Week in BioE (July 9, 2018)

A New Treatment for Joint Dysfunction

TMD is a common condition affecting movement of the jaw

Medical researchers have long been baffled by the need to find safe and effective treatment for a common condition called temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD). Affecting around twenty-five percent of the adult population worldwide, TMD appears overwhelmingly in adolescent, premenopausal women. Many different factors such as injury, arthritis, or grinding of the teeth can lead to the disintegration of or damage to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), which leads to TMD, although the root cause is not always clear. A type of temporomandibular disorder,  TMD can result in chronic pain in the jaw and ears, create difficulty eating and talking, and even cause occasional locking of the joint, making it difficult to open or close one’s mouth.  Surgery is often considered a last resort because the results are often short-lasting or even dangerous.

The state of TMD treatment may change with the publication of a study in Science Translational Medicine. With contributions from researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), UC Davis, and the University of Texas School of Dentistry at Houston, this new study has successfully implanted engineered discs made from rib cartilage cells into a TMJ model. The biological properties of the discs are similar enough to native TMJ cells to more fully reduce further degeneration of the joint as well as potentially pave the way for regeneration of joints with TMD.

Senior author Kyriacos Athanasiou, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UCI, states the next steps for the team of researchers include a long-term study to ensure ongoing effectiveness and safety of the implants followed by eventual clinical trials. In the long run, this technique may also prove useful and relevant to the treatment of other types of arthritis and joint dysfunction.

Advances in Autism Research

Currently, diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been limited entirely to clinical observation and examination by medical professionals. This makes the early identification and treatment of ASD difficult as most children cannot be accurately diagnosed until around the age of four, delaying the treatment they might receive. A recent study published in the journal of Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, however, suggests that new blood tests may be able to identify ASD with a high level of accuracy, increasing the early identification that is key to helping autistic children and their families. The researchers, led by Juergen Hahn, PhD, Professor and Department Head of Biomedical Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, hope that after clinical trials this blood test will become commercially available.

In addition to work that shows methods to detect autism earlier, the most recent issue of Nature Biomedical Engineering includes a study to understand the possible causes of autism and, in turn, develop treatments for the disease. The breakthrough technology of Cas9 enzymes allowed researchers to edit the genome, correcting for symptoms that appeared in mice which resembled autism, including exaggerated and repetitive behaviors. This advance comes from a team at the University of California, Berkeley, which developed the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Gold to treat symptoms of ASD by injecting the Cas9 enzyme into the brain without the need for viral delivery. The UC Berkeley researchers suggest in the article’s abstract that these safe gene-editing technologies “may revolutionize the treatment of neurological diseases and the understanding of brain function.” These treatments may have practical benefits for the understanding and treatment of such diverse conditions as addiction and epilepsy as well as ASD.

Penn Professor’s Groundbreaking Bioengineering Technology

Our own D. Kacy Cullen, PhD, was recently featured in Penn Today for his groundbreaking research which has led to the first implantable tissue-engineered brain pathways. This technology could lead to the reversal of certain neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

With three patents, at least eight published papers, $3.3 million in funding, and a productive go with the Penn Center for Innovation’s I-Corps program this past fall, Dr. Cullen is ready to take this project’s findings to the next level with the creation of a brand new startup company: Innervace. “It’s really surreal to think that I’ve been working on this project, this approach, for 10 years now,” he says. “It really was doggedness to just keep pushing in the lab, despite the challenges in getting extramural funding, despite the skepticism of peer reviewers. But we’ve shown that we’re able to do it, and that this is a viable technology.” Several Penn bioengineering students are involved in the research conducted in Dr. Cullen’s lab, including doctoral candidate Laura Struzyna and recent graduate Kate Panzer, who worked in the lab all four years of her undergraduate career.

In addition to his appointment as a Research Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of Penn’s Department of Bioengineering Graduate Group Faculty, and will teach the graduate course BE 502 (From Lab to Market Place) for the BE Department this fall 2018 semester. He also serves as the director for the Center of Neurotrauma, Neurodegeneration, and Restoration at the VA Medical Center.

