November 13, 2009
Graduate Student Awarded 3-yr DoD Fellowship on Prostate Cancer
Pallavi Tiwari (LCIB member and 2nd year BME PhD student) has been awarded a 3 year, $100K, Department of Defense fellowship for her project entitled "Computerized Decision Support System for Detection and Grading of Prostate Cancer Using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS)". Pallavi will be working under the mentorship of Professor Anant Madabhushi. Dr's Mark Rosen (UPENN), John Kurhanewicz (UCSF), and Nicholas Bloch (Boston Medical Center) will serve as clinical collaborators on this project.

November 11, 2009
Graduate Students Win Conference Travel Awards
BME PhD students Kiana Aran and Mercedes Morales from Dr. Jeffrey Zahn's laboratory have received conference travel awards from the Graduate School to help defray travel costs to the Microtas 2009 Conference in Jeju Korea in early November. Both students presented posters at the conference.

November 10, 2009
BME Graduate Student wins 2 year NJCCR fellowship
LCIB member and BME PhD graduate student, Ajay Basavanhally has been awarded a 2 year predoctoral fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer research for his project entitled “Quantitative Prognosis on Breast Cancer Histopathology”. The 2 year, $50,000 fellowship will support Ajay during his PhD program under the mentorship of Professor Anant Madabhushi in the BME department at Rutgers.

October 02, 2009
NIH New Innovator Award to BME Graduate Faculty, KiBum Lee
Congratulations to Professor Ki-Bum Lee, Graduate Faculty in BME & Stem Cell IGERT Faculty, for bagging the highly competitive NIH Director's New Innovator award, given nationally to a small number of early stage investigators of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative new research approaches. Professor Lee's project funded at $2.3M is titled: Combinatorial approaches for studying multiple cues regulating human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) fate.

October 01, 2009
Yarmush Receives 2-Year NIH Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush has been awarded a 2-year, $828K NIH grant entitled, "Recellularization of Liver Bioscaffolds". The project is focused on the development of techniques for decellularizing livers that are unsuitable for transplantation, and recellularizing them with embryonic stem cell derived hepatocyte-like cells. It is hoped that these new bioscaffolds will show more promise than the synthetic scaffold approach that has not yielded success over the past 20 years.

September 28, 2009
Madabhushi Awarded NIH R03 for $161K
Professor Anant Madabhushi has been awarded a NIH R-03 grant entitled "Integrating Quantitative Histological Image and Vascular Density Patterns for Prostate Cancer Prognosis Prediction". This 2 year $161,000 grant will continue the ongoing collaboration between Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr's Feldman and Tomaszewski are the Co-PIs from UPENN.

September 15, 2009
Micheli-Tzanakou one of the Editors of a Book on Biometrics
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou is one of the authors on newly a published book Biometrics - Theory, Methods and Applications. It is an indispensable resource for researchers, security experts, policy makers, engineers and graduate students. ISBN 978-0-470-24782-2.

September 14, 2009
Micheli-Tzanakou featured in IEEE Transactions
Professor Micheli-Tzanakou was a guest editor on the topic of Computational Intelligence in Biomedicine for the IEEE Transactions Journal. Dr. Micheli-Tzanakou is featured in the September 2009 edition of IEEE Journal.

September 01, 2009
Yarmush and Colleagues Receive NSF Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush and colleagues at Texas A&M (Juergen Hahn, PI; Arul Jayaraman, co-PI; and Carl Laird, co-PI) have been awarded a 4-year, $1.48 M, high-profile, NSF award entitled, "Extracting Population and Stochastic Effects on Signaling Activity from Transcription Factor Profiles". The project is focused on the development of a new computational framework that will enable investigators to partition stochastic and cell population effects with the ultimate goal of developing improved models of signal transduction pathways. The Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program is NSF's bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking. CDI research outcomes are expected to produce paradigm shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that create new wealth and enhance the national quality of life.

August 24, 2009
BME graduate student work highlighted in journal
The work of Er Liu, graduate student in Biomedical Engineering, and co-author, Matthew Treiser, a recent PhD graduate of the department, was highlighted as part of the cover art in the special issue of "Cell Response to Biomaterials" by the journal Combinatorial Chemistry & HTS. This work is supported by the NIH and was done in collaboration with the National Institute for Standards and Technology and the NJ Center for Biomaterials.

August 15, 2009
NSF MRI Award to Moghe and Co-Investigators
Rutgers PI Bob Bartynski (Physics & Astronomy) and Co-PIs (Prabhas Moghe, BME/CBE; Vitaly Podzhorov, PA; Kathryn Uhrich, CBE; S. W Cheong, PA) were recently awarded a Major Instrumentation Award of $550,000 for Acquisition of a State-of-the-Art X-Ray Photoelectron Spectrometer for Research, Training and Education.

August 15, 2009
NSF ICubed Award to Rutgers Faculty Administrators and IGERT Faculty Moghe
BME Stem Cell IGERT PI Prabhas Moghe and four other administrators (Program PI: Phil Furmanski; Other CoPI's: Mike Pazzani, Jerry Kukor, Eileen Kowler) secured a 4-Y $ 1M grant from NSF for Innovation through Institutional Integration. Rutgers will integrate programmatic innovations related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) research and professional training of students by leveraging the innovative research, curriculum, and community best practices developed in Rutgers’ four IGERT projects horizontally across the institution’s STEM graduate programs and centers, and vertically within undergraduate research experience programs.

August 10, 2009
NIH AARA Supplement Award to Moghe
The NHLBI has awarded an administrative supplement of $254K to Dr. Prabhas Moghe for his NIH grant on Nanoscale Receptor Blockers for Inhibition of Atherosclerosis. BME graduate faculty member Kathryn Uhrich is a key collaborator.

July 29, 2009
Androulakis receives 1 year NSF Award
Professor Ioannis Androulakis received a 1-year $54,000 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further advance his work on modeling and analysis of complex reaction networks. Dr. Androulakis is an Associate Professor in BME.

July 19, 2009
REU Funding comes to Rutgers (BME)
Rutgers will be the home to a new Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site program, thanks to a new $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The program on Cellular Bioengineering: From Biomaterials to Stem Cells will be led by PI Charles Roth and co-PI Prabhas Moghe and will provide opportunities for a diverse population of students to whom cutting-edge research experiences are not typically available.

July 18, 2009
BME Graduate Student Wins Gerondelis $5K Award
BME graduate student Panagiota (Pegy) Foteinou is a recipient of a $5,000 Gerondelis Foundation award. The Foundation rewarded Pegy for her work towards understanding and modeling the multi-scale nature of human endotoxemia, a surrogate model for studying systemic inflammation in humans. Pegy is a PhD candidate in Prof. Androulakis' group.

July 16, 2009
Multi-institutional NIH R01 $3.375 million 5 yr grant to Madabhushi and colleagues
Dr. Madabhushi (PI) and his collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania (Michael Feldman, PI) and Siemens Corporate Research (GianLuca Paladini, PI, Lance Ladic, Co-PI) have been awarded a 5 year, $3.375 million NIH R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute. This 5 year, multi-PI, multi-institutional grant will be funded for the first 2 years by money from the ARRA and for the final 3 years by the NCI. The project entitled "Software to facilitate multi-mode, multi-scale fused data for Pathology and Radiology"e; will focus on developing a software informatics platform that integrates image analysis, image registration, and computer vision tools for facilitating automated diagnosis of prostate cancer from multi-parametric MRI and histopathology.

July 16, 2009
Martin Yarmush receives $2.5M NIH Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush received a 4-year $2,578,970 grant from the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to develop a novel subzero non-freezing protocol to extend the viable preservation times of hepatic tissues and organs using a supercooled medium. The work intends to generate a new field of supercooled storage, and also establish quantitative standards for evaluating the organ viability following preservation. While the focus of the current work is on the liver, the protocols established will also serve as the basis for subzero nonfreezing preservation of all organs and tissue engineered products.

July 14, 2009
Madabhushi awarded $55,000 grant from Cancer Institute of NJ
Prof. Anant Madabhushi (lead PI) and Dr. Shridar Ganesan (Co-PI) were awarded a $55,000 grant for their project entitled "Histologic Image based classifiers of outcome in Estrogen-Receptor Positive Breast Cancers" from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. This 1 year project will focus on developing quantitative image descriptors for prognosis prediction of ER+ breast cancers based on analysis of H&E stained histopathology tissue sections alone.

June 29, 2009
Boustany Wins NSF Award
Dr. Boustany received an award from the NSF for her project entitled "Optical Fourier Processing Microscope Based on Two-Dimensional Gabor Filters". The project aims to develop novel instrumentation for highly sensitive analysis of subcelullar structure. The project was funded under the NSF Instrumentation Development for Biological Research (IDBR) Program. NSF expects to fund this project for three years at $416,507.

June 05, 2009
Roth awarded two-year R01 grant from the NIH
Professor Charles Roth has been awarded a two-year R01 grant from the NIH for his project “Efficient Cellular Delivery of Oligonucleotides”. This $687,000 grant was made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and will support mechanistic studies and preclinical development of a novel platform for oligonucleotide delivery.

June 02, 2009
Shreiber receives NSF CAREER Award
Professor David Shreiber received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF. The CAREER Award, which is NSF’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty, provides $400,000 over a 5-year period. The research project, entitled “Engineered Biomaterial Gradients for Control of Neural Cells”, examines the response of regenerating axons and astrocytes to multiple gradients of guidance cues, with a long term objective of designing improved therapies for nerve and spinal cord regeneration, and also includes educational enhancements and outreach in Tissue Engineering.

May 28, 2009
Student wins two awards at Annual Retreat on Cancer Research
CBE graduate student and Nanopharmaceuticals IGERT Trainee Carolyn Waite received two awards today at the 2009 Annual Retreat on Cancer Research in New Jersey, where she presented her recent work on targeted siRNA delivery to tumor spheroids. She received a Gallo Award for outstanding graduate students and a New Jersey Cancer Research Award for Scientific Excellence, given to the best abstracts presented at this year's symposium. Carolyn is advised by Prof. Charlie Roth.

May 27, 2009
Yarmush appointed to Editorial Board of two journals
Professor Martin Yarmush has been appointed to the editorial boards of the “Journal of Hepatology” and the “Journal of Tissue Engineering”. Both are open-access and peer-reviewed forums for the publication of scientific research in the fields of hepatology and tissue engineering and their clinical application.

May 19, 2009
Madabhushi receives a $70,000 award from NIH
Anant Madabhushi has been awarded a NIH award to supplement his ongoing parent NIH grant “Detecting Prostate Cancer Using 3 Tesla Multi-Protocol MRI/MRS”. The $70,000 award from the National Cancer Institute will provide funding for several undergraduate and high school students in his lab, the Laboratory for Computational Imaging and Bioinformatics, over the summer of 2009.

May 07, 2009
BME’s McBride wins Aresty Research Grant
John McBride, a BME undergraduate senior student received an Aresty grant of $1,000 for his research on the project entitled Novel Bio-potential Monitor for Neonatal Intensive Care. The device will provide noninvasive evoked potential monitoring of neonates in the clinics. He has presented a poster at the recent Aresty undergraduate research conference. His mentor is Professor John K-J. Li.

May 04, 2009
BME Honors Academy’s Walawalkar wins Aresty Research Grant
Chirag Walawalkar, President of BME’s Biomedical Engineering Society, received an Aresty grant of $1,000 for his research on the project entitled Novel Blood Glucose Monitor with Controlled Reverse Iontophoresis. The device will eventually benefit the diabetic patients through automated detection of blood glucose and subsequent transdermal delivery of insulin. Chirag was also interviewed by the Home News and is working under the mentorship of Professor John K-J. Li.

April 26, 2009
Madabhushi Wins Teaching Award
The Engineering Governing Council recently announced that Professor Anant Madabhushi was selected by the Biomedical Engineering students to receive the 2008-2009 Excellence in Teaching Award. Anant has been selected for this award three years a in row. The award will be presented during the Leadership Conference on May 3, 2009.

April 26, 2009
BME Undergraduate awarded first place
Robert Toth, 4th year BME undergraduate was awarded first place in the School of Engineering Undergraduate Research Symposium for his talk titled “Segmentation of the prostate from in vivo MRI images.“ This talk summarizes his research work over the past 24 months under the supervision of Professor Anant Madabhushi. As part of this award, Rob was given a ribbon and a cash prize of $250.

April 13, 2009
Cai wins NIH research award
Professor Li Cai, in collaboration with Professor Haiyan Huang (PI, UC Berkeley), received a $421,096 two year award from the NIH. The title of the research grant is “Applied Statistics to a Secondary Analysis of Public Repositories for Microarray”.

April 10, 2009
Undergraduate BME student wins scholarship
Stephanie Loh, Biomedical Engineering Class 2010, has been chosen as one of the recipients of the Wells H. Keddie Scholarship with a award of $750. Stephanie is working on a project,“Genetic control mechanisms of Dbx1 gene expression”. Dbx1 plays a critical role in spinal cord development. Professor Li Cai is her mentor.

April 09, 2009
BME Student wins Goldwater Scholarship Award
Simon Gordonov, a BME junior and ISURF/IGERT scholar, was selected to receive the Goldwater Scholarship Award. Simon was the sole Rutgers student to receive this honor and the only BME student from New Jersey. A large number of Goldwater scholars go on to win Rhodes scholarships and other honors. Simon is advised by Prabhas Moghe.

March 27, 2009
Shannon Agner wins $50,000 NJCCR Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
Shannon Agner, 3rd year MD-PhD student in the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University, has been awarded for a 2 year, $50,000, pre-doctoral fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research (NJCCR) for her project on “Defining image-based breast cancer phenotypes on MRI”. Shannon will be working on this project under the mentorship of Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

March 22, 2009
Yarmush receives 2-Year Grant from Lifeblood Medical and DOD
Professor Martin Yarmush received a $447,816 grant from Lifeblood Medical Inc. and DOD to test Lifeblood Medical’s perfusion solutions for preservation of ischemic livers. The proposed work has significant military relevance, as a superior preservation modality would enable transportation & allocation of donor organs to the troops on foreign battlegrounds, a task which cannot be achieved currently.

March 16, 2009
Foteinou receives Bevier Fellowhsip
BME Graduate student Panagiota (Pegy) Foteinou is a recipient of a Bevier Graduate Fellowship. Pegy PhD work focuses on the developement of a multi-scale model of human inflammation and is working with Prof. Androulakis.

March 13, 2009
BME graduate student wins Bevier Fellowship
BME graduate student, Panagiota Foteinou, was just awarded a Rutgers University Louis Bevier Fellowship for 2009-2010 on March 13, 2009. The Bevier Fellowship is awarded to exemplar doctoral students in their final stages of research. Pegy is a PhD student in Dr. Ioannis Androulakis’ lab working on Quantitative Models of Systematic Inflammation in Humans.

March 03, 2009
Prof. Androulakis wins NIH research award
Prof. Androulakis, in collaboration with Professors Lowry and Calvano (Dept. of Surgery, UMDNJ), received a $132K one year award from the NIH to further advance their collaboration towards the development of a multi-scale model of human inflammation.

March 01, 2009
Yarmush Lab Team Wins BMEidea Award
BME Graduate students Jeff Barminko and Eric Wallenstein from Professor Martin Yarmush’s lab have been selected for a BMEidea award from the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance. The award, which carries a $500 stipend, is for a design project entitled, “An efficient gene delivery system for manipulating mature somatic cells”.

February 17, 2009
Professor Buettner awarded RU-FAIR Professorship
Professor Helen Buettner has been selected to serve as an RU-FAIR Professor for the $3.67 million Institutional Transformation grant awarded to Rutgers through the NSF ADVANCE program. She will join the management team of the Rutgers ADVANCE grant in developing and promoting multi-campus initiatives to improve gender equity in science, engineering and math on the Rutgers faculty.

February 13, 2009
Professors Madabhushi and Metaxas awarded a Patent
Professors Anant Madabhushi and Dimitris Metaxas have been awarded patent on their invention on “Method and Apparatus for Automatically Detecting Breast Lesions and Tumors in Images”, United States Patent No. 7,466,848.

February 13, 2009
BME students receive honorable mention
Jay Naik (junior) and Scott Doyle (graduate student) were awarded an honorable mention award for their poster entitled “a boosted ensemble distance metric: applications to content based image retrieval of digitized breast cancer histopathology” at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, Orlando, Fl, Feb 7-12, 2009. This work was done under the supervision of Dr. Madabhushi.

February 13, 2009
BME senior receives Best Paper Award
Rob Toth was awarded the prestigious Michael B. Merickel best student paper award at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, Orlando, Fl, Feb 7-12. 2009. Rob was presented a check for $1000 and a plaque for his paper entitled, “A boosted ensemble scheme for accurate landmark detection for active shape models”. This work was done under the supervision of Dr. Madabhushi.

February 13, 2009
Five BME Undergraduate Students Receive Aresty Grants
Tapan Patel secured an Aresty grant for his research on the project Roles of Nkx-6.1 in Regulating Notch1 Expression in Retinal Development. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $750 in support of their undergraduate research project. Professor Li Cai is supervising the project.

