for these same samples and see whether those parameters correlate with the clinical findings of the study. Shevkoplyas hopes eventually AMVNs such as the ones produced in his lab can be used to screen every RBC unit before transfusion to test the cells’ viability. He said this work brings together his two main research interests – blood banking/transfusion and the use of microfabrication technology to study the properties of RBCs at microscale – which he has studied since he was a doctoral student at Boston University.
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