Strella Biotechnology’s Biosensors Minimize Food Waste, One Apple at a Time

By Erica K. Brockmeier

BE Senior Malika Shukurova (left) with her partner Katherine Sizov, Strella Biotechnology

Bringing home a bad apple or two from the grocery store might not seem like a huge deal to the average consumer. But for producers and sellers of fresh fruits and vegetables, the staggering 40% of food that goes bad before it even reaches a store means mounds of wasted food and nearly $1 trillion in lost profits.

Now, thanks to a 2019 President’s Innovation Prize (PIP) award, seniors Katherine Sizov of Alexandria, Virginia, and Malika Shukurova of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, plan to address the issue and optimize the produce supply chain. The prize will help them grow their novel biosensing technology startup company Strella Biotechnology.

Sizov, who is majoring in molecular biology, likes to ask everyone the same question when talking about Strella: “How old do you think an apple in a grocery store is?” As it turns out, an apple from a store may have been in storage anywhere from a couple months to up to more than a year. “That’s one fact that you don’t really consider when you go into a store because you’re so used to seeing fresh fruit,” she says.

The idea for Strella came to life when Sizov, who was previously doing undergraduate research on neurodegenerative disorders, found herself reading papers outside of her main area of study and chatting with Shukurova about what she learned about food waste. The two friends had met during freshmen year through the Penn Russian Club.

That 40% of all fresh produce going to waste is what motivated Sizov. “I thought it was the most ridiculous number in the world,” she says. “This clearly is a problem that could be solved, and, since ag is a bio space, I thought we could use the technical knowledge that we have to solve the problem.”

Shukurova, a bioengineering major, quickly became interested in seeking a solution with Sizov. “At that time I was becoming increasingly interested in the technical aspects [of the problem], and more focused towards building a solution by sensing,” she says. Their complementary areas of technical expertise, and two years of friendship, led to a collaboration.

They soon found a potential approach: Ripening fruits release ethylene gas, and the amount of the gas correlates with a fruit’s ripeness. The challenge, however, is that man-made compounds do not bind ethylene with much specificity, so it’s a difficult gas to measure.

Strella’s solution? “Hack the fruit,” says Sizov, explaining that fruits can already measure ethylene themselves. Placing a ripe banana next to an unripe banana, for example, causes the unripe fruit to ripen more quickly. “Why reinvent the wheel? Let’s use what a fruit uses to sense ethylene,” she says.

After Sizov “hacked” the fruit and had a potential biosensor in hand, Shukurova’s experience and technical knowledge in bioengineering gave her knowledge on both the electronic and biological aspects of the problem. Their patent-pending sensor is now a “leading ripeness indicator” that Strella can monitor on a constant basis.

But bringing their biosensor to market means overcoming technical and biological challenges, including biosensor stability and powering the electrical components that collect data. Sizov and Shukurova put together a team of people with complementary knowledge, including Zuyang Liu, an electrical engineering master’s student; Reggie Lamaute, an undergraduate studying chemistry and nanotechnology; and Jay Jordan, who has previous experience in sales and market development in agriculture.

Strella biotechnology came together thanks to a number of programs and resources at Penn, including the Wharton VIP-Xcelerate, the Wharton VIP Fellows program, Weiss Tech House, the Wharton Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Club, the Penn Engineering Miller Innovation Fellowship, and courses offered as part of the Engineering and Entrepreneurship Program. Sizov and Shukurova also say that Penn’s openness to innovation and the numerous resources for would-be entrepreneurs has expedited their success.

Mentorship was also crucial for the success of their startup, with both naming Sevile Mannickarottu and their PIP mentor, Jeffrey Babin, as instrumental resources. Babin, who first met Sizov when she took his engineering entrepreneurship lab and who later served as her Wharton accelerator program advisor, says that Sizov was able to take skills she gained in the classroom and directly apply them in business scenarios. “She’s fearless in terms of picking up the phone and talking to strangers, gauging the market place, and taking on the tough issues in starting a company,” he says.

Continue reading at Penn Today.

BE’s Danielle Bassett Profiled in Science Magazine

Danielle Bassett, PhD

Danielle Bassett, Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in theDepartment of Bioengineering, grew up in central Pennsylvania where she and her 10 siblings were homeschooled. Back then, Bassett had aspirations to become a professional pianist, a dream shattered by stress fractures in her arm at age 16.