Haim Tawil secured an Aresty grant for his research on the project Characterization of Morphological Changes in Ephrin-A5 Knockout Mouse Retinal Cells. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $300 in support of their undergraduate research project. Professor Li Cai is supervising the project.

Stephanie Loh secured an Aresty grant for his research on the project Dbx1 Enhancer Regulates Spinal Cord Gene Expression. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $300 in support of their undergraduate research project. Professor Li Cai is supervising the project.

Jay Naik secured an Aresty grant for his research on a novel boosted distance metric for content based retrieval of histopathology. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $600 in support of their undergraduate research project. Professor Anant Madabhushi is supervising the project.

Hussain Fatakdawala secured an Aresty grant for his research on segmentation of lymphocytes from breast cancer histopathology. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $600 in support of their undergraduate research project. Professor Anant Madabhushi is supervising the project.

December 16, 2008
BME Graduate Students Awarded International Fellowship
Kerri-Ann Norton has been selected for the Hosei International Fund Foreign Scholars Fellowship. This fellowship elects three candidates worldwide to conduct research at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan. The fellowship will take place from October 2009 to August 2010.

November 07, 2008
Work in the Yarmush Lab Spotlighted
Research performed in the laboratory of Professor Martin Yarmush on the use of transient transfection techniques for purifying differentiated cells derived from stem cells is spotlighted in the December 1 issue of Biotechnology and Bioengineering and singled out as the “Editor’s Choice”. Lead author on the work is BME graduate student Eric Wallenstein, with contributions from BME graduate student Jeff Barminko and Professor Rene Schloss. The full paper describing this innovative work can be found in Biotechnol Bioeng, 2008; 101, 859-872.

November 03, 2008
Madabhushi appointed Associate Editor of IEEE
Anant Madabhushi has been appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (Letters). IEEE Transactions on BME (Letters) submissions are required to go through an expedited review which is focused on the need for fast publication for emerging and evolving novel concepts with high-impact potential.

October 25, 2008
BME Graduate Students Receive Honorable Mentions
Jonathan Chappelow, post-doctoral fellow and James Monaco, 4th year BME graduate student, received honorable mentions for their presentations entitled "Histo-Stitcher: An Interactive Software Package for Reconstructing Digitized Whole Histological Sections from Fragmented Slices" and "Computerized Detection of Prostate Cancer from Whole Mount Prostate Histology" respectively, at the 2008 Advancing Practice, Instruction, and Innovation through Informatics (APIII) meeting recently held in Pittsburgh, PA. Both Jonathan and James work under the supervision of Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

October 10, 2008
Shinbrot elected into the AIMBE
Troy Shinbrot has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). AIMBE is leading advocacy group for medical and biological engineering and is comprised of some of the most important leaders in science and engineering.

October 06, 2008
BME Graduate Student Awarded Conference Travel Grant
Lawrence Sasso received a $500 travel support grant to attend the 12th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (CBMS), MicroTAS 2008 held in San Diego, CA October 12-16, 2008. Lawrence is a doctoral student of Prof. Jeffrey Zahn developing a continuous microimmunoassay and will present his work at the conference

October 06, 2008
Zahn and Shreiber received a $111,289 Grant from NIH
Jeffrey Zahn and David Shreiber received a $111,289 grant from the NIH funded Point of Care Center for Emerging Technologies at the University of Cincinnati to develop microdevices for monitoring inflammation in the CSF and allowing localized drug delivery following spinal cord injuries.

September 30, 2008
BME Undergraduate Student Receives Aresty Grant
Simon Gordonov secured an Aresty grant for his research on the use of lentiviral fluororeporter vectors for assessing human mesenchymal stem cell lineage commitment and cytoskeletal dynamics. The Aresty research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $600 in support of their undergraduate research project for the Fall & Spring. Simon is supervised by Prabhas Moghe.

September 29, 2008
BME Student Receives Aresty Award
Asha Singanamalli, a sophomore BME student, received a $1,000 award from the Aresty Foundation to support her project, entitled “Investigating biomechanical mechanisms of acupuncture.” Asha is advised by Professor David Shreiber.

September 28, 2008
BME Undergraduate Student Receives Aresty Grant
Vani Mathur secured an Aresty grant for her work on human embryonic stem cell engineering. The Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $1000 in support of her undergraduate research project for the Fall & Spring. Vani is supervised by Prabhas Moghe.

September 28, 2008
BME Undergraduate Student Receives Aresty Grant
Paul Gianella and David Pal secured an Aresty grant for their work on silencing of genes that confer resistance to chemotherapy. The Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates (ARC) has decided to grant funding in the amount of $1,000 in support of their undergraduate research project for the Fall & Spring. Paul supervised by Charles Roth and David is co-supervised by Charles Roth and Prabhas Moghe.

August 21, 2008
Li Cai awarded $412,059 NIH R21 Award
Li Cai received a second two year $412,059 award from the NIH R21. The project is titled, “Comparative genomic and molecular genetics approaches to retinal stem cells.” This award will support his research in Retinal Stem Cells.

August 12, 2008
Li Cai awarded $329,647 NIH R21 Award
Li Cai received a two year $329,647 award from the NIH R21. This award will support his research in the area of Cancer Stem Cells.

July 24, 2008
Yannis Androulakis received $50K Knowledge Build Award
Yannis Androulakis received a $50K Knowledge Build Award from Exxon Mobil R&E Company. This award will support his work on High-dimensional Data Analysis.

July 24, 2008
Yannis Androulakis awarded $1.2M NIH R01 Award
Yannis Androulakis received a 3 year $1.2M award from NIH R01. This award will support his research in the area of Bioinformatics Analysis of Control Mechanisms of Hypermetabolism. This work is in collaboration with Professors Charlie Roth, Marianthi Ierapetritou (CBE), and Francois Berthiaume (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital)

July 09, 2008
Yarmush Receives NSF Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush received a three-year $280,367 grant from the National Science Foundation to support his gene therapy related research focusing of the development of novel methods for engineering improved retrovirus stability. The work will be done in collaboration with Professor Li Cai.

July 07, 2008
BME Students in Thailand
Three BME students, recent graduate Ronn Friedlander (Class of 2008), Laith Qumei (Class of 2010), and David Pal (Class of 2011), are participating with Engineers Without Borders in a project designed to improve water quality in rural Thailand. You can follow their progress here.

July 01, 2008
Li Cai Awarded Busch Biomedical Research Grant
Li Cai received a two year $50,000 Busch Biomedical Research Grant to support his research on "Control of CD44 Expression in Breast Cancer Stem Cells". The project is to study the transcription regulation of breast cancer stem cells.

June 27, 2008
BME Graduate student awarded at ASME Conference
Margaret Julias won 2nd Place, PhD Student Paper Competition - Podium Division, (Prof. David Shreiber advisor), ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, Marco Island, Florida.

June 27, 2008
BME Graduate student awarded at ASME Conference
Harini Sundararaghavan won 3rd Place, PhD Student Paper Competition - Podium Division, (Prof. David Shreiber advisor), ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, Marco Island, Florida.

June 27, 2008
BME Graduate student awarded at ASME Conference
BME Graduate student Gary Monteiro was Honorable Mention, PhD Student Paper Competition - Paper Division, (Prof. David Shreiber advisor), ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, Marco Island, Florida, June 28, 2008.

June 27, 2008
BME Indergraduate student awarded at ASME Conference
BME undergraduate student L. Edgar won 2nd Place, Bachelor Student Paper Competition (Prof. David Shreiber advisor), ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference, Marco Island, Florida, June 28, 2008.

June 23, 2008
Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Ranked No. 1 again by ISI
For the sixth year in a row, articles in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering (ARBME) were cited more often than papers in any of its peer journals, according to ISI's 2007 Journal Citation Report, giving it the highest "impact factor" in its peer group. The ARBME had an impact factor of 11.567 placing it #1 in its peer group of 44 journals, and #2 among all engineering journals. Professor Martin Yarmush serves as the editor-in-chief of the ARBME which published its first volume in 1999.

June 13, 2008
John Semmlow awarded $750,000 NIH-NIHLB Grant
John Semmlow and SonoMedica, Inc. of McClean, VA were awarded a Phase II STTR grant of $750,000 from the NIH-NIHLB over two years to advance his work on detection of coronary artery disease using acoustic information.

June 11, 2008
Anant Madabhushi awarded $260,000 Wallace H. Coulter Grant
Anant Madabhushi has been awarded a 2 year Phase 2 grant for $260,000 from the Wallace H. Coulter foundation for his proposal entitled "Automated Detection of Prostate Cancer from Multi-protocol High Resolution MRI". The Phase 2 award was competitive and of the 25 Phase 1 Early Career awardees only 7 were selected for Phase 2 based on progress made in Phase 1, a new grant application, and an oral presentation in front of a review committee in Florida, in early June. Under the Phase 2 project, Dr. Madabhushi will look to commercialize his ongoing research in developing computerized detection methods for prostate cancer using MRI. Clinical collaborators on this project are Dr. John Tomaszewski, Dr. Mark Rosen, and Dr. Mike Feldman from the University of Pennsylvania.

June 04, 2008
Shinbrot Received NSF Grant
Professor Troy Shinbrot received a three-year $300,000 grant from NSF to study the effects of triboelectrification on flow, mixing and segregation of pharmaceutical powders. The work is in collaboration with Ben Glasser (CBE) and Dr. San Kiang of Bristol-Meyers Squibb.

May 30, 2008
Langrana Wins NJCSCR Grant
Professor Noshir Langrana received a two-year $393K grant from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research for a research project entitled, Neural Precursor Control by ECM for Spinal Cord Regeneration. The members of his research team include Post Doc Associate Penelope Deveau and Professors Bonnie Firestein and Rene Schloss.

May 30, 2008
Shreiber awarded NIH Grant
Professor David Shreiber has been awarded a 2-year R21 grant from the NIH/NIBIB for $412,059. The project is titled, "Biomimetic scaffolds for targeted peripheral nerve regeneration." Professors Helen Buettner (BME) and Melitta Schachner (CBN) are co-investigators.

May 27, 2008
Anant Madabhushi receives $50,000 Life Sciences Commercialization Award
Anant Madabhushi has been awarded $50,000 as part of the Life Sciences Commercialization award from the Office of Technology Transfer at Rutgers University for his project entitled "Computerized Cancer Detection and Grading of Prostate Histopathology". The award is meant to facilitate commercialization of Dr. Madabhushi's ongoing work in automated computerized diagnosis of prostate cancer. Dr. Michael Feldman and Dr. Tomaszeweski, pathologists at the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania will serve as clinical collaborators on this project.

April 29, 2008
John Li Appointed Associate Editor of IEEE EMBS
Professor John K-J. Li has been appointed as an Associate Editor for 2008 Proceedings of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Conference. EMBS is an international society for biomedical engineers. Prof. Li is responsible for reviews in Cardiovascular and Respiratory Systems.

April 24, 2008
Madabhushi Wins Teaching Award
The Engineering Governing Council recently announced that Professor Anant Madabhushi was selected by the Biomedical Engineering students to receive the 2007-2008 Excellence in Teaching Award. Anant has been selected for this award two years a in row. The award will be presented during the Leadership Conference on May 3, 2008.

April 24, 2008
Moghe Wins Teaching Award
The Engineering Governing Council recently announced that Professor Prabhas Moghe was selected to receive the 2007-2008 Excellence in Teaching Award. This award is based on the votes by the students body and it based on faculty devotion in teaching and support for the students. The award will be presented during the Leadership Conference on May 3, 2008.

April 21, 2008
Yarmush Appointed Editorial Board Member
Professor Martin Yarmush has been appointed as an Associate Editor of a new open access journal, “Stem Cells and Cloning: Advances and Applications”. The journal publishes original reports and reviews on established and emerging concepts in stem cell research including embryonic stem cells; adult stem cells; cord blood stem cells; stem cell transformation and culture; therapeutic cloning; autologous embryonic cell lines; laboratory, animal and human therapeutic studies; and philosophical and ethical issues related to stem cell research.

April 17, 2008
John Li Honored with Patent Award Plaque
BME Professor John K-J. Li was presented with a Patent Award Plaque at the Rutgers Biennial Patent Award Reception on April 3, 2008 for his invention on “Temporary Blood Circulation Assist Device”. The Biennial event was organized by Rutgers through its Office of Corporate Liaison and Technology Transfer (OCLTT) in recognition of strong and original nature of the research work.

April 16, 2008
James Monaco wins $80,000 NJCCR Post-doctoral Fellowship
Dr. James Monaco, post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Imaging and Bioinformatics (LCIB), Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a 2 year, $80,000 post-doctoral fellowship to “Detect pre-malignant prostate lesions from High Resolution MRI“. Dr. Monaco will be working under the supervision of Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

April 16, 2008
Madabhushi awarded $66,000 NJCCR Grant
Dr. Anant Madabhushi‘s ongoing project “Computerized Detection and Grading of Prostate Cancer Histopathology“ has been renewed for a second year by the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research. As part of the 1 year, $66,000 award Dr. Madabhushi and his lab members will continue to develop and validate sophisticated image analysis methods to automatically detect and grade prostate cancer from digitized histological biopsy specimens.

April 16, 2008
Yarmush Receives NJCBIR Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush received a two-year $327K grant from the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research for a project entitled, “A Novel Organotypic Model of Traumatic Brain Injury“. The funding will support Dr. Yarmush's goal to develop an in vitro traumatic brain injury model combining organotypic slices with microfabricated devices that integrate mechanical deformation and multiple electrode arrays. This new model will provide researchers working in the field of traumatic brain injury with the capability to perform real-time and long-term evaluation of molecular and functional events in the axons following mechanical deformation.

April 15, 2008
Dimitri Metaxas Wins Research Award
The Rutgers Board of Trustees recently announced that Professor Dimitri Metaxas was selected to receive the 2007-2008 Excellence in Research Award. This award is the university’s highest honor for outstanding research contributions to a discipline or to society.

April 15, 2008
Charlie Roth Wins Teaching Award
The Rutgers Board of Trustees recently announced that Charlie Roth was selected to receive a Warren L. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, for the academic year 2007-2008 in recognition of his outstanding service in stimulating and guiding the intellectual development of students at Rutgers University. This award is named to honor the memory of the noted historian and Rutgers University professor, Warren I. Susman.

April 15, 2008
Noshir Langrana Wins Scholar-Teacher Award
Noshir Langrana selected to receive a Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award for the academic year 2007-2008 for his outstanding synergistic contributions in research and teaching. This award honors faculty members who are able to integrate their teaching with their research, whose research informs and adds excitement to their teaching, and whose interactions with students in the classroom stimulate and inform their scholarship.

April 15, 2008
BME Graduate Student Awarded NJCCR Fellowship
Kevin Nikitczuk, a second year BME PhD student and NSF IGERT fellow, was awarded a two year pre-doctoral fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research for his project “Immune Targeting using an Engineered Vaccine Delivery System“. Kevin’s work is directed by Professors Martin Yarmush and Edmund Lattime, Associate Director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

April 15, 2008
Yarmush Appointed Associate Editor
Professor Martin Yarmush has been appointed as an Associate Editor of a new international journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society called Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. The journal focuses on studies aimed at understanding how cellular behavior arises from molecular-level interactions, so that we may ultimately control, the mechanical, chemical, and electrical processes of the cell. Two Rutgers alumni are also on the editorial board: David Odde (co-editor-in-chief), who received his MS with Professor Yarmush and his PhD with Professor Helen Buettner, and Joe Le Doux (associate editor) who received his PhD with Professor Yarmush.

April 14, 2008
Moghe and Kohn Received Renewal for NIH RESBIO
The NIH NIBIB P41 Program Project titled RESBIO: Integrated Resource for Polymeric Biomaterials, led by the team of Professors Joachim Kohn, Prabhas Moghe and three Co-PIs, was renewed from 2008 to 2013. Estimated at $5.6 M, this grant funds three major core projects on the synthesis, biorelevant characterization, and computational modeling of biomaterials.

April 14, 2008
BME Graduate Student Awarded March Conference Travel Award
Anshul Jain, PhD student under Dr. Papathomas, just received a conference travel award for $150 for a Vision Sciences Society Conference he will be attending in Naples Florida on May 9-14th. Anshul will be presenting a Poster titled “Endogenous selective attention to opposite-moving spectral components influences aftereffects in vision and audition”. Congratulations to Anshul on his award!

April 14, 2008
BME Undergraduate wins Whitaker International Fellowship
Ronn Friedlander, BME Class of 2008, won a Whitaker International Fellowship. The fellowship involves traveling abroad to study in Cambridge for a year.

April 10, 2008
BME Graduate Student Mentors Team to Top Finish at Robotics Competition
A Robotics High School team involving Jeffrey Erickson, BME PhD student, went to NYC April 4-6 for the FIRST Robotics Competition. The team scored the top overall seed and won the competition. As a result, the team will be going to Atlanta for the national event at the Georgia Dome in Mid April. The team went from worst to first in a year.

