faculty – Page 42 – Penn Bioengineering Blog

May 2, 2018May 1, 2018

Robert D. Bent Chair for Jason Burdick

The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Bioengineering is proud to announce that Professor Jason Burdick, PhD, has been named the Robert D. Bent Chair. Robert Bent is an internationally recognized nuclear physicist who spent most of his career at Indiana University.

A PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado (2002), Dr. Burdick was a postdoc in Robert Langer’s lab at MIT before coming to Penn in 2005 as Wilf Family Assistant Professor. He was tenured with a promotion to Associate Professor in 2010 and subsequently promoted to Professor in 2013. His research, which focuses on the development of polymeric biomaterials for tissue engineering and drug delivery, has earned him recognition including an NSF Career Award, the American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, and most recently the Heilmeier Research Award and Clemson Award for Basic Research.

“This chair recognizes Jason’s prolific and deep scholarly contributions to the field of biomaterials, in addition to his leadership at Penn and beyond,” said David Meaney, PhD, Chair of the Bioengineering Department. “For anyone who saw Jason’s Heilmeier lecture, you know how impactful his work has been in the field.”

April 26, 2018April 23, 2018

Provost’s Award Given to Hammer for PhD Mentoring

Last night, Daniel A. Hammer, PhD, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, was recognized with the 2018 Provost’s Award For Distinguished PhD Teaching and Mentoring. This University-wide honor has been awarded annually to two Penn faculty members for the last 15 years.

With an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton and a PhD from Penn, Dr. Hammer joined the faculty at Cornell in Chemical Engineering after a short postdoctoral appointment in 1988. He was awarded tenure there and came to Penn in 1996. He holds a joint appointment in Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering, and he spent almost seven years as department chair, including serving as Principal Investigator of Penn’s Whitaker Foundation Leadership-Development Award, which led to the hiring of 8 faculty members in Bioengineering and provided seed money for the construction of Skirkanich Hall.

Among Dr. Hammer’s previous honors are an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1982, election as a Fellow of the AIMBE in 1997, and the Penn SEAS Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in 2004. Dr. Hammer has mentored a total of 51 PhD students, many of who have become faculty members themselves, including three recipients of NSF Career Awards.

“I am deeply honored to win the PhD mentoring award, which is a testament to the quality, inventiveness, and drive of my doctoral students. I have very much enjoyed training these young people in Penn’s fertile scientific environment, and it’s been a singular joy to see their careers flourish.”

April 14, 2018April 13, 2018

Jason Burdick Wins Two Research Awards

It was a big week’s for Penn Bioengineering‘s Jason Burdick, PhD. This week Dr. Burdick, who is Professor of Bioengineering, received the George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and the Clemson Award from the Society for Biomaterials. Receiving the Heilmeier Award on Tuesday, April 10, Dr. Burdick presented a lecture entitled “”Engineering Hydrogels for Applications in Drug Delivery and Tissue Repair.” Two days later at the annual meeting of the Society for Biomaterials in Atlanta, he received the Clemson and lectured as well.

The Heilmeier Award is named for George H. Heilmeier, PhD, an alumnus in electrical engineering from Penn and Princeton and executive at RCA, Texas Instruments, DARPA, and other organizations who died in 2014. Dr. Burdick is the sixth BE faculty member (including secondary faculty) to win the award since its institution in 2002. The Clemson awards are given yearly in three areas: basic research; applied research; and contributions to the literature. Dr. Burdick is the first-ever Clemson recipient from Penn. In addition, his PhD student Leo Wang won the Student Award for Outstanding Research by a PhD candidate.

“I am very honored to receive these two awards,” Dr. Burdick said, “which are really reflections of the great lab members that I have had over my years at Penn, as well as the support of fantastic colleagues and collaborators.”

April 6, 2018April 6, 2018

Nanoparticle Synthesis Facility Established

nanoparticle

Nanotechnology is enabling new materials and devices that work at sizes so small that individual atoms and molecules make a difference in their behavior. The field is moving so fast, however, that scientists from other disciplines can have a hard time using the fruits of this research without becoming nanotechnologists themselves.

With that kind of technology transfer in mind, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Targeted Therapeutics and Translational Nanomedicine has established the Chemical and Nanoparticle Synthesis Core.