Now, Bassett is a renowned physicist and MacArthur fellow who has pushed the field of network science, which studies connections and interactions between parts of a whole, to new realms. Bassett’s research focuses on brain function, including work on how brains of people with schizophrenia are organized, how brain communication changes with learning, and how the brain is able to switch between tasks.

Kelly Servick of Science sat down with Bassett to talk through her incredible journey from child pianist to leading network scientist:

““By 17, discouraged by her parents from attending college and disheartened at her loss of skill while away from the keys, she expected that responsibilities as a housewife and mother would soon eclipse any hopes of a career. ‘I wasn’t happy with that plan,’ she says.

Instead, Bassett catapulted herself into a life of research in a largely uncharted scientific field now known as network neuroscience. A Ph.D. physicist and a MacArthur fellow by age 32, she has pioneered the use of concepts from physics and math to describe the dynamic connections in the human brain. ‘She’s now the doyenne of network science,’ says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. ‘She came from a formal physics background but was … confronted with some of the deepest questions in neuroscience.’”

Continue reading about Bassett’s career path and evolving research interests at Science.

Reposted from the Penn Engineering Medium blog. Media contact Evan Lerner.

Week in BioE: April 19, 2019

by Sophie Burkholder

New Vascularized Patches Could Help Patient Recovery from Heart Attacks

Heart attacks are the result of a stoppage of blood flow to the heart – an interruption to normal function that can result in severe tissue damage, or even tissue death. This loss of healthy tissue function is one of the biggest challenges in treating patients that undergo heart attacks, as the damaged tissue increases their risk of having future attacks. One of the main solutions to this issue right now is the creation of cardiac tissue scaffolds using stem cells to create a platform for new and healthy tissue to grow in vivo. A group of biomedical engineers at Michigan Technological University hopes to expand on this basis by focusing not just on cellular alignment in the scaffold but on that of microvessels too. Led by Feng Zhao, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, the team hopes that this new attention on microvessel organization will improve the vasculature of the scaffolds, and thus improve the success of the scaffolds in vivo, allowing for a better recovery from heart attacks.

Some Stem Cells May Be More Fit Than Others

Stem cells are one of the hottest research areas in the field of bioengineering today. Widely known as the cells in the human embryo that have the ability to eventually transform into specific cells for the brain, lung, and every other organ, stem cells are also of recent interest because researchers found ways to reverse this process, transforming organ-specific cells back to the pluripotent stem cell level. This achievement however, is mostly applicable to individual stem cells, and doesn’t fully encapsulate the way this process might work on a larger population level. So Peter Zandstra, Ph. D., a bioengineering faculty member at the University of British Columbia, decided to research just that.

Using mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs), Zandstra and his lab attempted to track the cells throughout their reprogramming, to more clearly trace each back to its respective parent population. Surprisingly, they found that after only one week of reprogramming, nearly 80% of the original cell population had been removed, meaning that most of the parent generation was not “fit” enough to undergo the process of reprogramming, indicating that perhaps some stem cells will have a better chance of survival in this process than others. This research may suggest that not all cells have the capacity to undergo reprogramming, as many researchers originally thought.

A New Microdevice Will Help Model Bronchial Spasms

The difficulty in breathing associated with asthma is the result of bronchial spasms, which are a kind of muscle contraction in the airways. But little was known about just how these spasms occurred in patients, so Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, and his lab created a microdevice to model them. Calling the device a “bronchi on a chip,” Levchenko and his team used a microphysiological model to look at some of the biochemical and mechanical signals associated with these kinds of muscle contractions. They found that the contractions operate in a positive feedback system, so that those caused by disturbance from allergens will subsequently cause even more contractions to occur. But surprisingly, they also found that a second contraction, if triggered at the right time during the initial contraction, could actually stop the process and allow the muscles to relax. Because asthma is a notoriously difficult disease to translate from animal to human models, this new device opens the door to understanding different mechanisms of asthma before taking research to clinical trials.

New CHOP Research Center to Focus Research on Pediatric Airway Disorders

A new bioengineering lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia called the Center for Pediatric Airway Disorders will specialize in a variety of airway procedures for pediatric patients such as tracheal reconstruction and recurrent laryngeal nerve reinnervation. This new lab will be one of the first to give a unique focus to the application of bioengineering to pediatric laryngology. The interdisciplinary center brings together students and researchers from all different fields, including materials science and microbiology, to find new ways of repairing tissue and regenerating organs related to respiratory disorders. Specific areas of research will involve the modeling of children’s vocal cords, understanding the mechanisms of fibrosis, and improving surgical procedures.