March 18, 2008
Androulakis Awarded Clinical Translational Science Pilot Award
Prof. Androulakis in collaboration with Prof. Calvano and Prof. Lowry (Surgery Department, UMDNJ) received a $30,000 Clinical Translational Science Pilot Award from UMDNJ. The award will support their research on ”Analytical deconvolution of total leukocyte gene expression to reveal expression motifs of individual lecukocyte sub-populations”

March 01, 2008
BME Graduate Student Wins SPIE Award
Satish Vishwanath, a second year BME PhD student won an honorable mention award at the Spie medical imaging meeting held in San Diego February 18-21 and was attended by over 3000 people. Satish won the award for his poster "an integrated metaclassifier for prostate cancer detection by combining Magnetic resonance spectroscopy and imaging". Co-authors on this paper were Pallavi Tiwari, 2nd year MS BME student, Mark Rosen from UPenn and Professor Anant Madabhushi.

January 30, 2008
ECE, BME and UMDNJ Collaborators Awarded CCC Grant
ECE Professor Dario Pompili, PI, and his collaborators BME Professor John K-J. Li and UMDNJ-RWJMS Surgery (led by Randall Burd) have received one year $50,000 seed fund from Rutgers Collaborative Computing Research (CCC) on a project entitled: “Continuous Vital Monitoring for Trauma Triage Using Wireless Sensor Networks”. Prof. Li will lead the biomedical wireless sensors part of the project.

January 17, 2008
Madabhushi Awarded SIIM Grant
Professor Anant Madabhushi has received one year $50,000 Grant from the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) to support his research project entitled: “Content Based Image Retrieval System for Breast MRI “, starting July 1, 2008.

January 16, 2008
BME Graduate Student NSF-EAPSI Experience Published
Mike Wininger, BME IGERT fellow and NSF-EAPSI (East Asian Pacific Summer Institute) fellow contributed a brief essay on their experience to LiveScience.com as part of NSF PR/Outreach initiatives. His essay has been published in LiveScience, link Mike is working under the supervision of Dr. William Craelius.

January 15, 2008
BME students are chosen as a finalist for BMEIdea Competition
Satish Vishwanath, Pallavi Tiwari and Jon Chappelow have been short listed for the finals of national level competition, on their project "Computer-aided diagnosis of Prostate Cancer via MRI and MRS" at BMEIdea Design competition http://www.nciia.org/bmeidea/. They will now compete with 9 other finalists in this unique competition that judges rank entries on all aspects of biomedical commercialization, from product innovation to market need, and from regulatory strategies to social impact. This project is supervised by Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

January 09, 2008
UMDNJ, BME, and ISE Collaborators Awarded CCC Grant
ISE Professor W. Art Chaovalitwongse, PI, and his collaborators BME Professors Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou and Nada Boustany and UMDNJ Professor Brenda Wu have received one year $50,000 seed fund from Rutgers Collaborative Computing Research (CCC) on a project entitled: “Spatio-Temporal Data Mining in Brain Disorder and Cognitive Function Study”.

January 05, 2008
Microfluidics Work Spotlighted
Work on a microfluidic bioreactor for increased active retrovirus output was spotlighted in The January 2008 issue of the Chemical Biology supplement of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In this study, a team led by Professor Martin Yarmush describes a novel microdevice for the continuous production of retroviral vectors in a commonly available packaging cell line. This microdevice platform for virus production enables a high degree of control over environmental conditions, a capability that is critical for optimizing production of retrovirus and other viral vectors for gene therapy applications. The full article describing this work is published in Lab-on-a-Chip 2008, 8: 75-80.

December 04, 2007
Langrana Receives Prestigious 2008 H.R. Lissner Medal
Professor Noshir Langrana has been selected to receive the 2008 H.R. Lissner Medal. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in bioengineering. Langrana has been selected due to his significant contribution to the growth of bioengineering and to the mission of ASME Bioengineering Division; and for his internationally recognized work on spinal biomechanics, especially in the area of design and development of artificial disc. A formal presentation of the award is scheduled to take place at the 2008 Summer Bioengineering Conference, June 25-29, 2008

December 01, 2007
BME Alumni offer advice in GS-NB's "Careers at the Intersection" Forum
Recent BME Alumni Tim Maguire and Eric Novik, together with Bala Subramanian (Physics) discussed early career opportunities in math, science, and engineering to an audience of over 60 graduate students and postdocs at the GS-NB's "Careers at the Intersection Forum, Nov. 26th, at Busch Campus Center. All three talked about the transition from grad studies to the first steps in launching one's career - Maguire in "big pharma" (Merck), Novik in "biotech start-up" (Hurel) and Subramanian in business and finance (Goldman Sachs).

November 30, 2007
BME Graduate Student Awarded NJSCR Grant
Professor David Shreiber’s graduate student, Ian Gaudet, was awarded a 2-year, $60,000 graduate fellowship for the project entitled “Neurite guidance using photonically derived durotactic gradients, “ from Dec 15, 2007 to Dec. 30, 2009.

November 30, 2007
Cai Awarded NJSCR Grant
Professor Li Cai was awarded a two year, $400,000 Grant for the project entitled: “Control of Olig2 expression in spinal cord development and regeneration“, from Dec 15, 2007 to Dec. 30, 2009.

November 14, 2007
Micheli-Tzanakou Elected VP of IEEE Educational Activities Board
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou was elected Vice President of the IEEE Educational Activities Board for 2008. Also, the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB), approved the establishment of the Biometrics Council. Dr. E. Micheli-Tzanakou is leading the IEEE activities on Biometrics both in TAB where an e-journal on the IEEE activities on Biometrics will be developed and EAB where a Certification program on Biometrics is already in progress.

November 13, 2007
Doyle and Chappelow Receive Prestigious DOD Predoctoral Awards
Second year BME graduate student Scott Doyle and 3rd year BME graduate student Jonathan Chappelow have each been awarded the prestigious Department of Defense Predoctoral Training award in Prostate Cancer Research. Each student will receive approximately $96,000 over the next 3 years to fund their dissertation related research work under the supervision of Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

November 04, 2007
BME student is awarded at MICCAI
Pallavi Tiwari was a runner up in the Young Scientist Award competition held as part of MICCAI 2007, the 10th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention held in Brisbane, Australia. Pallavi under the supervision of Dr. Anant Madabhushi was acknowledged for her paper "A Hierarchical Unsupervised Clustering Scheme for Detection of Prostate Cancer from Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS).

November 02, 2007
Craelius Keynote Speaker
Professor William Craelius was the keynote speaker on “Bionic Restoration of Function”, at the 1st Medical Engineering Meeting at the Centro de Cirugia de Minima Invasion, at Caceres, Spain.

November 01, 2007
Micheli-Tzanakou Appointed Guest Co-Editor
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou is a guest co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology SPECIAL ISSUE: ”Classify the Classifiers: Investigating the Optimum Classification Technique per case in Bioinformatics”

November 01, 2007
Micheli-Tzanakou Appointed Guest Co-Editor
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou is a guest co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology SPECIAL ISSUE: ”Classify the Classifiers: Investigating the Optimum Classification Technique per case in Bioinformatics”

October 28, 2007
Bhanot is Plenary Speaker at 2007 NECSI Conference
Professor Gyan Bhanot was chosen to give a plenary talk at the International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston, MA: ICCS 2007. Details of the conference can be seen at http://www.necsi.org/events/iccs7/.

October 26, 2007
Moghe Invited to Prestigious Institute on Teaching and Mentoring
Each year the Compact for Faculty Diversity sponsors the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, a four-day conference that has become the largest gathering of minority doctoral scholars in the country. The IGERT awardees this year include: Professors Mary Anne Carroll, University of Michigan, Prabhas Moghe, Rutgers University, Paul Smolensky, Johns Hopkins University and Amy Ward, University of Alabama.

October 25, 2007
BME student inducted into the National College Athlete Honor Society
Kyra Thompson, a BME Undergraduate, was inducted into the Rutgers-New Jersey Delta Chapter of the National College Athlete Honor Society, Chi Alpha Sigma, during half-time of the Rutgers-Navy game which was held on September 7, 2007.

October 18, 2007
Bhanot is Plenary Speaker at Max Planck Institute
Professor Gyan Bhanot was chosen to give a plenary talk at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrucken, Germany for Stabil07: “From Statistical Physics to Computer Science: Analysis of Biological and Medical Data”. For more details see http://www.mpipks-dresden.mpg.de/~stabil07/

October 17, 2007
Papathomas Invited to an Editorial Board
Professor Thomas Papathomas is invited to membership in the Editorial Board of the Open Cybernetics and Systemics Journal.

October 15, 2007
Salkind Receives Edison Patent Award
Professor Emeritus Alvind Salkind and 2 former Rutgers graduate students, will be awarded the 2007 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award at the November meeting of the New Jersey R & D Council. The award is based on a 2006 US Patent 7, 011, 908 awarded to Terrill Atwater, Alvin Salkind, and Arek Suszko. The invention is a novel material (a manganese, bismuth mixed metal oxide) for rechargeable lithium electrochemical systems which widely used in medical, military, and high technology applications.

October 01, 2007
Moghe Received NJCST Award
Professors Prabhas Moghe (CoPI), Martin Grumet (PI) and coworkers received a New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology (NJCST) $3M Stem Cell Core grant, on Human Embryonic Stem Cells and Neural Transplantation. Moghe is the PI of a program project on 3-D Biomaterial Scaffolds for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Cultures.

October 01, 2007
BME Sophomore wins best poster award
Simon Gordonov, a sophomore in BME, received the University-wide Best Poster Award in Natural/Physical Sciences at the Rutgers Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium on May 2, 2008. Gordonov‘s project on “Profiling of stem cells on biomaterials“ is funded by a NIH P41 grant. His mentors are Matthew Treiser, IGERT Trainee, and Professor Prabhas Moghe, PI.

September 30, 2007
BME Student Receives Grant from ARESTY Foundation
Jacob Schnipper, a BME senior, was awarded an ARESTY undergraduate research award. The goals of his research are to (1) apply genes to stem cells that will enrich a subpopulation of hepatocyte-like cells from a mixture of many cell types; and (2) enhance and maintain the function of the sorted cells using novel approaches that support the survival, growth and liver-specific activity of the stem cells. Jacob is co-advised by Dr. Martin Yarmush and Dr. Rene Schloss.

September 24, 2007
BME Student Receives Aresty Award
Junior BME student, Rob Toth, has received an $800 undergraduate research award from the Aresty Foundation. Toth’s research work involves automated segmentation of prostate by combining active shape models and magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The funds will support Rob’s travel to present his work at the SPIE Medical Imaging meeting to be held in San Diego, CA in February, 2008.

September 21, 2007
Professor Yarmush’s Work Featured
Professor Martin Yarmush’s work on using adhesive stencils to make mouse embryonic stem (mES) cell aggregates of specific sizes ranging from 100 µm to 500 µm in diameter was featured in Chemical Biology, Issue 9, 2007. Chemical Biology is a news magazine which draws together coverage from all Royal Society of Chemistry publications, providing a snapshot of the latest developments in chemical biology. The full paper describing this innovative work was published in Lab on a Chip volume 7, page 941(2007).

September 20, 2007
BME Student Receives Grant from ARESTY Foundation
Undergraduate researcher Ronn Friedlander received a grant from the Aresty Foundation to support his research and travel to the Biomedical Engineering Society conference, where he presented his research findings. Ronn is advised by Professor Charles Roth.

September 12, 2007
BME Students Awarded
BME graduate students, Shannon Agner and Scott Doyle, were awarded for the Best Oral Presentation at AP III, 2007. They are both working with Dr. Anant Madabhushi.

September 12, 2007
Micheli-Tzanakou Keynote Speaker
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou, was a keynote speaker at the Consortium on Biometrics, in Washington DC, with the title: “Biometrics: IEEE Initiative on Biometrics Certification.

August 30, 2007
Moghe is Plenary Speaker at 2007 AIChE Meeting
Professor Prabhas Moghe has been chosen to give a plenary presentation representing Bionanotechnology at the Annual AIChE meeting in Salt Lake City. Professor Moghe’s talk is entitled, “Engineering Dynamics of Nanoscale Biointerfaces for Enhanced Cell Motility and Matrix Assembly.”

August 23, 2007
Florek Receives Prestigious Predoctoral Fellowship Award
Charles Florek, a BME graduate student, was recently awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Predoctoral Fellows for his project entitled, “Biological Evaluation of Anti-Adhesion Device for Neurosurgery.“ Charley works under the joint supervision of Prof. Martin Grumet, Director of the Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, and Prof. Joachim Kohn, Director of the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials.

August 20, 2007
BME Student Receives Travel Award
Pallavi Tiwari, a second year BME MS student advised by Professor Anant Madabhushi, has been awarded a $500 travel stipend MICCAI award to present her paper on “Automated Analysis of Prostate MR Spectroscopy For Cancer Detection”. Pallavi will be giving an oral presentation of her work in October in Brisbane, Australia.

July 18, 2007
Rutgers Faculty Receive $3M NJCST Stem Cell Grant
A group of Rutgers faculty including Professor Prabhas Moghe received funding from the NJCST for a research core entitled, “Human ES Cells and Neural Transplantation”. Professor Moghe’s project focuses on interactions of human ESCs with 3D biomaterial scaffolds. The Core is led by Professor Martin Grumet.

July 16, 2007
Shinbrot’s Work Featured
Research by Professor Troy Shinbrot and colleagues revealing new mechanisms for the mixing and separation of pharmaceutical and other grains has been covered in The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News. The work shows how two populations of sand grains mixed together and held in a hopper will, when shaken out into a beaker, spontaneously segregate themselves, because of static electrical interactions. (www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/832-1.html)

July 09, 2007
Androulakis Receives NSF Grant
Professor Yannis Androulakis received a three-year $315K grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research focusing of the development of novel computational methods for the analysis of complex reaction mechanisms. The work is in collaboration with Professor Marianthi Ierapetritou (CBE).

July 02, 2007
BME Students Join Rutgers Board of Trustees
Wajdi Kanj (BME 08) has been elected as the Student Representative to the Board of Trustees for 2007-08. This position, one of the most powerful in student and university governance gives Mr. Kanj direct access to the highest levels of the administration and the ability to sit on a great number of decision-making bodies. In addition, Christine Lomiguen (BME 09) has been selected as the Student Charter member of the Board of Trustees. This position, which has a term of six years, comes with full voting rights and privileges. This position is filled once every two years, and is available to only one student out of the tens of thousands at Rutgers.

June 20, 2007
Zahn Receives Early Career Award
Professor Jeffrey Zahn received a 2007 Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Career Award. The two-year $200K award will support his project titled “Microfluidic Dialysis Platforms for Monitoring Cardiopulmonary Bypass Systemic Inflammation”.

June 20, 2007
Madabhushi Research Featured in Media
Anant Madabhushi’s work on detection of prostate cancer has received media attention on the AAAS EurekAlert news distribution site. Click on AAAS EurekAlert to view the article.

June 06, 2007
Moghe Received American Heart Association Award
Professor Prabhas Moghe received a three year $198K Grant-in-Aid Award from the American Heart Association (AHA) for the project titled “Multifunctional Nanoscale Biomaterials for Inhibition of Atherogenesis”.

June 01, 2007
Androulakis Awarded Busch Biomedical Research Grant
Professor Ioannis Androulakis received a two year $43,000 Busch Biomedical Research Grant to support his research on “Modeling the dynamics of gene expression in monocytes from LPS-challenged healthy humans pre-treated with cotrisol.“

May 30, 2007
Royo Receives NJCSCR Fellowship
Nuria Royo, a second year BME PhD student has been awarded a 2-year $60,000 predoctoral fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research. Nuria will be working, under the direction of Professor William Craelius, on a project entitled “Guiding Axonal Regeneration with Piezoelectric Polymers”.

May 08, 2007
Madabhushi Awarded NJCCR Grant
Anant Madabhushi has been awarded a 1 year, $50,000 grant for his project entitled “Computerized Detection and Grading of Prostate Histology“ by the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research (Co-PI: Mike Feldman-UPenn). The major goal of this project is to develop quantitative image analysis tools to define image-based signatures to characterize appearance of prostate lesions from digitized histological biopsy specimens.

May 07, 2007
Yarmush's Research Featured as Cover Articles
Professor Martin Yarmush’s research in tissue engineering and metabolic engineering is highlighted as cover articles in 2 journals. The first, an article entitled, “Oxygen Uptake Rates and Liver-Specific Functions of Hepatocyte and Fibroblast Co-Cultures”, appears on the cover of the May 1 issue of Biotechnology and Bioengineering. The second, an article entitled, “Integrated Energy and Flux Balance Based Multiobjective Framework for Large-Scale Metabolic Networks”, will appear on the cover of June 2007 Special Issue of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering on “Systems Biology and Bionformatics”.

May 07, 2007
Chappelow Receives NJ Cancer Fellowship
Jonathan Chappelow, a second year BME PhD student has been awarded a 2-year $40,000 predoctoral fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research. Jon will be working, under the direction of Professor Anant Madabhushi, on developing novel multi-modal registration tools for aligning histology and high resolution MRI studies for detection of prostate cancer.