Supported by the Perelman School of Medicine and its Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Chemistry, this core facility aims to help Penn researchers design and synthesize custom molecules and nanoscale particles that would be otherwise hard to come by.

“Based on a short survey we conducted, we found that many faculty members want to synthesize unique chemical compounds, such as imaging agents, drugs or nanoparticles, but they don’t have the expertise to produce these compounds themselves,” says Andrew Tsourkas, professor in Penn Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering and Director of the Chemical and Nanoparticle Synthesis Core. “As a result, these projects are often abandoned.”

Read more at the Penn One Health website.

March 28, 2018March 30, 2018

Future of Technology Is Focus of Teach-in

future As new technologies emerge, whether related to health care, artificial intelligence, or other aspects of society, they bring with them new ethical challenges.

The topic of the future of technology was front and center on day three of the Penn Teach-in March 18-22. The series of free public events convened by the faculty senate aims to bring the academic community together with the broader community to engage in wide-ranging discussions on topics of social importance.

Among the offerings on Tuesday were two panels featuring faculty from the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The first, “The Future of Technology: Engineering Human Health,” was moderated by Kathleen Stebe and included Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, David Issadore, and David Meaney – three faculty members in the Department of Bioengineering.

Continue reading at Penn News Today

March 16, 2018March 14, 2018

Cell Phones: Is There a Link to Cancer?

Last month, the National Toxicology Program (NTP), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced the findings of a draft study in which it was shown that high exposure to radiofrequency radiation, similar to that caused by persistent use of cell phones, resulted in the formation of tumors in nerves surrounding the hearts of male rats — but not female rats or mice. These are the final results of the study, the preliminary results of which were released in 2016. The study must still undergo peer review later this month.

Among the experts studying this question for the last decade is Kenneth R. Foster, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s not so sure that there’s really any link between the radiation emitted by cell phones and cancers. “People have been using cell phones for decades and so far there has been no noticeable increase in brain cancer,” Dr. Foster said. “This means that the risk, if it occurs at all, is too low to detect with any reliability.”

Asked whether the findings of the NTP study could be generalized to people, Dr. Foster responded, “If you look at enough tissues and compare enough endpoints, you will pick up things that may just be one-off findings. Health agencies will have to assess the findings carefully in the light of the considerable previous literature of related studies. The results of the study are unlikely to change their previous assessments, which is that there is no clear evidence of health hazards from using cell phones.” The exposed rats in the NTP study consistently lived longer than the exposed rats, he added.

Dr. Foster noted that the exposure levels for the rats that developed tumors was far higher than safety limits for humans in terms of whole body exposure and not at all similar to the exposures that people receive from using cell phones. “Also,” he said, “people don’t use cell phones for nine hours a day for two years at a time, which were the exposures in the NTP study. After all of this research on the issue, my own view is that cell phones don’t cause brain cancer. But they do contribute to traffic accidents!”

March 12, 2018March 12, 2018

Shoddy Science Uncovered in New Research

by Linda Tunesi

Konrad Kording, professor in the Department of Bioengineering, and colleagues have a new technique for identifying fraudulent scientific papers by spotting reused images. Rather than scrap a failed study, for example, a researcher might attempt to pass off images from a different experiment to give the false impression that their own was a success.

Kording, a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor who also has an appointment in the Department of Neuroscience in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and his collaborators developed an algorithm that can compare images across journal articles and detect such replicas, even if the image has been resized, rotated, or cropped.

They describe their technique in a paper recently published on the BioRxiv preprint server.

“Any fraudulent paper damages science,” Kording says. “In biology, many times fraud is detected when someone looks at a few papers and says ‘hey, these images look a little similar.’ We reckoned we could make an algorithm that does the same thing.”

“Science depends on building upon other people’s work,” adds Daniel Acuna, lead author on the paper, and a student in Kording’s lab at Northwestern University at the time the study was conducted. “If you cannot trust other people’s work, the scientific process collapses and, worse, the general public loses trust in us. Some websites were doing this, anonymously, but at a painstakingly slow rate.” Acuna is now an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

While much of Kording’s work focuses on using data science to understand the brain, he is also curious about the process of research itself, or, as he puts it, “the science of science.” One of the Kording lab’s previous projects closely analyzed common methods of neuroscience research, and another turned a mirror on itself, describing how to structure a scientific paper.