Deeper Understanding of Sickle Cell Anemia Could Lead to New Treatments

Though sickle cell anemia is a common and well-known disease, a new study of its causes at the nanoscale level might reveal previously unknown information about the assembly of hemoglobin fibers. Using microscopes with the ability to visualize these molecules at such a small level, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that the beginning organizations that lead to sickle cell anemia are much less ordered than originally thought. Led by Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering David Wood, Ph.D., the team of researchers used this higher level of microscopy to find that hemoglobin self-assembly process, which was originally thought to be 96% efficient, is actually only 4% efficient. Wood hopes that this new knowledge will help allow for the development of new and better treatments for patients with sickle cell anemia, as there are currently only two FDA-approved ones on the market.

People & Places

Penn Today asked five Penn researchers about the women in STEM who have been a source of inspiration and encouragement throughout their own careers. Their responses include active researchers who have paved the way for better inclusion in STEM and famous female scientists from the past who broke boundaries as they made strides with their research.

Dr. Danielle Bassett, the Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and associate professor of bioengineering and electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has two heroes: “Ingrid Daubechies for her work on wavelets, or “little waves,” which are beautiful mathematical objects that can be used to extract hidden structure in complex data. “Also, Maryam Mirzakhani for inspiring a child to believe that mathematics is simply painting. Would that we all could see the world just that bit differently.”

Read the full story on Penn Today.

Joel Boerckel, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering

This week, we want to congratulate Joel Boerckel, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering, and his lab on receiving a second R01 Grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and and Musculoskeletal Skin Diseases for their work on defining the roles of YAP and TAZ in embryonic bone morphogenesis and mechanoregulation of fracture repair. Dr. Boerckel is a member of the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory.

We would also like to congratulate Christopher Yip, Ph. D., on being appointed as the new dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. A professor in both the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Yip’s research involves the use of molecular imaging to understand the self-assembly of proteins.

BE’s Jason Burdick Receives the 2019 Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal

by Sophie Burkholder

Dr. Burdick (second from the left) receives his award at the Annual Meeting of the U.S. Society for Biomaterials, April 2019

The Department of Bioengineering would like to congratulate our very own Jason A. Burdick, Ph. D., on being awarded the Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal. Dr. Burdick is the Robert D. Bent Professor and a member of both the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) and Center for Engineering Mechanobiology (CEMB) here at Penn.

The Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal is an award from the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Acta Biomaterialia that recognizes leaders in academia, industry, and the public sector for mid-career leadership in and significant contribution to the field of biomaterials engineering. Dr. Burdick is the third recipient of the award so far, which includes a silver medal, an inscribed certificate, and reward of $5000. As the principal investigator of the Polymeric Biomaterials Laboratory in Penn’s Department of Bioengineering, Dr. Burdick leads research with a focus in polymer design, musculoskeletal tissue engineering, the control of stem cells with material cues, and the control of molecule delivery with polymers.

The Silver and Gold Medalists (Dr. Burdick and Dr. Antonios G. Mikos respectively) were presented with their own brand of wine in celebration of their achievement.

Specifically, Dr. Burdick’s innovation in the application of hydrogels to the musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems brought him recognition for this award. His recent publications in Acta Biomaterialia include a study of bioactive factors for cartilage repair and regenesis in collaboration with fellow Penn Professor of Bioengineering Robert Mauck, Ph. D, and a study of adhesive biolinks that mimic the behavior of the extracellular matrix. The Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal is only the most recent of several awards that Dr. Burdick has received, including both the George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and the Clemson Award for Basic Research, and we can’t wait to see where his continued innovation in biomaterial engineering will take him next.

Organs-on-a-Chip Hurtle Toward the Final Frontier

Graduate student Andrei Georgescu and Assistant Professor Dan Huh in Huh’s lab. Adapting the organ-on-a-chip technology for a trip to the International Space Station presented Huh’s team with a number of engineering challenges. (Photo: Kevin Monko)

Throughout the 60-year history of the U.S. space program—from the Mercury capsules of the 1960s to today’s International Space Station—astronauts have been getting sick. Researchers know being in orbit seems to suppress their immune systems, creating a more fertile ground for infections to grow. But nobody really understands why.