April 30, 2007
Madabhushi Awarded NIH Grant
Professor Anant Madabhushi received an NIH R03 small grant award for a proposal entitled, “Detecting Precancerous Prostate Lesions from High Resolution MRI” The 2 year grant for $150,000 is a collaboration between Rutgers investigators and Drs. Mark Rosen and Michael Feldman of the University of Pennsylvania. The team will be developing computer-aided diagnostic and machine learning methods for detection of pre-malignant/pre-cancerous prostate lesions from high resolution MRI, extending their ongoing efforts in early prostate cancer detection.

April 26, 2007
Davidovich wins Research Award
The Department of Genetics has awarded senior Alex Davidovich High Honors in Genetics for his research honors project “Alginate-PLL Microencapsulation: Effect on the Differentiation of Embryonic Stem Cells into Hepatic and Neuronal Cell Lineages” done under the supervision of Professors Rene Schloss and Martin Yarmush. In addition, the Department elected to award Alex a cash prize for Excellence in a Research Presentation.

April 26, 2007
Wallenstein wins Schering-Plough Science and Innovation Award
Eric Wallenstein, a fifth-year BME PhD candidate, was selected as the 2007 Schering-Plough Science and Innovation Award recipient from Rutgers University. The award recognizes and promotes academic excellence in the areas of analytical chemistry, synthetic organic chemistry, chemical engineering, pharmaceutics and biotechnology. Eric, accompanied by his advisor Professor Martin Yarmush, will present his research on “Gene Delivery to Differentiating Stem Cells for Functional Enrichment of Hepatic-Like Subpopulations” along with other award recipients at a special symposium in June hosted by Schering-Plough top scientists, managers and senior laboratory professionals.

April 25, 2007
Mann Group Research Featured on Nanotechweb
A collaborative project between Professor Adrian Mann’s group at Rutgers University and colleagues at the University of Vigo, Spain has led to the development of a new method, Laser Spinning, for the rapid production of ultra-long ceramic nanofibers. The nanofibers have potential applications in tissue engineering and nanocomposite hard tissue implants. For more details see nanotechweb.org/articles/news/6/4/19/1

April 25, 2007
Madabhushi Wins Teaching Award
The Engineering Governing Council recently announced that Professor Anant Madabhushi was selected by the Biomedical Engineering students to receive the 2006-2007 Excellence in Teaching Award. The award will be presented during the Leadership Conference on April 29 2007.

April 23, 2007
Yarmush Selected to Present Beyer Lecture at U Wisconsin
Professor Martin Yarmush gave the “Karl Beyer Lecture” at a symposium of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Wisconsin. This lecture is in honor of Karl Beyer, MD, PhD, an early dual-degree graduate of UW-Madison and pioneer in the development of agents to treat hypertension and edema. Professor Yarmush’s presentation was entitled, “Critical Technology Development for the Bioartificial Liver”.

April 20, 2007
Madabhushi Awarded NIH Grant
Professor Anant Madabhushi received an NIH R21 grant award for a proposal entitled, “Detecting Prostate Cancer using Multi-protocol 3 Tesla in vivo MRI and MRS”. The 2 year grant is of $333,000 is a collaboration between Rutgers investigators and Drs. Mark Rosen and Michael Feldman of the University of Pennsylvania.

April 18, 2007
BME Undergrad Receives Poster Award
Pradeep Kadimcherla, BME ’08, was awarded 2nd place in the “Presentation Category” research poster competition that comes with a $150 cash award. The poster competition was part of 01:694:484 Seminar in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Pradeep presented his electron microscopy studies on the effect of the anti-apoptosis protein Bcl-xL on mitochondrial function and morphology. Pradeep is advised by Professor Nada Boustany.

April 04, 2007
Madabhushi team in BMEIdea Finals April 6th
The Rutgers team comprising Scott Doyle, Anant Madabhushi, Michael D. Feldman (pathologist, UPENN) has been selected to participate in the finals of the BMEIdea competition (www.nciia.org/bmeidea) for their work on developing a computer-aided diagnostic system for detection and staging of prostate cancer from digitized histology. Nationwide only 10 teams were chosen from several hundred to participate in the finals of this prestigious national biomedical engineering competition launched in 2004. BMEidea is a unique competition, in that judges rank entries on all aspects of biomedical commercialization, from product innovation to market need, and from regulatory strategies to social impact.

March 26, 2007
Mike Wininger Receives NSF Internship
BME graduate student Mike Winniger, an advisee of Professor Bill Craelius, was recently selected for the NSF’s 2007 East Asian Pacific Summer Institute and awarded an internship for stem cell research at the National Taiwan University. The East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes provide US graduate students in science and engineering first-hand research experience in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand or Taiwan; an introduction to the science and science policy infrastructure of the respective location; and orientation to the society, culture and language.

March 26, 2007
BME Graduate Students Receive LSM Awards
At the 21st Annual Symposium of the Laboratory for Surface Modification, graduate student Daniel J. Haders, working with Professor Richard E. Riman, won the prize for best student talk: “Deposition of crystallographically tunable hydroxyapatite films by TEP/EDTA doubly regulated hydrothermal crystallization for biomedical applications.” In addition, graduate student Norman Lapin working with Professor Yves Chabal, received the award for best student poster: “Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy investigation of the attachment between aminosilane, biotin and streptavidin at silicon oxide surfaces.”

March 23, 2007
Professors Yarmush and Megeed Awarded DOD Cancer Grant
Professors Martin Yarmush and Zak Megeed (of Harvard Medical School) have been awarded a one-year Concept Award through the Ovarian Cancer Research Program at the Department of Defense. This grant, totaling $131,250, will fund the development of targeted nanoparticles for the treatment of ovarian cancer.

March 21, 2007
Professor Metaxas’ Work Featured
Professor Dimitri Metaxas’s work on Homeland Security was featured in a Star Ledger article entitled, “Colleges leap into new field: Homeland security”. Professor Metaxas, in collaboration with investigators from biology, medicine, computer science and linguistics, are studying how subtle body movements -- the raising of an eyebrow, a shoulder shrug -- could signal deception.

March 14, 2007
Professor Li Wins NJ Commission Grant
New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research has awarded a one-year $159,500 grant to BME Professor John K-J. Li on a research project entitled, “Rapid Noninvasive Oxygen Monitoring in Cerebrospinal Injury”. The project will develop a system with fast electro-optical near-infrared device and evoked potential recording electrodes for noninvasive continuous assessment of oxygen metabolism and function in cerebrospinal injury and its treatment.

March 13, 2007
Androulakis and Ierapetritou win Award
Professors Androulakis and Ierapetritou received a $50K Knowledge Build Award from ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company in recognition of their work on the Analysis, Reduction and Representation of Complex Reaction Networks.

March 09, 2007
BME Faculty Selected for Academic Excellence Fund Awards
Three groups of BME faculty recently won Academic Excellence Fund Awards - awards meant to support existing and emerging areas of excellence in the University. These include: 1) Professors Yves Chabal, Eric Garfunkel, Prabhas Moghe, Kathryn Uhrich, and Martin Yarmush for a new Nano-Interfacial Science and Engineering program; 2) Professors Prabhas V. Moghe, Charles M. Roth, and Kathryn E. Uhrich for the Center for Science and Engineering in Nanomedicine; and 3) Professor Dimitris Metaxas and several computer science colleagues for a Pervasive Dynamic Cyber-physical Ecosystem.

March 08, 2007
Shinbrot’s Work Featured on Nature Newsblog
Professor Troy Shinbrot’s research questioning theories that water flowing through fractures on the surface mars might have created specific landmarks, was discussed. By sliding tiny glass beads down a table, Professor Shinbrot has been able to create similar structures here on earth. The terrestrial formations were built up by the static cling of the beads rubbing together. In 2004, Professor Shinbrot also showed that the low gravity of Mars could cause dust to flow like water, creating gullies similar to those made by streams here on Earth. blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2007/03/aps_march_07_water_on_mars_may.html

February 22, 2007
Zahn Awarded NIH Grant
Professor Jeffrey D. Zahn was awarded $417,787 by the National Heart Lung Blood Institute for a R21 grant entitled “Microdevices for Measuring CPB Systemic Inflammation“. In collaboration with his Co-Investigator, Akif Undar from The Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Professor Zahn is designing and fabricating microdevices for blood plasma separation and analysis to study complex inflammatory responses during cardiac surgery especially when Cardiopulmonary Bypass is used.

February 07, 2007
BME Juniors win Aresty Research Awards
BME juniors George Lee and Shivang Naik were awarded research grants by the Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates in recognition of their research activities. Shivang is exploring the utility of gland morphology in discriminating between different prostate cancer grades. George has been working on use of machine learning methods to distinguish between cancer and benign studies from high dimensional gene and protein expression studies. Both Shivang and George are mentored by Professor Anant Madabhushi.

February 01, 2007
BME Junior George Lee’s Paper Accepted
George Lee, a BME junior, had his first author, 12-page paper, “An Empirical Comparison of Dimensionality Reduction Methods for Classifying Gene and Protein Expression Datasets“, accepted at the International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications to be held in Atlanta, GA in May 2007. This represents a significant achievement because only 39% of papers submitted to this symposium were accepted. George is advised by Professor Anant Madabhushi.

January 17, 2007
Madabhushi Awarded Seed Fund Grant
Anant Madabhushi was awarded a $40K New Investigator Seed Fund grant from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey for his project entitled “Developing Quantitative Signatures for Characterizing Breast Lesions on MRI.“ His work will have significant clinical implications in early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer.

January 17, 2007
Buettner, Shreiber and Song Awarded NIH Grant on Acupuncture
Professors Helen Buettner, David Shreiber, and Peng Song (MAE) have been awarded a 2-year, $150,000 NIH grant for their project titled “Role of Connective Tissue Geometry in Acupuncture”. The team will develop an in vitro connective tissue equivalent system to study the role of intermuscular fascial planes in acupuncture.

January 16, 2007
Madabhushi Appointed CINJ Member
Anant Madabhushi is appointed a member of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ). Established in 1991, The Cancer Institute of New Jersey is the only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in New Jersey and one of only 38 nationwide.

December 22, 2006
BME Faculty Members to be Inducted into AIMBE
Professors Gyan Bhanot and Larry Shepp will be inducted as fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering at its annual meeting in February 2007. This brings the number of Rutgers BME program faculty who are AIMBE fellows to 25, and places Rutgers in the top ten of all universities with AIMBE fellows.

December 18, 2006
BME Students Receive Awards
Eric Yang (BME graduate student) was recently awarded a Laurance M. and Dorothy L. Leeds Fellowship/Scholarship for the 2006 academic year. Eric’s research focuses on modeling of corticosteroid pharmacogenomics in rat liver. David Simcha (BME senior undergraduate) received an award from the Aresty Research Center in support of his undergraduate research titled “Computational Prediction of Transcription Factor Binding Sites”. Pegy Foteinou (BME graduate student) received a travel award from the Society of Biological Engineering to present her work on the “Transcriptional Analysis of the Genome-Wide Response of Leukocytes in an in Vivo Human Model of Systemic Inflammation” at the First International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering in Coronado Island, California. Eric, David and Pegy all work under the direction of Professor Ioannis Androulakis.

December 12, 2006
Madabhushi Appointed Associate Editor
Professor Anant Madabhushi has been appointed as an Associate Editor of the scientific journal Medical Physics. Medical Physics is the scientific journal of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and is one of the premier journals devoted to publishing original scientific articles in all areas of medical imaging, image analysis, radiation physics, physics of radiology, and computer-aided diagnosis.

December 04, 2006
Langrana Wins NJCSCR Grant
New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research has awarded a two-year grant to Professor Noshir Langrana on a research project entitled, “Bifunctional DNA hydrogel to promote spinal cord regeneration” in the amount $321,439. The members of his research team include Professors David Shreiber, Bonnie Firestein, Rene Schloss and Bernard Yurke.

November 17, 2006
Professor Bhanot’s Work Wins Gordon Bell Award
A team of scientists including Professor Gyan Bhanot won the 2006 Supercomputing Gordon Bell award in the category of “Special accomplishment for innovation in scalable implementation”. This work involved the creation of a very fast computer code to simulate Quantum Chromodynamics in a highly scalable way on the Blue Gene Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Labs.

November 15, 2006
Professor Yarmush’s Work Featured
Professor Martin Yarmush’s work on a “Living Cell Array”, a microfluidic device that allows the study of real time gene expression in living cells, was featured in Chemical Biology. Chemical Biology is a news magazine which draws together coverage from all Royal Society of Chemistry publications, providing a snapshot of the latest developments in chemical biology. The full paper describing this innovative work was published in Lab on a Chip.

November 14, 2006
Students win NJCST Post Doctoral Fellowships
New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology Post Doctoral Fellowships were awarded to Michelle Burley to work with Germgard Lighting in Dover, NJ, and to Jason Maikos to work with Linguaflex, Inc in Newark, NJ. Michelle is advised by Professor Charlie Roth, and Jason is advised by Professor David Shreiber. The fellowships are designed to keep NJ's best and brightest graduates working in NJ.

November 14, 2006
Rutgers BME teams with Linguaflex to win NJCST Award
The New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology awarded Linguaflex, Inc and Rutgers BME a $500,000 Entrepreneurial Partnership Award to develop Linguaflex's technology for treating sleep apnea. The awards are intended to stimulate academic interactions with NJ start-up companies. The effort at Rutgers is led by Professor David Shreiber.

October 19, 2006
Mann Appointed JMR Associate Editor
Professor Adrian Mann has been appointed to the position of Associate Editor, Biomaterials for the Journal of Materials Research (JMR). JMR is one of the premier archival journals devoted to original materials science research, addressing more than 150 different topics on materials synthesis, materials processing, microstructure and properties.

October 08, 2006
Coleman Receives 2007 SES Medal
Professor Bernard Coleman has been selected to receive the 2007 SES Medal in recognition of his seminal work in the field of engineering science. The award will be presented during the 44th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science, October 21-24, 2007, at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.

September 29, 2006
Kim and Cai Awarded NIH Grant
Professors Sobin Kim and Li Cai have been awarded an NIH R03 grant from the National Cancer institute for their project entitled, “Analysis of Gene Expression Changes in Breast Cancer using MALDI-TOF MS”. This two year grant, totaling $147,543, will be directed to develop a system to rapidly recognize gene expression patterns in breast cancer tissues.

September 25, 2006
Yarmush Wins NIH Stem Cell Award
Professor Martin Yarmush has been awarded a 1-year NIH Career Enhancement Award for Stem Cell Research. This award, totaling $186,781 is meant to provide investigators with the necessary resources that will enable them to take full advantage of stem cells in their research.

September 03, 2006
BME Professors Chair Sessions at Biomedical Engineering Conference
At the 28th IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference held in New York City, August 30-September 3, 2006, several BME professors (John K-J. Li, Anant Madabhushi and Dimitris Metaxas) chaired tracks and sessions in a variety of areas including: cardiovascular and respiratory systems, image-guided surgery, and BME student activities.

August 17, 2006
Two New Faculty Join BME
Professor Gyan Bhanot, who comes to us from IBM and the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, is an expert in bioinformatics and systems biology, and will join the department on September 1st. Professor Jeffery Zahn, who hails from Penn State, is an expert in microfabrication and microfluidics, and will join BME in January 2007.

August 11, 2006
Postdoctoral Training Program Renewed
The Rutgers UMDNJ Training Program in Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials Science was recently refunded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for an additional 5 years. The award which is for $1.8M is led by Professors Joachim Kohn, Prabhas Moghe and 5 other Co-PIs.

July 18, 2006
Mann Receives NSF Award
Professors Adrian Mann and Manish Chhowalla (MSE) have been awarded $275,000 over 2 years by the NSF Division of Materials Research to investigation the structure and properties of Si doped Boron Carbide.

July 12, 2006
Moghe Receives $1M NSF NIRT grant
Professor Prabhas Moghe received an NSF Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) award. The award, which is $1M for 4 years, is from a project entitled “Ligand Nanodisplay for Cell Cytointernalization and SuperActivation”. Prof. Moghe is the PI of the team comprised of Professors Roth, Tsakalakos, and Talaga from Rutgers and Prof. Schwarzbauer (Princeton).

July 08, 2006
Boustany Receives J&J Discovery Award
Professor Nada Boustany has been awarded a 2-year, $25,000 award from the Johnson and Johnson Discovery Fund for her proposal to investigate the mechanisms of action of the BCL-xL transmembrane domain.

July 06, 2006
Mann Receives Busch Award
Professor Adrian Mann has been awarded a 2-year, $25,000 award from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund to support his studies of the nanomechanics of the bones of knockout mice.

July 05, 2006
Roth Receives Busch Award
Professor Charles Roth received a 2-year, $25,000 award from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund to support his project entitled “Inhibition of DNA Repair Using Short Interfering RNA in Glioma Cells”.

June 30, 2006
BME Senior Design Project Highlighted at MICCAI
A paper by senior BME student Scott Doyle, based on his senior design project, has being accepted at Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention conference (MICCAI), a presitgious medical imaging conference to be held this year in Copenhagen in early October. Scott’s work was supervised by Professor Anant Madabhushi.