Continued at the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

February 28, 2018February 28, 2018

Collaboration in Research by Bioengineering Faculty

In faculty matters, specialization is the name of game. The areas in which individual professors conduct their research and teach are highly specific, with often no overlap between the areas of expertise of people in the same departments. Given the broad range of topics covered by the term, bioengineering is particularly complex in the array of subjects researched by faculty.

Now and then, however, these paths converge. Most recently, Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, and Danielle Bassett, Ph.D., Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioengineering, collaborated on a paper published in Nature Methods. Dr. Cremins’s research has focused on genome folding, an intricate process by which DNA in the nuclei of cells creates loops that result in specific forms of gene regulation. Dr. Bassett’s area is network science and systems theory. Both professors apply their research in the area of central nervous development.

In the new paper, Drs. Cremins and Bassett, along with members of both their labs and colleagues from the Department of Genetics, developed a a graph theory-based method for detecting genome folding, called 3DNetMod, which outperformed earlier models used for the same purpose. In addition, Dr. Cremins is profiled in the same issue of Nature Methods, where she discusses how her past education and experience have resulted in her career achievements thus far.

February 15, 2018February 15, 2018

New Review Blazes the TRAIL

Cell signaling and the proteins involved in it participate in virtually every process in the body, whether normal or pathological. Much of this signaling involves proteins called cytokines, and of particular interest among them are tumor necrosis factors (TNFs), whose job it is to carry out apoptosis — the process by which cells die at predetermined time points as part of their normal life cycle. Among this family of cytokines, TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) has been of particular interest to oncologists.

The process by which TRAIL combines with or binds to other molecules that modulate the life cycle of cancer cells can interfere with the ability of these molecules to facilitate the growth of cancer cells into tumors. However, attempts to deploy the cytokine to interfere in the process that produces cancer have been unsuccessful because of issues regarding inefficient delivery of TRAIL to the relevant sites, poor circulation of the cytokine in the blood, and the development of resistance to TRAIL. Bioengineers have been hard at work attempting to overcome these barriers.

In a new article published in ACS Nano coauthored by Michael J. Mitchell, Ph.D., Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation at Penn Bioengineering, and Robert Langer, Ph.D., David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, these engineered solutions are reviewed and assessed. The review covers nanoparticle technologies with potential to solve the problems encountered thus far, including a range of materials (polymers, lipids, inorganic), cell-nanoparticle hybrids, and therapeutic cells genetically engineered using nanoparticles.

“The TRAIL protein is a essential component of our immune system,” Dr. Mitchell says, “and it kills tumor cells without harming normal ones. However, it remains challenging to deliver the protein into tumors, and tumors can also be resistant to the protein. We and others are now exploiting nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and immune cell-biomaterial hybrids to overcome these key biological barriers to cancer therapy.”

January 16, 2018January 16, 2018

A Call to Understand Brain Network Mechanisms of Mental Disorders

The sheer complexity of the human brain means that, despite the tremendous advances made in neuroscience, there is still much we don’t know about what goes on inside our heads and how it goes awry in mental disorders. Even with the most advanced techniques, much of what we’ve learned about the brain is descriptive — telling that something is different between health and unhealthy function — but not why that something is different or how we could change it.

Among the approaches that have provided important insights into these questions is network science, which seeks to understand the brain as a complex system of multiple interacting components. Now, in a review published recently in Neuron, Danielle Bassett, Ph.D., Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioengineering, and Richard Betzel, Ph.D., a postdoc in Dr. Bassett’s lab, have collaborated with scientists from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The review covers a broad range of discoveries and innovations, moving from earlier, two-dimensional approaches to understanding the brain, such as graph theory, to newer approaches including multilayer networks, generative network models, and network control theory.

“Stating what is different in brain networks of individuals with disorders of mental health is not the same as identifying why” says Bassett. “Here we propose that emerging tools from network science can be used to identify true mechanisms of mental health disorders, and bridge molecular and genetic mechanisms through brain physiology, thus informing interventions in the form of pharmacological manipulations and brain stimulation.”