Early on the morning of April 26, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch a cargo mission to the ISS from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Along with fresh water, food, and other necessities for the crew, the craft will be carrying two experiments designed by Penn scientists that could help shed light on why bugs have bedeviled space travelers.

For more than a decade, Dan Huh, the Wilf Family Term Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been developing super-small devices that use living cells to stand in for larger organs. These organs-on-a-chip hold great promise for all kinds of research, from diagnosing disease to curing them. They’re also a way to test things, including drugs and cosmetics, in a way that mimics real life without relying on animal subjects.

Read the full story at Penn TodayMedia contact Gwyneth K. Shaw

Two BE Seniors Win the President’s Engagement and President’s Innovation Prizes

The Department of Bioengineering is proud to congratulate two of our graduating seniors on their 2019 President’s Engagement Prize and President’s Innovation Prize. Awarded annually, the Prizes empower students to design and undertake post-graduation projects that make a positive, lasting difference in the world. Each Prize-winning project will receive $1000,000, as well as $50,000 living stipend per team member.

Senior Oladunni Alomaja (right) with her partners Princess Aghayere and Summer Kollie, Rebound Liberia

BE senior Oladunni Alomaja (BSE 2019) and her partners Princess Aghayere and Summer Kollie won a President’s Engagement Prize for Rebound Liberia. Ola and her partners will use basketball as a tool to bridge the literacy gap between men and women and as a mechanism for youth to cope with the trauma and stress of daily life in post-conflict Liberia. Rebound Liberia will build an indoor basketball court in conjunction with a community resource center, and its annual three-month summer program will combine basketball clinics with daily reading and writing sessions and personal development workshops. The team is being mentored by Ocek Eke, director of global and local service-learning programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Senior Malika Shukurova (left) with her partner Katherine Sizov, Strella Biotechnology

BE senior Malika Shukurova (BSE 2019, also pursuing a MSE in BE) and her partner Katherine Sizov won a President’s Innovation Prize for Strella Biotechnology. Strella is developing a bio-sensor that can predict the maturity of virtually any fresh fruit. Strella’s sensors are installed in controlled atmosphere storage rooms, monitoring apples as they ripen. This enables packers and distributors to identify the ripest apples and fruit for their customers, thus minimizing spoilage and food waste and promoting sustainability. Strella’s current market is U.S apple packers and distributors, which represent a $4 billion produce industry. The startup is looking to expand to other markets, such as bananas and pears, in the future. Malika and Katherine are being mentored by Jeffrey Babin, Practice Professor and Associate Director of the Engineering Entrepreneurship Program. Katherine, a Biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences, developed the company as a sophomore in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory, the primary teaching lab for the Department of Bioengineering.

Another winner of the President’s Innovation Prize, Wharton student Michael Wong for InstaHub, also has BE connections: One of the co-founders, Oladayo (Dayo) Adewole, graduated with a BSE in Bioengineering in 2015, went on to achieve his master’s in Robotics, and is currently back in BE pursuing his PhD. InstaHub’s mission is to eliminate energy waste through snap-on automation that enhances, rather than replaces, existing building infrastructure. Founded at Penn in 2016, InstaHub is focused on fighting climate change through energy conservation efforts with cleantech building automation technology. The initial development work for InstaHub was also done in the George H. Stephenson lab here in BE.

Congratulations once again to all the winners of this year’s President’s Engagement Prize and President’s Innovation Prize! Read more about the awards and all the winners at Penn Today and the Penn Engineering Medium Blog.

Bioengineering Chair and Students Honored at the 2019 SEAS Awards

Each spring, the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania hosts an awards recognition dinner to honor exceptional work in the school: The Faculty honor students for outstanding service and academics, while the students choose faculty members for their commitment to teaching and advising. This year, the Department of Bioengineering won big with honors for both our Department Chair and our undergraduates. Read about each of the award winners and see photos from the awards ceremony below. Congratulations to all the winners!

David F. Meaney, Ph.D.