June 29, 2006
Madabhushi Receives Busch Award
Professor Anant Madabhushi received a 2-year, $25,000 Busch Biomedical Research Grant. The funds will support a research project entitled, “Detecting pre-malignant prostate lesions from 3 Tesla ex vivo MRI”.

June 29, 2006
Cai Receives Busch Award
Professor Li Cai received a 2-year, $25,000 Busch Biomedical Research Grant from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund. The funds will support a research project entitled, “Genomic Analysis of Photoreceptor Development”.

June 28, 2006
Androulakis and Ierapetritou Receive Grant
Professors Yannis Androulakis and Marianthi Ierapetritou have been awarded a 3 year $275,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for their research program on the efficient characterization of complex reaction networks.

June 22, 2006
BME Students win IGERT Fellowships
BME graduate students, Kevin Nikitczuk and Lavanya Peddada, were recently awarded graduate fellowships from the NSF IGERT “Engineered Biointerfaces”. Nikitczuk works under the direction of Professor Martin Yarmush, and Peddada works under the direction of Professor Charles Roth.

June 21, 2006
BME Professors to Speak at Bioengineering Methods Conference
Professors Joachim Kohn, Doyle Knight, and Martin Yarmush are invited speakers at the 1st Annual Conference on Methods in Bioengineering to be held at MIT, July 17 and 18, 2006. The conference will focus on the current state of the art in polymeric biomaterials, microfabrication technologies, and tissue engineering. For more information, please see http://cem.sbi.org/MiB/

June 19, 2006
Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Ranked No. 1 by ISI
For the fourth year in a row, articles in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering (ARBME) were cited more often than papers in any of its peer journals, according to ISI’s 2005 Journal Citation Report, giving it the highest “impact factor” in its peer group. Professor Martin Yarmush serves as the editor-in-chief of the ARBME which published its first volume in 1999.

June 14, 2006
Metaxas and Driscoll Receive NIH Award
Professors Dimitris Metaxas and Monica Driscoll have been awarded an NIH grant for their R21 application entitled, “Bio-computational Image Analysis to Define Objective Indicators of Healthspan”.

June 13, 2006
Madabhushi receives Early Career Award
Professor Anant Madabhushi has been awarded The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award in BME for the proposal entitled "Automated Detection of Prostate Cancer from High Resolution MRI" in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. As part of this 2 year $200,000 award, Professor Madabhushi will develop computer-aided diagnosis methods for early detection of prostate cancer using 3 Tesla MRI. The work when completed will have significant clinical and translational implications for prostate cancer screening, for therapy, and for improving the accuracy of prostate biopsies.

June 12, 2006
Li Appointed Editor-in-chief
Professor John K-J. Li was recently re-appointed Editor-in-chief of Cardiovascular Engineering, An International Journal. The Journal is published by Springer and is linked to the Biomedical Engineering Society Website, allowing complimentary online access by all BMES members. www.kluweronline.com/issn/1567-8822/contents

June 06, 2006
Yarmush to Speak at Joint NIH-NSF Conference
Professor Martin Yarmush is an invited plenary speaker at a joint NSF-NIH workshop on “Engineering Approaches to Energy Balance and Obesity: Opportunities for Novel Collaborations and Research”. Professor Yarmush’s presentation is entitled, “Systems Approaches for Characterization of Metabolism: Metabolic Flux Analysis and the Living Cell Array”.

June 05, 2006
Kohn Appointed to Apogee Medical Advisory Board
Professor Joachim Kohn has been appointed to serve on Apogee's Medical Advisory Board. Apogee Technology, Inc of Norwood, MA is an emerging micro-electrical mechanical systems and nanotechnology company that designs, develops and markets medical devices and sensors products.

June 05, 2006
Rutgers Awarded Third NSF IGERT Grant
Professor Eileen Kowler,leading a team of Rutgers faculty from 4 different graduate programs, has been awarded an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship grant from the NSF. This 5 year award will support graduate fellowships in a new training program “Perceptual Science and Imaging” which provides training in new perceptual technologies which are applicable to humans and implemented in machines. BME faculty Dimitris Metaxas and Thomas Papathomas also serve as co-PIs on the award.

June 05, 2006
Madabhushi Receives Commercialization Award
Professor Anant Madabhushi received an award from the Rutgers Technology Commercialization Fund. The award will support translation of patented research for improving the accuracy of prostate cancer biopsies using computer aided design and high resolution MRI. This is the fourth TCF award to BME faculty; other award recipients are Professors Sobin Kim, Kathryn Uhrich, and Martin Yarmush.

June 02, 2006
Nanotechnology Shows Promise to Treat Cardiovascular Disease
Professors Prabhas Moghe and Kathryn Uhrich published exciting results in the June issue of the journal “Biomacromolecules” about the potential of nanotechnology to treat cardiovascular disease. The researchers propose using “nanoengineered lipoblockers” as a way to combat clogged arteries by attacking how bad cholesterol triggers inflammation and causes plaque buildup at specific blood vessel sites.

June 01, 2006
Graduate Students Win Fellowship Awards
Two students supervised by Professor Martin Yarmush have been awarded graduate fellowships from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research. Nripen Sharma has been awarded a 2-year, $60,000 graduate fellowship for his project, entitled, “Metabolic Engineering of Stem Cell Differentiation into Oligodendrocytes”. Lulu Li has been awarded a 1-year, $30,000 graduate fellowship for her project entitled, “Tunable Electrostatic Pulses to Modulate Stem Cell Differentiation into Neuronal Lineage Cells”.

June 01, 2006
Chabal Wins NSF Special Creativity Award
Professor Yves Chabal has been awarded a “Two-Year Extension for Special Creativity” on his current NSF grant entitled “Surface Chemical Functionalization of Technologically Important Semiconductors”. The $310,000 award is in recognition of Professor Chabal’s “recent creative accomplishments” which are directly applicable to the development of semiconductor process chemistry, the understanding of new nanomaterials synthesis methods, and the development of biological sensors and devices.

May 30, 2006
Li Elected Chair of IEEE EMBS Chapter
Professor John Li was recently re-elected Chair of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMB) Chapter of IEEE’s Princeton/Central Jersey Section. The EMB section is a leading authority in biomedical engineering and technology and has close interaction with NJ biomedical industry.

May 26, 2006
Li Awarded U.S. Patent
Rutgers BME Professor John K-J. Li with UMDNJ cardiologist Kenneth Khaw are inventors of a patent recently awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Temporary Blood Circulation Assist Device is an axial flow blood circulation device with an inflatable impeller. It can improve blood flow and reduce workload of the failing heart, as well as improve blood circulation to other parts of the body, such as the brain during stroke.

May 03, 2006
Yoav Biton wins Mandelis Award
Yoav Biton, a student advised by Prof. Bernard Coleman is the winner of the Dr. Stanley and Francine Mandeles Graduate Research Award at Rutgers. Yoav’s work involves the development of methods of calculating equilibrium configurations of DNA and studying the effects of salt on these equilibrium configurations. is the winner of the Dr. Stanley and Francine Mandeles Graduate Research Award at Rutgers. Yoav’s work involves the development of methods of calculating equilibrium configurations of DNA and studying the effects of salt on these equilibrium configurations.

April 28, 2006
Chabal Wins Research Award
The Rutgers Board of Trustees recently announced that Professor Yves Chabal was selected to receive the 2005-2006 Excellence in Research Award. This award is the university’s highest honor for outstanding research contributions to a discipline or to society.

April 28, 2006
BME Graduate Student Recieves Summer Award
The New Jersey Center for Biomaterials has announced summer research awards to Prof. William Craelius’s student Michael Wininger, Prof. Dave Shreiber’s student Gary Monteiro, and Prof. Prabhas Moghe’s student Er Liu.

April 27, 2006
Rutgers Research Receives Commercialization Award
Tim Maguire, Rene Schloss, and Professor Martin Yarmush received a $20,000 award from the Rutgers Technology Commercialization Fund. The award will support translation of patented research involving the use of alginate encapsulation as a means to control hepatic differentiation of stem cells.

April 19, 2006
Graduate Student Recieves Prestigious Award
Charles Florek, NSF BME-IGERT graduate fellow in Biointerfaces was awarded first prize for his talk Anti-Adhesion Device for Neurosurgery: Proof of Concept as a Barrier Device, at the W.L. Gore BME Partnership Meeting held in February. W. L. Gore holds this meeting annually to develop relationships with prominent Biomedical Engineering programs throughout the United States.

April 04, 2006
NJCBM Faculty Receive RU Academic Excellence Fund Awards
Profs. Joachim Kohn and Doyle Knight are the recipients of an Academic Excellence Fund award for their research on the Infrastructure for Biomaterials Informatics. The purpose of this research is to help extend the predictive power of computational models which describe the bioresponse to biomaterials.

April 03, 2006
Craelius Speaks on the $6 Billion (Hu)man
Professsor Bill Craelius presented recent results of his internationally recognized bionic hand at a symposium on the $6 Billion (Hu)man, sponsored by the American Association at Experimental Biology, held in San Francisco. Craelius bionic hand uses existing nerve pathways to control individual computer-driven mechanical fingers.

March 29, 2006
Rutgers Research receives BMES Award
Jason Maikos received an award for “Outstanding Scientific and Engineering Innovation in a Poster Presentation” as lead author on his poster “Characterization of Immediate Blood-Spinal Cord Barrier Damage Due to Mechanical Trauma”, which was presented at the 2005 BMES Symposium in Baltimore. Jason’s advisor, Dr. David Shreiber, was the Principal Investigator for the poster, which also included Devesh Patel (a BME Senior) and Dr. Wise Young (Cell Biology & Neuroscience) as co-authors.

March 29, 2006
Androulakis Wins Teaching Award
The Engineering Governing Council recently announced that Professor Yannis Androulakis was selected by the Biomedical Engineering students to receive the 2005-2006 Excellence in Teaching Award. The award will be presented during the Leadership Conference on April 9 2006.

March 23, 2006
Mann Receives Bioengineering and Environmental Sciences Award
Professor Adrian Mann has received an award of $259,724 from the Bioengineering and Environmental Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation. The award will support a study into the effects of tannins, chlorhexidine, peroxide, and sodium bicarbonate on the mechanical properties, morphology, and intermolecular bonding of salivary pellicle. The research is funded through the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry scheme and will be undertaken in collaboration with Church & Dwight, Inc., Princeton, NJ.

March 14, 2006
Yarmush Receives New Jersey High Tech Hall of Fame Award
Professor Martin Yarmush was recently selected to be inducted into the New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame. The New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame was created to spotlight the high-tech achievements of business leaders, researchers, educators, and government officials, who, through their leadership and accomplishments, have made New Jersey one of the premier high-tech states in the nation. The awards ceremony will be held on May 7.

March 13, 2006
Third Annual Biomedical Engineering Showcase is a Success
Rutgers, NJIT, UMDNJ, Princeton, Stevens, Kean University, and the Biotechnology Council of New Jersey hosted their third Biomedical Engineering Showcase on Friday, February 10th 2006. The event, which focused on Stem Cells and Biomedical Engineering, drew in more than 400 attendees, 24 exhibitors and over 40 poster presentations. Representatives from academia included undergraduates, graduate students and faculty, and industry was well represented by a vast array of researchers, CEO’s, accountants, lawyers and sales representatives. Highlights of the day’s events included three keynote presentations, and a blue ribbon panel discussion dedicated to the industrial and ethical aspects of stem cell research.

February 14, 2006
BME Undergrads Win Aresty Awards
Several BME undergraduates were awarded grants in the Spring 2006 competition by the Aresty Research Center to support their research. Awardees included Julie Maguire and Macdale Elwin, who are Honors Academy members performing research under the direction of Professor David Shreiber,Hiral Patel, who is performing research under the direction of Professor Prabhas Moghe, BME junior Parth Patel, working under Prof. Moghe’s direction, and Amit Misra working under Professor Androulakis’ direction.

January 30, 2006
Professor Madabhushi’s Work Featured
Professor Anant Madabhushi’s work on early detection of prostate cancer from high resolution MRI was featured at the recent Technology Transfer Showcase Forum held at Rutgers. The forum was sponsored by the Technology Licensing offices at Rutgers, NJIT, Princeton, and UMDNJ.

January 04, 2006
FDA Approves Medical Device using Kohn Biomaterial
A hernia repair device using a polymer from Professor Joachim Kohn’s combinatorial library of polyarylates has received FDA approval for marketing. The device, developed by TyRx Pharma, Inc., consists of a surgical mesh coated with a polymer which gives the surgical mesh improved handling characteristics that facilitate precise placement during the surgical repair and leaves less implant material following the resorption of the coating.

December 09, 2005
Boustany Appointed Chair of ISAC Committee
Professor Nada Boustany was recently appointed Chair of the Emerging Leaders Task Force Committee of the International Society for Analytical Cytology (ISAC) To ISAC was established in 1976 to promote research, development, and applications in analytical cytology.

December 06, 2005
Langrana Appointed Associate Editor
Professor Noshir Langrana was recently appointed Associate Editor of the “Journal of Biomechanical Engineering” (JBME). JBME reports research results in most areas of biomechanical systems, including: artificial organs and prostheses; bioinstrumentation and measurements; bio-heat transfer; biomaterials; biomechanics; bioprocess engineering; cellular mechanics; design and control of biological systems; and physiological systems.

December 02, 2005
Shinbrot and Colleagues Receive NJCSCR Grant
Professors Troy Shinbrot, Helen Buettner, David Shreiber and Kathryn Uhrich have recently received a $200,000 award to study the migration of implanted spinal neurons. This award by the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research will combine computational and experimental analyses of future rehabilitative technologies to regenerate damaged spinal systems.

November 30, 2005
Shreiber Receives PVA Research Foundation grant
Professor David Shreiber has received a 2-year, $150,000 award from the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) Research Foundation to design biomaterials for limiting astrocyte inhibition of spinal cord regeneration. Professor Bonnie Firestein (Cell Biology & Neuroscience) is a co-investigator.

November 15, 2005
Uhrich Wins New York ACS Award
Professor Kathryn Uhrich has been named the 2005 winner of the Buck-Whitney Medal for outstanding new research in chemistry and biochemistry. The American Chemical Society presented Professor Uhrich with the medal at its Nov. 14 2005 meeting at Albany Molecular Research, Inc. Albany, NY

October 25, 2005
Androulakis Receives ExxonMobil Knowledge Build Award
Professor Yannis Androulakis received a $35,000 Knowledge Build Award from ExxonMobil. The funds will support research related to the analysis and representation of complex reaction pathways.

October 15, 2005
Yarmush is Plenary Speaker at Annual AIChE Meeting
Professor Martin Yarmush has been chosen to give a plenary presentation representing the Food, Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering division at the Annual AIChE Meeting in Cincinnati. Professor Yarmush’s talk is entitled, “Tissue Engineering: Microsystems and Macrosystems for Functional Genomics, Metabolic Engineering, Stem Cell Differentiation, and the Treatment of Liver Disease.”

October 10, 2005
Rutgers BME wins Grant from the Coulter Foundation
The Department of Biomedical Engineering has won a 1-year $250,000 grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to fund translational research activities that are collaborative with UMDNJ investigators. The Prinicipal Investigators of this award are Professors Noshir Langrana, Stan Dunn, and Martin Yarmush.

October 01, 2005
Metaxas Win $3.5 Million Award from Homeland Security
A team of Rutgers investigators led by Professor Dimitris Metaxas will be aided in their study of how to accurately detect lying through a $3.5 million grant from U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security. The researchers are investigating how a person’s subtle body movements may indicate deception. The goal is to capture these cues on camera, analyze the movements via computer and deliver input on the subject’s likely truthfulness.

September 29, 2005
NJIT/RUTGERS Team win Major Rehabilitation Grant
A collaborative research team of NJIT and Rutgers, including Professor William Craelius, has won major funding to establish a joint research center to develop technology for children with orthopedic disabilities. The Center will be established by a $4.8M grant from the Us National Institute for Disability Research and Resources.

September 03, 2005
Dunn, Constantinides, and Moghe Publish Book
Professors Stan Dunn, Alkis Constantinides, and Prabhas Moghe have published a BME textbook entitled “Numerical Modeling in Biomedical Systems.” received a $135,000 Teaching Materials grant from the Whitaker Foundation. The book which brings together a set of computational problem solving tools important to biomedical engineers, had received a $135,000 Teaching Materials grant from the Whitaker Foundation.

September 01, 2005
Semmlow Wins NIH STTR Award
Professor John Semmlow, in collaboration with Sonomedica, LLC of Vienna, VA, was awarded a Phase I NIH STTR grant for a project entitled, “Improved Acoustic Detection of Coronary Blockages”. The objective of the research program is to improve acoustic-based detection of coronary artery disease to a clinical level.

August 30, 2005
Rutgers/UMDNJ/Princeton Team Win EPA Award
Professor Yannis Androulakis is a member of a collaborative research team of Rutgers, UMDNJ, Princeton, and FDA researchers, headed by Professors Welsh and Georgopoulos of UMDNJ, selected to establish the nation's first and only EPA-supported National Center of Excellence for Environmental Bioinformatics and Computational Toxicology. The initial award totals ~$4.5 million over 5 years.

August 15, 2005
Roth, Yarmush, Androulakis and Ierapetritou Awarded NSF Grant
A collaborative research team of BME and CBE faculty -- Professors Charles Roth, Martin Yarmush, Yannis Androulakis and Marianthi Ierapetritou -- was awarded a $1 million grant through the NSF Metabolic Engineering initiative. This grants supports research into genetic and signaling networks that control hepatocyte metabolism in cell-based devices.

July 12, 2005
Coleman Receives NSF Grant
Professor Bernard Coleman has been awarded a 3-year $289,160 grant from the Mathematical Biology program of the NSF. The grant entitled Bifurcation of Equilibria in DNA Elasticity, continues Professor Coleman’s work on DNA mechanics.

June 27, 2005
Yarmush Receives $3.4M NIH Grant
Professor Martin Yarmush has received a 5-year $3.4M from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. The funds will support a research program aimed at developing real-time functional genomics cell arrays for studying inflammation and fibrosis.

June 15, 2005
Shreiber Receives J&J Discovery Award
Professor David Shreiber received a 2-year, $25,000 Discovery Award from Johnson & Johnson. The funds will support research to develop microfluidic bioreactors for stem cell differentiation into neurons.

June 06, 2005
New Class Of ISRUF Students Announced
Eileen Dawson, Aleksey Demtchouk, Julie Maguire, Jessica Nikitczuk, & Nayerreh Rajaei were selected as the 2005 W.L. Gore ISURF Scholars. This award, established by the NSF IGERT program and W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc., provides support to promising undergraduate researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Honors Academy to pursue research in the area of integratively engineered biointerfaces.

June 04, 2005
Papathomas’ Work Featured on NPR
National Public Radio featured an article published in the journal Neuron co-authored by Professor Thomas Papathomas on their Morning Edition Saturday radio program. The results of Papathomas’ work, which are detailed in the paper (Neuron, 46: 723-729, 2005), open a new perspective in the research on visual attention and provide testable predictions about the neural mechanisms of implicit attentional selection.

June 03, 2005
BME Industrial Internship Program a Rousing Success
The BME industrial internship program, under the direction of June Yarmush, was a great success this acadmeic semester. More then 50 graduate and undergraduate students were paired with industrial partners, in companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Chromocell, and Celgene, as well as a host of others located in the Cure Corridor of New Jersey. Additional information on the program can be found here.

June 02, 2005
Mann Receives PRF Award
Prof. Adrian Mann has received $35,000 award from the Petroleum Research Fund administered by the American Chemical Society. The grant funds will support Prof. Mann in an ongoing investigation into the effects of organic fluids on the mechanics of nanoasperity contacts. The research aims to provide insight into the role of bio-lubricants, like hyaluronic acid, in reducing friction and wear between contacting surfaces.

June 01, 2005
BME Students win Biotech Graduate Fellowships
BME graduate students Eric Novik and Nicole Iverson were recently awarded NIH Biotechnology Tranining Grant fellowships. Novik, under the the direction of Professor Yarmush, focuses on the differentiation of embryonic stem cells into hepatocytes. Iverson, under the direction of Professor Prabhas Moghe, focuses on the attachment of nanoparticles to endothelial surfaces inflamed by LDL.

May 27, 2005
Julias Named NJCSR Graduate Fellow
Margaret Julias has been awarded a 2-year, $60,000 graduate fellowship from the New Jersey Comission on Spinal Cord Research for her project, entitled: A Novel Micromechanical Method for Controlling Microstructure in Nerve Grafts. Julias is advised by Profs. Helen Buettner and David Shreiber.

May 20, 2005
Rakestraw is Commencement Speaker
Dr. Scott Rakestraw, who serves on the BME Industrial Advisory Board, served as the commencement speaker for the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois (Urbana). Dr. Rakestraw is currently the president of the Branta Group which services global life science and health care investment companies, and is an alumnus of UIUC.

May 19, 2005
Kim Receives NIEHS Award
Professor Sobin Kim received a 1-year $20,000 research grant from the NIEHS Center for Environmental Health Sciences. The award will support studies on high throughput identification of cytochrome P-450 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. Dr. Kim is collaborating with Dr. Jun-Yan Hong, a professor at the School of Public Health and the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at UMDNJ.

May 18, 2005
Winter, Leung and Wayman Named RURF Fellows
Ashley Winter, Patrik Leung, and David Wayman, all BME Honors Academy members, were awarded Rutgers Undergraduate Research Fellowships (RURF) for their respective projects: 1) "Molecular Engineering Approaches for Identifying Liver Precursor Cells"; 2) "Charactaerization and Long-Term Propagation of Embryonic Stem Cells"; 3) "Gene Regulation of Hepatocytes". Winter and Leung are supervised by Professors Yarmush and Schloss and Wayman is supervised by Professor Roth.

April 20, 2005
NSF Grant awarded to Shinbrot
A 2-year $100,000 NSF Grant entitled “Transactions between Granular Flow and Solidification: Merging Multiphase Transport with Statistical Mechanics” was awarded to Professor Troy Shinbrot. In these studies Professor Shinbrot aims to focus on the interface between solid-like and fluid-like coexisting regions with the ultimate goal of producing an experimentally validated, quantitative, first principles model that spans the solidified-fluidized interface of granular beds. The data that the proposed work will provide will be of direct benefit for the predictive design of pharmaceutical formulation processes.

April 18, 2005
Uhrich’s and Harten’s Work Highlighted in C&E News
A feature article in the April 18 issue of Chemical and Engineering News (p. 47) highlights the work of Professor Kathryn Uhrich in developing polymerization technology that enables a drug to be its own biodegradable delivery vehicle. The article also describes collaborative work with Professor Robert Harten on the effect of PolyAspirin on healing bone defects.

April 10, 2005
Desiderio Wins Conference Award
Michael Desiderio, a BME senior, won the Second Place Award for his presentation on: Optical Assessment of Apparent Phase Velocities at the 31st Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference held at Stevens Institute on April 3rd 2005. In his project, Michael explored frequency characteristics of pulse wave velocities for vascular diagnosis under the direction of Professor John K-J Li.

March 17, 2005
NIH Biotechnology Training Program Renewed
The NIH supported Biotechnology Training Program, directed by Professor Henrik Pedersen, has been renewed for its fourth five-year cycle. The $1.25 million grant provides stipend and tuition for 7 fellows and is matched by institutional sources. BME faculty participating include Professors Helen Buettner, William Craelius, Prabhas Moghe, Charles Roth, David Shreiber, and Martin Yarmush.

March 10, 2005
Langrana Wins NIH Award
Professor Noshir Langrana, together with Drs. Rene Schloss and Bernard Yorke have been awarded a 2-year, $225,687 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Their research program is entitled "DNA Cross-Linked Gels: New Advanced Biomaterials".

March 05, 2005
Prabhas Moghe Selected for Academic Excellence Fund Award
Professor Prabhas Moghe was 1 of 33 investigators to receive an Academic Excellence Fund Award - awards meant to support existing and emerging areas of excellence in the University. The $35,000 award will enhance the Multiphoton Microscopy facility and its studies on cell-biomaterials interactions.

February 02, 2005
BME Research Highlighted at NJNC Nanotechnology Conference
Several core BME faculty were prominently featured at the first New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium (NJNC) Nanotechnology Conference, held at Lucent Technologies (http://www.njnano.org). Professors Yves Chabal, Noshir Langrana, and David Shreiber presented their respective research programs, for which nano- and microfabrication was provided by the NJNC through support from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

January 10, 2005
BME Showcase to be Held on March 11, 2005
The second annual “New Jersey Biomedical Engineering Showcase” will be held at NJIT on Friday, March 11, 2005. The theme of this year’s Showcase is “Enhancing Synergies between Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology”. The day long program includes plenary presentations, a poster session, industrial and academic program exhibits, and a career fair for both undergraduate and graduate students. For registration and other information, please contact http://bmeshowcase.njit.edu/

January 10, 2005
Micheli-Tzanakou Elected IEEE Division X Director
Professor Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou has been elected to the position of IEEE Division X Delegate/Director for 2005-2006. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is a non-profit, technical professional association of more than 360,000 individual members in approximately 175 countries. Dr. Micheli-Tzanakou has been involved with IEEE for over two decades and has served in many different roles, from student branch counselor to Neural Network Society President and IEEE Awards Board Chair.

December 10, 2004
Kohn's Work Featured in Nature Materials
In the November issue of Nature Materials, Professor Joachim Kohn published a feature article describing his recent successes in designing new biomaterials using combinatorial schemes. With this novel technology, tailored products can be designed to satisfy the specific needs of each specific biomedical or prosthetic application.

November 30, 2004
Graduate Students Win NJCSCR Fellowships
Chris Gaughan (CBE graduate student) and Gary Monteiro (BME graduate student) were awarded two-year fellowships from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research, which include full stipend and supply and travel allowances. Both Chris’ (“Fabrication of tunable hydrogels for spinal cord regeneration”) and Gary’s (“3D microreactors for stem cell differentiation”) research projects aim to assist in the search for a cure for paralysis following spinal cord injury. Both fellows are advised by Professor David Shreiber.

November 30, 2004
Two NJCSCR Research Grants Awarded to BME Faculty
The New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research has awarded research grants to Professor Martin Yarmush and to Professor Noshir Langrana. Dr. Yarmush received a 2-year, $221,000 award for his project, “Microfabrication of a Bioreactor to Characterize Neuronal Stem Cell Differentiation”. BME faculty Rene Schloss and David Shreiber are co-investigators on the research team that includes collaborators from Harvard and Washington University. Dr. Langrana received a 1-year, $150,000 award for his project, “Bifunctional Biomaterial Design for Spinal Cord Regeneration”. Dr. Langrana’s research team includes Drs. Shreiber, Schloss, Bonnie Firestein (Cell Biology & Neuroscience), and Bernard Yurke (Lucent).

November 20, 2004
Patel Brazil Bound
Natasha Patel, a senior Biomedical Engineering student and member of the BME Honors Academy, was selected as one of three students to represent Rutgers at the International Undergraduate Research Symposium in Sao Paulo, Brazil the week of November 20, 2004. Natasha, who conducts research on the mechanisms of acupuncture with Professors Helen Buettner and David Shreiber, was selected from a large pool of applicants on the basis of her research achievements and ability and willingness to act as an ambassador of Rutgers SOE.

November 20, 2004
NJABR Honors Uhrich and Stock
The New Jersey Association for Biomedical Research honored 12 outstanding New Jersey women scientists from academia and industry at its “Thank You Research” Gala on November 18. The honorees included Profs. Kathryn Uhrich and Ann Stock, both BME program faculty.

November 01, 2004
Metaxas Wins ITR Award
Professor Dimitris Metaxas has been awarded a 3-year, $849,817 ITR grant from the NSF for a project entitled “Advances in Recognition and Interpretation of Human Motion”. The overall goal of the project is to advance state-of-the-art in the field of computer-based American Sign Language recognition.

October 28, 2004
President's Excellence Award to Ursula
Ursula Wolf, our BME Graduate Program Secretary, was one of ten recipients (from nearly 60 nominations) of an Excellence in Service Award as part of the 2004 President’s Recognition Program at a reception this week. Ursula has supervised the recent dramatic growth of the department with professional accomplishment and ease, and consistently makes sure that our students are cared for and motivated when they need it most. Ursula professionally and efficiently keeps the program running without ever losing sight of the importance of compassion and thoughtful care for our students. Ursula represents the best of what Rutgers has to offer, and we in the department are proud of her well-earned recognition. Congratulations, Ursula!

October 10, 2004
Craelius Receives Phase II SBIR Grant
The National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research awarded a phase II, 2- year, $500,000 SBIR grant to Nian-Crae, a biomedical device company founded by Professor William Craelius from. This project completes development of the Hand Arm Rehabilitation Interface (HARI) developed by Professor Craelius and tests its efficacy with 24 stroke subjects. HARI is a revolutionary training tool that helps therapists and their clients rehabilitate the paralytic arm by facilitating and monitoring prescribed exercises, and simultaneously assessing progress.

October 03, 2004
Kohn’s Translational Work Cited by NIBIB
Professor Joachim Kohn’s successful collaboration with REVA Medical Inc to develop a biodegradable stent for coronary artery disease treatment was highlighted by the NIBIB as a major advance. The research was supported by NIBIB, REVA Medical Inc., and the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials. Details can be found at www.nibib.nih.giv/eAdvances/92104.htm

October 01, 2004
Bouzit Joins BME
Mourad Bouzit, an expert in robotics and virtual reality has joined the department as an Assistant Professor effective October 1 2004. Dr. Bouzit most recently worked at Avaya Corp where he was developing new concepts in teleconferencing. At Rutgers, he plans to focus his attention on several biomedical applications including tele-rehabilitaion and tele-surgery.

September 22, 2004
Shinbrot and Glasser’s Research Featured in “Nature”
In the September 23, 2004 issue of the journal “Nature”, Profs. Troy Shinbrot and Ben Glasser demonstrate that stirring a mixture of granular materials faster or longer won’t always generate a smooth blend. In fact, ingredients that were thought to be thoroughly mixed may have actually separated. The consequences of these findings are quite widespread, and very crucial in the context of pharmaceutical manufacturing where pills might not have an effective amount of active agent due to mixing induced anomalies.

September 08, 2004
Mann Awarded ONR DURIP Instrumentation Grant
Professor Adrian Mann and a team of Rutgers University co-investigators have been awarded a one-year, $279,317 instrumentation grant by the Office of Naval Research as part of the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). The grant will support the purchase of a “Combined Micro-Raman and Near-field Scanning Optical Microscope for Characterization of Nanostructured Materials”. The instrument will be used for the characterization of elastic strains and chemical phases in natural and artificial ceramics, polymers and composites. The instrument will be particularly useful for characterization of healthy and diseased mineralized tissues.

September 01, 2004
Two New Faculty Join BME
Professors Ioannis Androulakis and Sobin Kim have joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering as Assistant Professors. Professor Androulakis is an expert in bioinformatics and systems analysis and Professor Kim is an expert in genomics technologies, developing novel methods for DNA sequence analysis.

August 13, 2004
Shinbrot Awarded NSF Mathematical Training Grant
Professor Troy Shinbrot has been awarded a one-year, $160,000 Training Grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Rutgers Center for Collaborative Neuroscience. At the Center, Shinbrot will develop mathematical models for neuronal outgrowth and will examine strategies for regeneration following spinal cord injury.

July 22, 2004
Buettner Awarded Busch Biomedical Research Grant
Professor Helen Buettner has been awarded a two-year, $25,000 Biomedical Research Grant from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund for her proposal, “A Micromechanical System for Nerve Tissue Engineering Based on Acupuncture”. The project will use in vitro acupuncture needling to create micromechanically oriented extracellular matrices for nerve tissue engineering.

July 19, 2004
Ierapetritou, Yarmush and Roth Win NSF Award
Professors Marianthi Ierapetritou, Martin Yarmush and Charlie Roth were awarded a 3-year, $500,000 grant by the National Science Foundation’s Quantitative Systems Biology Program for their joint research program entitled “Experimental and Computational Studies to Optimize Hepatocyte Function.”

July 15, 2004
Chabal Assumes Directorship of LSM
Professor Yves Chabal has been appointed Director of the Laboratory of Surface Modification replacing Professor Ted Madey. The LSM, a unique facility which provides comprehensive surface and thin film analyses, brings together over 20 faculty from different departments to address basic and applied issues of high tech surface and interfaces.

July 07, 2004
Yarmush and Mavroidis Receive NASA Grant
Professors Martin Yarmush and Dinos Mavroidis (from Northeastern University) received a Phase II, 2 year, $400,000 grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) for their project “Bio-Nano-Machines for Space Applications”. The goals of the project are to study bio-nano-machine components for two macro-scale space devices: the Networked TerraXplorer (NTXp) for mapping and exploration of large surfaces, and the Smart Bio-Nano Suit (SBS), for early detection and protection against dangerous and harmful environments.

July 05, 2004
Dunn Appointed Deputy Editor
Professor Stan Dunn was recently appointed Deputy Editor of a new journal BioMedical Engineering OnLine (BEO). BEO is an open access, peer reviewed, online journal that is dedicated to publishing research in all areas of biomedical engineering.

July 01, 2004
Moghe Receives AHA Award
Professor Prabhas Moghe received a three year $198,000 award from the American Heart Association for his project Nanoscale Macromolecules for LDL Complexation and Clearance. Other collaborating-investigators in this research program are Profs. Kathryn Uhrich, and Silvina Tomassone.

June 21, 2004
Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Ranked No. 1 by ISI
Articles in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering (ARBME) were cited more often than papers in any of its peer journals, according to ISI’s 2003 Journal Citation Report, giving it the highest “impact factor” in its peer group. It was also ranked #1 in the ISI’s 2002 Journal Citation Report. The ISI’s impact factor has increased from 3.537 in 2002, to 7.875 in 2003. Professor Martin Yarmush serves as the editor-in-chief of the ARBME which published its first volume in 1999.