Dr. David F. Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor and Chair of Bioengineering, was awarded with the Ford Motor Company Award for Faculty Advising, which recognizes “dedication to helping students realize their educational, career and personal goals.” Dr. Meaney is beloved by the students in BE for his engaging teaching style, his commitment to student wellness and advancement, as well as his weekly Penn Bioengineering spin classes, and so we are delighted to see him recognized in this way by the wider student body  Read more about the award here and Dr. Meaney here.

Eshwar Inapuri (BAS 2019), a graduating senior completing his Bachelor of Applied Science degree in BE with minors in Biophysics and Chemistry, was awarded the Ben and Bertha Gomberg Kirsch Prize. This competitive award is decided by the SEAS faculty from among the Engineering undergraduate body and distinguishes a member of the B.A.S. senior class in  who “in applying the flexibility of the program, has created a personal academic experience involving the most creative use of the resources of the University.”

The Hugo Otto Wolf Memorial Prize, awarded to one or more members of each department’s senior class, distinguishes students who meet with great approval of the professors at large through “thoroughness and originality” in their work. This year, BE chose to share the award between Ethan Zhao (BSE 2019) and Shelly Teng (BSE 2019).

The Herman P. Schwan Award is decided by the Bioengineering Department and honors a graduating senior who demonstrates the “highest standards of scholarship and academic achievement.” The 2019 recipient of the Schwan Award is Joseph Maggiore (BSE 2019).

Every year, four BE students are recognized with Exceptional Service Awards for their outstanding service to the University and their larger communities. Our winners this year are Dana Abulez (BSE 2019), Daphne Cheung (BSE 2019), Lamis Elsawah (BSE 2019), and Kayla Prezelski (BSE 2019). All four of these recipients are also currently in the Accelerated Master’s program in BE.

And finally, BE also awards a single lab group (four students) with the Albert Giandomenico Award which reflects their “teamwork, leadership, creativity, and knowledge applied to discovery-based learning in the laboratory.” This year’s group consists of Caroline Atkinson (BSE 2019), Shuting (Sarah) Cai (BSE 2019), Rebecca Kellner (BSE 2019), and Harrison Troche (BSE 2019).

A full list of SEAS award descriptions and recipients can be found here.

Junior Bioengineering Students Filter ECG Signals for Use in Astronaut Fatigue-Monitoring Device

by Sophie Burkholder

Every undergraduate student pursuing a B.S.E. in Bioengineering participates in the Bioengineering Modeling, Analysis, and Design Laboratory I & II courses, in which students work together on a series of lab-based design challenges with an emphasis on model development and statistical analysis. Recently, junior undergraduates enrolled in this course taught by Dr. Brian Chow and Dr. David Issadore (both of whom recently received tenure) completed a project involving the use of electrocardiography (ECG) to innovate a non-invasive fatigue-monitoring device for astronauts that tend to fall asleep during long operations in space.

Using ECG lead wires and electrodes with a BioPac M-35 data collection  apparatus, students collected raw data of their own heart and respiration rates, and loaded the data into MATLAB to analyze and calculate information like the heart rate itself, and portions of it like the QT-interval. “I think it was cool that we could measure signals from our own body and analyze it in a way that let us use it for a real-world application,” said junior Melanie Hillman about the project.

After taking these preliminary measurements, students used a combination of circuitry, MATLAB, and data acquisition boards to create both passive and active filters for the input signals. These filters helped separate the user’s breathing rate, which occurs at lower frequencies, from the heart rate, which occurs at higher frequencies, allowing for the data to be read and analyzed more easily. In their final design, most students used an active filter circuit chip that combined hardware with software to create bandpass filters of different frequency ranges for both input signals.

“It was nice to be able to do a lab that connected different aspects of engineering in the sense that we both electronically built circuits, and also modeled them theoretically, because normally there’s a separation between those two domains,” said junior Emily Johnson. On the final day of the project, Demo Day, groups displayed their designs ability to take one input from the ECG cables connected to a user, and filter it out into recognizable heart and respiration rates on the computer. This project, conducted in the in the Stephenson Foundation Bioengineering Educational Laboratory here at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Bioengineering, is just one of many examples of the way this hallmark course of the bioengineering curriculum strives to bring together all aspects of students’ foundational engineering coursework into applications with significance in the real world.