June 11, 2004
IGERT Fellowship Awards announced
Congratulations to BME graduate students Charles Florek, Salaheldin Hamed, Rebecca Hughey, Eric Novik, and Alice Rentz, who were recently appointed as Graduate Trainees in the Rutgers-NSF IGERT Program on Integratively Engineered Biointerfaces. Other new trainees are Frances Gratacos and Ronald Perez (MBS), and Princey Varughese (CCB).

June 07, 2004
ISURF Scholars Named
BME undergraduate students Benjamin Griffel, Fred Martin, Anthony Nicolini, Rebecca Penkala, and Julie Richardson have been named ISURF (IGERT Summer Undergraduate Research Frontier) Scholars for 2004 and will participate in intense summer research. Advising faculty include Nada Boustany, Prabhas, Moghe, Rene Schloss, Martin Yarmush, Charles Roth, Stanley Dunn, and Richard Riman.

June 01, 2004
Martin receives RISE Fellowship
BME Undergraduate Fred Martin received a RISE (Research in Science and Engineering) fellowship. His project titled “Differentiation of Embryonic Stem Cells into Functional Hepatoyctes”, is being performed under the direction of Professors Martin Yarmush and Rene Schloss.

May 26, 2004
NJCSCR Fellowship for Maikos
Jason Maikos, a 3rd year BME graduate student, received an inaugural Graduate Student Fellowship from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research. The 2-year fellowship includes a full stipend and supply and travel allowances. Jason’s research project, under the guidance of Professor David Shreiber, is entitled “In Vivo Tissue-Level Thresholds for Spinal Cord Injury”.

May 24, 2004
Rabara and Viriyayuthakorn named RURF Fellows
Knic Rabara, a BME Honors Academy member working with Professor David Shreiber, was awarded a Rutgers Undergraduate Research Fellowship (RURF). Knic’s project is entitled “Design of a Self-Assembling Oligopeptide Biomaterials for Nerve Regeneration.” Also awarded a RURF is BME student Sandra Viriyayuthakorn, who is working with Professor Charles Roth on “Quantitative Analysis of Intracellular Trafficking of Oligonucleotides”.

May 20, 2004
Rutgers Undergraduate Awards
BME graduate, Andy Eugene delivered the student commencement address at graduation on May 20th at the Louis Brown Athletic Center Andy’s speech was selected from a group of several engineering students who competed for the honor. This is the second consecutive year that a BME was selected. At the 2003 convocation, Theresa Hayes, a BME graduate delivered the student address.

May 06, 2004
Rutgers BME Wins Excellence Award
The Department of Biomedical Engineering has been honored with the “2004 Rutgers Award for Programmatic Excellence in Undergraduate Education”. The BME department was singled out for novel dynamic curricula following 3 separate tracks and for its integration of class teaching and research in the undergraduate experience. Multiple extant external awards attest to the excellence in education and in the quality of BME graduates.

April 30, 2004
4th Annual Senior Design Conference Showcases Student Achievements
On April 29th 2004, over 70 students presented their research at the 4th Annual Senior Design and Graduate Program Conference held on Busch Campus. Graduating seniors throughout the day, presented the results of their year-long design projects to an audience of approximately 120 invited guests including family members, various departmental faculty, and industrial collaborators. The event began with a plenary lecture on “Defending Against Biological Terrorism” given by Dr. Tim Dasey, a BME alumnus who works at MIT/ Lincoln Laboratory. During lunch, BME graduate students and BME Honors Academy members presented posters and describing exciting and pivotal ongoing research in BME laboratories.. The day concluded with a first-ever Mini Career Fair hosted by the Industrial Interactions Office, which provided the graduating students a chance to interview with companies for potential employment.

March 10, 2004
Drzewiecki Receives Patent Award
Professor Gary Drzewiecki along with 38 other faculty were honored at the Rutgers Office of Corporate Liaison and Technology Transfer Fifth Patent Award Dinner. Dr. Drzewiecki was recognized for his innovative technique for measuring vascular function using a blood pressure cuff. Other BME faculty receiving recognition include Professors Kohn, Riman, Uhrich and Sinko.

March 10, 2004
Five BME Faculty are Inducted into AIMBE
Professors Stanley Dunn, Prabhas Moghe, Thomas Papathomas, Russ Parsons, and John Semmlow were inducted as fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering at its annual meeting this past week. This brings the number of Rutgers BME program faculty who are AIMBE fellows to 19, and places Rutgers in the top ten of all universities with AIMBE fellows.

February 27, 2004
LSM Symposium a Rousing Success
The Eighteenth Annual Symposium of the Laboratory or Surface Modification was held on Thursday, February 26, 2004, at the Fiber Optics Auditorium on the Busch Campus. In addition to oral presentations by Professors Yves Chabal (Director of LSM and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemistry) and Kathyrn Uhrich (Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program), poster presentations were also given by BME graduate students, Tim Maguire and Melissa Stickle.

February 26, 2004
Penkala Receives Scholarship
Rebecca Penkala, a junior in BME, received the 2004 David and Dorothy Bernstein Scholarship from the BioMAPS program and the Center for Molecular Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry. Rebecca’s project for the award is “Intracellular Activation Using Ligand and Carrier Nanodots” under the direction of Professor Prabhas Moghe.

February 24, 2004
BME Faculty Receive Teaching Materials Award
Professors Stan Dunn, Alkis Constantinides, and Prabhas Moghe received a $135,000 Teaching Materials grant from the Whitaker Foundation. The award is to help develop a BME textbook entitled “Numerical Modeling in Biomedical Systems.” The foundation has given only 10 Teaching Materials awards since the program was initiated in 1995.

February 13, 2004
First Annual Biomedical Engineering Showcase is a Success
The Rutgers University and NJIT Departments of Biomedical Engineering, and the Biotechnology Council of New Jersey hosted their first Biomedical Engineering Showcase on Friday, February 13th 2004. The event drew in more than 335 attendees, 20 exhibitors and over 30 poster presentations. Representatives from academia included undergraduates, graduate students and faculty, and industry was well represented by researchers, CEO’s, accountants, lawyers and sales representatives. Highlights of the day’s events included six keynote lectures from prominent investigators representing the major NJ universities, and a series of workshops dedicated to the industrial aspects of research. Key portions of the event were videotaped by NJN and aired on public television.

January 30, 2004
Protein Data Bank Receives $30 Million Grant
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – The Rutgers-based Protein Data Bank (PDB) has begun the year with a commitment of a record $30 million in federal support for the next five years. This computer library of molecular structures is one of the world's most critical resources for solving the mysteries of human disease. Prof. Helen Berman, a BME graduate program faculty member is director of the PDB.

January 26, 2004
Four BME Graduate Students Win IGERT Fellowships
Tim Maguire, Harini Sundararaghavan, Melissa Stickle, and Daniel Haders will be formally inducted into the first fellow class of the IGERT program in Integrative Biointerfaces. The induction ceremony will be a part of the IGERT Program Inauguration which will be held in the Fiber Optics auditorium on January 30, 2004

January 20, 2004
BME Faculty Win Academic Excellence Fund Awards
VP Furmanski has announced the 2003-04 Rutgers Academic Excellence Awards. Of 36 proposals funded Rutgers-wide, 4 were awarded to BME program faculty: 1) J. Kohn - Combinatorial and Parallell Polymer Synthesis; 2) E. Kowler and D. Metaxas - Research and Training in Visual Science; 3) Y. Chabal et al - Novel Atom Layer Deposition; and 4) J. Guo et al - Nanoscale Opto-Mechanical Biosensing

January 20, 2004
Dunn Appointed to Journal Editorial Board
Professor Stan Dunn has been appointed to the editorial board of Machine Vision and Applications, a journal dedicated to publishing high quality technical contribution in engineering aspects of image-related computing.

December 23, 2003
Rutgers and BCNJ to Host BME Showcase
A consortium of institutions (Rutgers, UMDNJ, NJIT, and the Biotechnology Council of NJ) will host the first annual Biomedical Engineering Showcase at the Somerset Marriott on Friday February 13 2004. The Showcase is designed to strengthen academic-industrial relations in biomedical engineering and biotechnology within the State of NJ. (Announcement) (Sessions) (Registration Form)

December 15, 2003
Sinko Named to the Parke-Davis Chair
Professor Patrick Sinko, a faculty member in the BME graduate program, has been appointed to the Parke-Davis Chair in Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery. The Chair, funded by the Warner-Lambert Foundation, supports education and research in controlled drug delivery. Sinko is internationally recognized for his work on targeted delivery in cancer.

November 03, 2003
Uhrich Wins Major Award
Professor Kathryn Uhrich has recently received a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award from the Research and Development Council of New Jersey. The award recognizes her work on polydrugs as useful biomedical device coatings and therapeutics. Polymerix, the company formed to commercialize this technology was also named Life Sciences Company of the Year.

October 01, 2003
$ 3.6 million NSF IGERT Award to Moghe
Professor Prabhas Moghe, leading a team of Rutgers faculty from 8 different graduate programs, has been awarded an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant from the NSF. This 5 year award will primarily support graduate fellowships in a new training program Integratively Engineered biointerfaces. Four other faculty will help administer the award, including Kathryn Uhrich, Ted Madey, Martin Grumet, and Martin Yarmush.

September 30, 2003
SBIR Grant Awarded to Craelius
A phase I, 6-month SBIR grant has been awarded to Professor William Craelius from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. In this program, James A. Flint, a BME graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Craelius, is developing the hand-arm rehabilitation interface (HARI), a robotic device for helping stroke victims regain use of their hand.

September 15, 2003
Honors Academy Students Heading for Brazil
Lillian Chow and Sarah Frischberg, undergraduate seniors and member of the BME Honors Academy, were among the five students selected to represent the Rutgers School of Engineering at the International Undergraduate Research Symposium, to be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil the week of November 1, 2003. Lillian and Sarah were selected from a large pool of applicants on the basis of their research achievements and their ability and willingness to act as ambassadors of Rutgers SOE.

September 13, 2003
Boustany Receives Whitaker Foundation Grant
Professor Nada Boustany has been awarded a 3-year Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Grant for $240,000. The funds will be used to study apoptosis (programmed cell death) using optical scattering techniques.

September 07, 2003
BME Student Enrollment Grows
The new academic year has begun and with it came record numbers of BME students. The number of undergraduate students has increased from 12 in 1999 to 216 in 2003 (90 sophomores, 75 juniors, and 51 seniors). The graduate student body has also grown to a current census of 104 students (69 Ph.D. and 35 M.S.).

September 01, 2003
Boustany Joins BME
Nada Boustany, an expert in biomedical optics, in general, and in microscopic examination of sub-cellular components, in particular, has joined the faculty of Biomedical Engineering as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Boustany received her Ph.D. in Medical Engineering from MIT and completed a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship in the department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.

July 26, 2003
Shinbrot's and Muzzio's Research Highlighted in Science News
In the July 26 2003 issue of Science News (page 56) the work of Professors Troy Shinbrot and Fernando Muzzio on granular materials mixing, was featured in an article entitled \\\"Mastering the Mixer\\\". The article discusses the bewildering complexity of issues generated by the field of solids mixing (like that performed in pharmaceutical formulation), and the future prospects in tackling real-world problems.

July 21, 2003
Professors Mavroidis and Yarmush Receive NSF NIRT Grant
A project entitled \\\"Bio-Nano-Robotic Systems Using Viral Protein Nano Motors\\\" has been funded by NSF\\\'s Nanomanufacturing program through a 4 year $1,050,017 grant. The goal of the program (which includes Profs. Tomassone, CBE, and Papadimitrakopoulos, U Conn) is to develop novel and revolutionary biomolecular machine components that can be assembled to form multi-degree of freedom nanodevices for manipulating objects in the nanoworld.

July 03, 2003
Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Ranked No. 1 by ISI
Articles in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering (ARBME) were cited more often than papers in any of its peer journals, according to ISI's 2002 Journal Citation Report, giving it the highest "impact factor" in its peer group. Professor Martin L. Yarmush serves as the editor-in-chief of the ARBME which published its first volume in 1999.

July 01, 2003
Shreiber Awarded Busch Biomedical Research Grant
Professor David Shreiber has been awarded a two-year, $20,000 Biomedical Research Grant from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund for his proposal, entitled "Design of a Self-Assembling Biomaterial for Nerve Regeneration". Shreiber aims to use protein engineering to customize biomaterial properties for tissue engineering.

June 18, 2003
Roth Awarded Grant for Nanoparticle Research
Professor Charles Roth has been awarded a two-year, $35,000 grant from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society for his research project "Interplay of Colloidal and Specific Interactions in Ligand-bearing Nanoparticle Adsorption". In this project, theoretical and experimental approaches will be combined to develop nanoparticles that exhibit both efficient and selective delivery of drugs to target cells.

June 01, 2003
Shreiber Wins NJCSC Award
A research team led by Professor David Shreiber has been awarded a two-year grant for $203,000 from the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research. Shreiber, along with Yves Chabal (Biomedical Engineering and Chemistry), Kathryn Uhrich (Chemistry), and Helen Buettner (Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biochemical Engineering), will use microfluidics to optimize gradients of biomaterial properties in collagen scaffolds to enhance spinal cord regeneration.

May 05, 2003
Craelius Wins Distinguished Fellowship
Professor William Craelius has been names the 2003 recipient of The Mary Switzer Fellowship from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The award, which carries a stipend of $55,000, will be used to further Dr. Craelius\' cutting-edge research on bionic limbs.

May 04, 2003
Kohn Receives Clemsen Award
The Society for Biomaterials awarded its highest basic research award, The Clemsen Award, to Prof. Joachim Kohn for his work on combinatorial and computational approaches to biomaterials design. Professor Kohn\'s work has been the basis of a number of new biomedical products which are being used in orthopedic, skin, nerve, and cardiac applications.

April 30, 2003
BME Wins GAANN Grant
The Department of Biomedical Engineering has been awarded a graduate student training grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The GAANN award will provide 6 full (stipend & tuition) fellowships per year for the next 3 years. Professor Thomas Papathomas, the BME Graduate Program Director, serves as principal investigator of the GAANN Program.

April 22, 2003
$5.1 million NIH Research Resource Award to Kohn
Professor Joachim Kohn, Director of the NJ Center for Biomaterials and a graduate faculty member in BME has been awarded a $5.1 million NIH grant for a new center of \"Integrated Technologies for Polymeric Biomaterials.\" Several key investigators from Rutgers, NJIT, UMDNJ, and Stevens are involved in facility and research program development including Professors Prabhas Moghe and Charles Roth from BME.

April 04, 2003
Biju Parekkadan Wins NSF Fellowship
Biju Parekkadan, one of the top seniors in the BME department, has been awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship carries full stipend and tuition for 3 years, and is awarded to the top tier of engineering and science students in the country, who are planning to pursue graduate study.

March 26, 2003
Wallenstein Receives Prestigious NDSEG Fellowship
First year graduate student, Eric Wallenstein, has been selected to receive a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. The NDSEG Fellowship is exceedingly competitive, and provides full stipend and tuition for 3 years. Mr. Wallenstein is interested in developing techniques for generating pancreatic cells from embryonic stem cells; he is advised by Professor Martin Yarmush.

February 28, 2003
Mann joins BME and CME
Professor Adrian Mann an expert in nanotechnology applied to biological systems has joined the Biomedical and Ceramics & Materials Engineering Departments at Rutgers effective January 1, 2003. Professor Mann, who holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Oxford University, is studying the microstructure of bone in a variety of disease states in order to evaluate the effects of clinical treatments on local mechanical properties.

February 28, 2003
Roth Awarded NSF CAREER Grant
Professor Charles Roth received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER Award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty and carries a grant of $400,000 over the next five years. Professor Roth's project is entitled "Molecular Systems Bioengineering" and centers around the use of genetic engineering techniques to improve the performance of cultured liver cells for medical devices. It also encompasses enhancements to the Molecular and Tissue Engineering undergraduate track and several outreach activities.

February 25, 2003
Best Paper Award to Claudia Mello-Thoms and Stan Dunn
Professors Mello-Thoms and Dunn received the 2003 Herbert M. Stauffer Award for Best Clinical Science Paper, for their study "The Perception of Breast Cancer: What Differentiates Missed from Reported Cancers in Mammography?", which was published in Academic Radiology in September, 2002. Prof. Mello-Thoms, a Ph.D. graduate of Rutgers BME, is currently Assistant Research Professor in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Radiology.

February 21, 2003
Four BME Faculty to be Inducted into AIMBE
Professors Grigore Burdea, William Craelius, Cazimir Kulikowski, and Kathryn Uhrich were inducted as fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers at its annual meeting February 21, 2003. These faculty members are being cited from seminal work in: 1) rehabilitation through novel virtual reality systems (Burdea), 2) novel prosthetics (Craelius), 3) application of advanced computational techniques to medicine and genetics (Kulikowski), and 4) novel biomaterials and drug delivery systems (Uhrich). This brings the total number of Rutgers faculty in the AIMBE College of Fellows to 13.

January 16, 2003
Li Awarded Grant from UMDNJ
Professor John Li has received a one year award for $45,000 from UMDNJ - New Jersey Medical for his project "Esophageal Ultrasound Doppler." Prof. Li's research spans a broad range of cardiopulmonary problems with an emphasis on developing new diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

December 12, 2002
Washington Times Article on "The Tissue of Life"
Professor David Shreiber along with several other leaders in the Tissue Engineering field were quoted in the Washington Times feature article "The Tissue of Life". Shreiber who works in the area of nerve repair, stressed the enormous potential of the field in a variety of applications.

December 05, 2002
BME Honors Academy Funded
The Biomedical Engineering Honors Academy: An Undergraduate Community of Research Scholarship received a Rutgers Dialogues Grant starting January 2, 2003. Professor Charles Roth directs the Honors Academy, which currently has 9 BME juniors who are following an enriched research program, in addition to their courses.

December 01, 2002
Li Elected Chair of Local Chapter
Professor John Li was recently elected Chair of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMB) Chapter of IEEE's Princeton/Central Jersey Section. The EMB section is a leading authority in engineering biomedical technology. For more info see http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/princeton-centraljersey/

October 20, 2002
Shoane's Research Highlighted in Science News
Professor George Shoane's research on improving the golf putting process was featured in the October 12, 2002 issue of Science News (p. 238). The study mentioned showed that certain golfing grips can lessen head and eye movement during putting, which improves the putter's success. Professor Shoane is a leading expert in vision research, in general, and in oculomotor control, in particular.

October 10, 2002
Shreiber Awarded Grant from the CDC
Professor David Shreiber has received a 3-year, $600,000 award from the Centers for Disease Control to study the biomechanics of spinal cord injury. The research involves collaborations with Professors Dimitri Metaxas (Biomedical Engineering) and Wise Young (Cell Biology and Neuroscience), and aims to identify tissue-level material thresholds for injury following spinal cord compression.

October 01, 2002
Shinbrot Receives NSF Award
Professor Troy Shinbrot received a 1-year $50,000 award from the NSF for his project "Instabilities and Waves in Sheared Granular Materials". The goal is to study fundamental flow instabilities in powders and grains as encountered in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

September 04, 2002
Rutgers Breaks Ground for New Biomedical Engineering Building
Groundbreaking took place today for a $23.8 million, 60,000-square-foot building dedicated to biomedical engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The four-story state-of-the-art structure on the university's Busch campus in Piscataway is targeted for completion in 2004. Features include core facilities for genomics and proteomics, tissue engineering, biomedical imaging and optics, microfabrication, animal study, high-performance computing, laboratories, offices and a 200-seat auditorium and conference center.

August 26, 2002
Metaxas Receives Two Large Research Awards from the Air Force
Professor Dimitri Metaxas received two awards from AFOSR: 1. Recognition, Identification, Analysis, and Synthesis of Human Activities ($220,592), and 2. Human Identification and Recognition of Emotional States from Visual Input ($604,723). These new awards complement many of the innovative research programs currently ongoing in the Center for Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling, which Professor Metaxas directs.

August 23, 2002
Yarmush Receives NIH Grant to Improve Liver Transplantation
Professor Martin Yarmush received a 4-year $1.7M award from the NIH for his project Metabolic Engineering for Improving Liver Transplantation. The research program objective is to precondition fatty livers that are normally rejected as transplant candidates, so that they can be efficiently used. If successful, these techniques would make available hundreds of livers each year which are currently being disposed.

August 21, 2002
Shreiber Receives Research Grant from the Whitaker Foundation
Professor David Shreiber received a 3-year award from the Whitaker Foundation for $230K for his project entitled "Development of Tissue-Specific, Three Dimensional, In Vitro Models of Nervous System Trauma". The research project utilizes tissue engineering to study the mecahnotransduction of mechanical injury to axons and glia, and will contribute to the design of rational strategies to prevent and treat traumatic brain and spinal cord injury. Professor Wise Young (Cell Biology and Neuroscience) is a collaborator.

August 19, 2002
Roth Receives NIH Bioengineering Research Grant
Professor Charles Roth received a 5-year NIH award for $1 million to support his project entitled "Efficient and Selective Delivery of Antisense Oligonucleotides". The research project, which involves a collaboration with Professor Joachim Kohn (Chemistry), includes the development of a family of ligand-bearing, polymeric materials for delivery of nucleic acids to cells, and their use in identifying and overcoming rate-limiting steps to delivery.

August 15, 2002
Center for Wireless Integrated Sensor-on-Silicon Technology Funded
An award of $2.8M was made by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology for the "Center for Multimodel Wireless Integrated Sensor-on-Silicon Technology". The Principal Investigator, Dr. Dipankar Raychaudhuri, of Rutgers' WINLAB, will collaborate with colleagues from Princeton University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Agere Systems, Lucent, Sarnoff, Johnson and Johnson, Thomson Multimedia, and Semandex Networks. Professor John Li , a co-PI of the project, will lead the biomedical applications group.

August 12, 2002
Moghe Receives NSF Grant on Nanoscale Bioengineering
Professor Prabhas Moghe was awarded a three year $300 K grant from the Bioengineering Division of the NSF for his project entitled "Nanoscale Engineering of LDL-Retentive Substrates". The study proposes the synthesis and design of nanoscale substrates with high binding affinities for low density lipoproteins for use in the treatment of atherosclerosis. Collaborators include Rutgers Professors Kathryn Uhrich (Chemistry), Silvina Tomassone (Chemical Engineering), and Yicheng Lu (Electrical and Computer Engineering).

July 17, 2002
NIH Hepatic Tissue Engineering Award
Professor Martin Yarmush received a 5-year NIH renewal grant for $2M for continuing research on developing a bioartificial liver device. The research program includes the use of stem cells and other novel cellular systems as sources for liver cells and innovative bioreactor designs based on microfabrication techniques.

July 12, 2002
Two BME Faculty Receive NSF Award
Professors Dinos Mavroides and Martin Yarmush received a 1 year NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research for their collaborative work on nanorobotic systems.

June 20, 2002
BME Receives Major Whitaker Awards
Rutgers Department of Biomedical Engineering has been selected by the Whitaker Foundation to receive two substantial awards. The first is a $5 million Special Award to help the department build excellence in biomedical engineering through new state-of-the-art facilities and new faculty hires. The second is an Industrial Internships Program Award which will provide $180,000 over a three year period to support internships in the dynamic NJ pharmaceutical and medical technology industries.

June 12, 2002
National Eye Institute Grant Awarded to Papathomas.
Professor Thomas Papathomas received a 3-year NIH Award ($466,500) entitled "The Role of Object-Based Attention in Motion Perception". The major goals of the project are to study the interaction between attention and motion processing that enables the visual system to efficiently integrate, segment, and maintain a unified percept of moving surfaces.

May 30, 2002
Biju Prekkadan Wins Summer Research Award
A BME junior, Biju Parekkadan, was awarded a Supplemental Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. He will be working at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute with Dr. Jay Knutson in the Laboratory of Biophysical Chemistry, Optical Spectroscopy Section.

May 24, 2002
Coleman Receives NSF Grant
Professor Bernard Coleman was awarded a three year NSF Grant for his project entitled "Contact Problems in Kirchhoff's Nonlinear Theory of Rods". The work proposed involves analysis of DNA micromechanics and has implications for DNA nanodevices that are chemomechanically responsive.

May 09, 2002
NASA Summer Fellowship for Kevin
Kevin Nikitczuk, a sophomore in BME, received a summer fellowship from the NASA Space Grant Consortium. The fellowship consists of $5,000 for a 10 week research project on "Protein Based Nanorobotic Systems". Kevin is advised by Professors Dinos Mavroidis and Martin Yarmush.

May 01, 2002
Shoane to Edit Landmark Book
Professor George Shoane and Jani M. Pallis will be co-editing a new book entitled "Biomedical Engineering Principles in Sports" to be published by Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. The book will cover comprehensively all major sports, and chapters will be introduced with comments by the finest athletes in the world.

April 23, 2002
Roth Receives Whitaker Foundation Grant
Professor Charles Roth was awarded a one year Whitaker Foundation award for his project entitled "Effect of DNA Structure on Polymer-DNA Complex Formation and Delivery". Professor Roth's work is pioneering new inroads into the antisense delivery field.

April 10, 2002
BME Awarded NASA's NIAC Grant
Professors Dinos Mavroidis and Martin Yarmush received a Phase I, six month, $75K grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) for their project "Protein Based Nano-Machines for Space Applications". The goals of the project is to identify and study both computationally and experimentally novel Viral Protein Linear (VPL) motors and their use in future space nano-machines. The NIAC focuses on revolutionary concepts - specifically systems and architectures - that can have a major impact on missions of the NASA Enterprises in the time frame of 10 to 40 years in the future.

April 05, 2002
Distinguished Rutgers Faculty Member Assumes Society Presidency
Wilma K. Olson, the Mary I. Bunting Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers, and an associate faculty member in biomedical engineering, began her term as the president of the Biophysical Society Feb. 25 at the society’s 2002 annual meeting in San Francisco. Dr. Olson is also the director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at Rutgers. She is known for her contributions to molecular biophysics through groundbreaking studies of nucleic acids, where she has developed and applied novel computational tools.

March 15, 2002
BME Awarded Equipment Grant
Agilent Technologies, through their University Relation Philanthropy Equipment Grant Program, has awarded $140,000 of new equipment to the BME department. Professor Stanley Dunn, PI of the program, aims to use these new state-of-the-art Bioanalyzer Systems for the undergraduate teaching laboratories.

February 25, 2002
Langrana to Serve on NIH Panel
Professor Noshir Langrana was appointed to serve as a member of the Scientific and Technical Review Board on Biomedical and Behavioral Research Facilities for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) of the National Institute of Health. The term of the appointment is from July 2002 to June 2006.

February 20, 2002
Two BME Faculty to be Inducted into AIMBE
Professors Bernard Coleman and Dimitris Metaxas will be inducted as fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers at its annual meeting March 1-3, 2002. These faculty members are being cited from seminal work in: (1) theoretical modeling studies that advance our understanding of DNA micromechanics (Coleman) (2) physics-based modeling of heart motion (Metaxas).

February 15, 2002
J&J Donates Major Equipment
The Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Packaging Science and Engineering have just received a major donation from Johnson and Johnson - McNeil Pharmaceuticals of New Brunswick, New Jersey. This equipment donation, valued at approximately $450,000 will be used to upgrade undergraduate and graduate teaching and research laboratories in cell and tissue engineering, and materials testing and evaluation.

February 09, 2002
Inventor of Artificial Hand Writes Feature Article
Professor William Craelius contributed a critical overview of bionics entitled "The Bionic Man-Restoring Mobility" in the February 8 issue of "Science" magazine. Prof. Craelius is the inventor of Dextrahand the first artificial hand to allow individual finger control.

February 01, 2002
Grant to Establish Center for Biomolecular Imaging
The New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology recently announced the award of a $2.5 million, 5 year grant to establish a Center for Molecular and Biomolecular Imaging. The Center is a joint venture between investigators at Rutgers and Princeton led by a team of three principal investigators: Stanley Dunn, John Semmlow, and Warren Warren.

January 30, 2002
Yarmush Receives Genomics Award
Professor Martin Yarmush recently received an $882,300 award from the NIH for a project entitled "Real-Time Functional Genomics Using Cell Arrays." The objective of this program is to use live cells in a massively parallel microfabricated format to visualize protein expression in real-time.

December 20, 2001
State Award for the Center for Biomaterials
A $150,000 grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology was awarded to Professor Joachim Kohn to supplement his NSF supported "Partnerships for Innovation" program. The program seeks to evaluate new model for combining academic and industrial resources to develop underutilized university and industry intellectual property.

December 04, 2001
Industrial Advisory Board Meeting
The Department of Biomedical Engineering Industrial Advisory Board met on Dec at the Busch Campus. Ten of the twelve industrial board members were in attendance for six hours of presentations and interactions with faculty and students. The new co-chairs of the advisory board are Fred Senatore, MD, PhD (Aventis), and Mark Zimmerman, PhD (J&J).

November 14, 2001
Langrana Receives NSF Award
A group of five, which includes Professor Noshir Langrana, will receive a $1.2 million award through the Information Technology Research (ITR) program, for developing methodologies to improve the quality and efficiency of product design. Professor Langrana's project involves developing experimental and computational techniques for improved medical implant design.

October 22, 2001
Tech Vest Conference
On October 21, the Center for Biomaterials in cooperation with Tech Vest held its annual conference at the New York Hilton. Among the many outstanding presentations were those by Biomedical Engineering faculty Professors Prahbas Moghe, Martin Yarmush, Joachim Kohn, Kathryn Uhrich, Jack Ricci, and Gary Nackman. The entire three-day conference hosted an audience of nearly 250 participants.

October 15, 2001
International Conference
John Semmlow was awarded a Visiting Professorship at the Universite de Aix et Provence in Marseille France for the summer of 2001. During this period he organized and chaired the Third International Conference on Sensorimotor Control in Man and Machines held in Marseille at the beginning of Oct. This conference was the third of a series that he founded in Berkeley in 1994.

August 12, 2001
Nanomaterials Award
The School of engineering was awarded a $2.5 M grant from the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education's Workforce Excellence Program to create a new undergraduate curriculum in Nanomaterials Science and Engineering. This program involves five departments in the School of Engineering (including Biomedical Engineering) as well as Physics and Chemistry. The program will support 7 new undergraduate courses (4 lecture and 3 lab), provide funds for two new faculty, and create new undergraduate laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment.

July 10, 2001
Governor's School of Engineering and Technology
The prestigious Governors’ School of Engineering and Technology opened at Rutgers. The program brings 100 of the top high school juniors from all over New Jersey to the school of Engineering where they will participate in a four-week tuition-free total immersion program emphasizing engineering and information technology. Biomedical Engineering will host a large group of these outstanding young talents.

June 22, 2001
Shoane Publishes Two Scholarly Books
Professor George Shoane has recently published a single-authored comprehensive book entitled "Models of Oculomotor Control" by World Scientific Publishing Co. and has co-edited a large-volume book titled "Models of the Visual System" by Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

May 22, 2001
Metaxas to Join BME
Professor Dimitri Metaxas, a noted scholar in Computational Bioengineering, will be joining the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Computer Sciences in Fall 2001. Professor Metaxas joins Rutgers from the University of Pennsylvania where he developed an international reputation in physics-based modeling of heart motion and human gait. Professor Metaxas will direct Rutgers Center for Computational Bioimaging and Modeling.

April 12, 2001
BME Building Approved
The Board of Governors of the University approved the plan to build a 60,000 gross square foot, $23.8 million Biomedical Engineering Building on the Busch Campus. Construction is anticipated to begin in spring of 2002 with a completion date of October 2003.

February 28, 2001
Yarmush Speaks in Trenton
Professor Martin Yarmush presented a seminar at the State House in Trenton to increase awareness of the field of biomedical engineering and its potential to increase the quality of life of New Jersey citizens. Attendees included academic and legislative staff, and various radio and newspaper reporters.

November 16, 2000
Kohn Speaks in Trenton
Professor Joachim Kohn, Director of Rutgers' Center for Biomaterials Science and Board of Governors discussed "Tissue Regeneration: What Does it Mean for New Jersey?" at the 44th session of Rutgers' New Jersey Public Policy Seminar Series in Trenton. Rutgers' Center for Biomaterials Science is a leading program developing the basic platform technologies to bring tissue regeneration therapies to the clinic. The concept of using scaffolds for restoring full function to diseased or damaged tissue offers significant benefits to patients, as well as provides substantial economic development opportunities for New Jersey.

September 29, 2000
Uhrich Spins-Off Company
This past summer Professor Kathryn Uhrich, an Associate Professor in Chemistry, and Associate Faculty Member in Biomedical Engineering spun off a company, Polymerix Corp. to develop new polymeric drugs with unique properties. The first example, polyaspirin, is salicylic acid formulated as a polymer.

September 27, 2000
$25 Million for Structural Genomics
A consortium of scientist led by Professor Guy Montelione, Professor of Molecular Biology and Associate Faculty Member in Biomedical Engineering, was awarded a $25 million 5-year grant to determine the structure and function of proteins. The goal of this cutting-edge programs is to use Structural Genomics tools to advance the results of the Human Genome Project to a more functional level, and thereby open new opportunities for therapeutics.

September 26, 2000
Johnson & Johnson gives Rutgers $550,000 grant
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- Rutgers has received a $550,000 grant from Johnson & Johnson for a number of projects and programs in key areas. The grant will help underwrite the cost of six new projects and fund a new undergraduate research fellowship. It will also provide funding for eight ongoing or expanded projects, fellowships, and a research awards program established in previous years. One of the new programs is the Alliance in BioMEMS which led by Professor Helen Buettner and which seeks to generate exciting new graduate training opportunities in this expanding field.

August 21, 2000
Tissue Engineering Award
The New Jersey Commission on Higher Education recently announced the results of its first High Tech Workforce Excellence Program. The Biomedical Engineering department will receive $2.5 million over a three-year period to create an undergraduate program in Tissue Engineering.