Week in BioE: April 5, 2019

by Sophie Burkholder

Tulane Researchers Use Cancer Imaging Technique to Help Detect Preeclampsia

Preeclampsia is potentially life-threatening pregnancy disorder that typically occurs in about 200,000 expectant mothers every year. With symptoms of high blood pressure, swelling of the hands and feet, and protein presence in urine, preeclampsia is usually treatable if diagnosed early enough. However, current methods for diagnosis involve invasive procedures like cordocentesis, a procedure which takes a sample of fetal blood.

Researchers at Tulane School of Medicine led by assistant professor of bioengineering Carolyn Bayer, Ph.D., hope to improve diagnostics for preeclampsia with the use of spectral photoacoustic imaging. Using this technique, Bayer’s team noticed a nearly 12 percent decrease in placental oxygenation in rats with induced preeclampsia when compared to normal pregnant rats after only two days. If success in using this imaging technology continues at the clinical level, Bayer plans to find more applications of it in the detection and diagnosis of breast and ovarian cancers as well.

New CRISPR-powered device detects genetic mutations in minutes 

Two groups of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the Keck Graduate Institute of the Claremont Colleges recently collaborated to design what they call a “CRISPR-Chip” –  a combination of the CRISPR-Cas9 System with a graphene transistor to sequence DNA for the purpose of genetic mutation diagnosis. While companies like 23andMe made genetic testing and analysis more common and accessible for the general public in recent years, the CRISPR-Chip looks to streamline the technology even more.

This new chip eliminates the long and expensive amplification process involved in the typical polymerase chain reaction (PCR) used to read DNA sequences. In doing so, the CRISPR-Chip is much more of a point-of-care diagnostic, having the ability to quickly detect a given mutation or sequence when given a pure DNA sample. Led by Kiana Aran, Ph.D., the research team behind the CRISPR-Chip hopes that this new combination of nanoelectronics and modern biology will allow for a new world of possibilities in personalized medicine.

New Method of Brain Stimulation Might Alleviate Symptoms of Depression

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the United States, with nearly 3 million cases every year. For most patients suffering from depression, treatment involves prolonged psychotherapy, antidepressant medication, or even electroconvulsive therapy in extreme cases. Now, scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine study the use of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to alleviate symptoms of depression.

Led by Flavio Frohlich, Ph.D., who has an adjunct appointment in biomedical engineering, this team of researchers based this new solution on information from each patient’s specific alpha oscillations, which are a kind of wave that can be detected by an electroencephalogram (EEG). Those who suffer from depression tend to have imbalanced alpha oscillations, so Frohlich and his team sought to use tACS to restore this balance in those patients. After seeing positive results from data collected two weeks after patients in a clinical trial receives the tACS treatment, Frohlich hopes that future applications will include treatment for even more mental health disorders and psychiatric illnesses.

University of Utah Researchers Receive Grant to Improve Hearing Devices for Deaf Patients

Engineers at the University of Utah are part of team that recently received a $9.7 million grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to design new implantable hearing devices for deaf patients, with the hope to improve beyond the sound quality of existing devices. The work will build upon a previous project at the University of Utah called the Utah Electrode Array, a brain-computer interface originally developed by Richard Normann, Ph.D., that can send and receive neural impulses to and from the brain. This new device will differ from a typical cochlear implant because the Utah Electrode Array assembly will be attached directly to the auditory nerve instead of the cochlea, providing the patient with a much higher resolution of sound.

People & Places

Vivek Shenoy, Eduardo D. Glandt President’s Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Secondary Faculty in Bioengineering, has been named the recipient of the 2018–19 George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research for “for pioneering multi-scale models of nanomaterials and biological systems.”

The Heilmeier Award honors a Penn Engineering faculty member whose work is scientifically meritorious and has high technological impact and visibility. It is named for George H. Heilmeier, a Penn Engineering alumnus and advisor whose technological contributions include the development of liquid crystal displays and whose honors include the National Medal of Science and Kyoto Prize.

Read the rest of the story on Penn Engineering’s Medium blog.

We would also like to congratulate Jay Goldberg, Ph.D., from Marquette University on his election as a fellow to the National Academy of Inventors. Nominated largely for his six patents involving medical devices, Goldberg also brings this innovation to his courses. One in particular called Clinical Issues in Biomedical Engineering Design allows junior and senior undergraduates to observe the use of technology in clinical settings like the operating room, in an effort to get students thinking about how to improve the use of medical devices in these areas.