New Prosthetics Will Have the Ability to Feel Pain

New research from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has found a way to address one of the difficult aspects of amputation: the inability for prosthetic limbs to feel. This innovative electronic dermis is worn over the prosthetic, and can detect sensations (such as pain or even a light touch), which are conveyed to the user’s nervous system, closing mimicking skin. The findings of this study were recently published in the journal Science Robotics.

While one might wonder at the value of feeling pain, both researchers and amputees verify that physical sensory reception is important both for the desired realism of the prosthetic or bionic limb, and also to alert the wearer of any potential harm or damage, the same way that heat can remind a person to remove her hand from a hot surface, preventing a potential burn. Professor Nitish Thakor, PhD, and his team hope to make this exciting new technology readily available to amputees.

People and Places

Women are still vastly outnumbered in STEM, making up only twenty percent of the field, and given the need for diversification, researchers, educators, and companies are brainstorming ways to proactively solve this problem by promoting STEM subjects to young women. One current initiative has been spearheaded by GE Healthcare and Milwaukee School of Engineering University (MSOE) who are partnering to give middle school girls access to programs in engineering during their summer break at the MSOE Summer STEM Camp, hoping to reduce the stigma of these subjects for young women. GE Girls also hosts STEM programs with a number of institutions across the U.S.

The National Science Policy Network (NSPN) “works to provide a collaborative resource portal for early-career scientists and engineers involved in science policy, diplomacy, and advocacy.” The NSPN offers platforms and support including grant funding, internships, and competitions. Chaired and led by emerging researchers and professors from around the country, including biomedical engineering PhD student Michaela Rikard of the University of Virginia, the NSPN seeks to provide a network for young scientists in the current political climate in which scientific issues and the very importance of the sciences as a whole are hotly contested and debated by politicians and the public. The NSPN looks to provide a way for scientists to have a voice in policy-making. This new initiative was recently featured in the Scientific American.

Upon its original founding in 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has included the eradication of malaria as part of its mission, pledging around $2 billion to the cause in the years since. One of its most recent initiatives is the funding of a bioengineering project which targets the type of mosquitoes which carry the deadly disease. Engineered mosquitoes (so-called “Friendly Mosquitoes”) would mate in the wild, passing on a mosquito-killing gene to their female offspring (only females bite humans) before they reach maturity. While previous versions of “Friendly Mosquitoes” have been met with success, concerns have been raised about the potential long-term ecological effects to the mosquito population. UK-based partner Oxitec expects to have the new group ready for trials in two years.

 

Recasting Engineers as Economic Drivers

by Dave Meaney

educating engineers

In the aftermath of the presidential election, quite a few experts cited the lack of economic opportunity for many as a primary factor that elevated Donald Trump to the presidency. These changes in economic opportunity did not occur months prior to the election, but they resulted from years of continual changes in the US economy.

For example, manufacturing represented more than 50% of the economic output and jobs after World War II; it now represents only 10% of the economy. Professional services — in finance, health, insurance, education, and similar industries — represented less than 5% of the economy in 1950, while it now captures almost 40% of the economy. Our country went from makers to providers. Many other workplace traditions have also changed; e.g., one often doesn’t work for the same employer for decades, nor do workers have confidence that they will remain in the career they start in their 20s. A physician could become a business owner and then (if we are lucky) a teacher. These changes are causing many of us to ask: What should we be teaching our students for this future?

First, let’s understand how economies can change. One theory in economics puts these job sector shifts as part of Kondriateff waves, which pass through the US economy in (roughly) 50- to 80-year cycles. These “K-waves” reach back to late 18th century and continue to the current day. The economist Joseph Schumpeter reasoned that these waves were triggered by technological revolutions; e.g., the invention of the steam engine and new steel production processes led to a K-wave from 1850 to 1900 that included the development of the railroad system, the settling of the American West, and the emergence of the American economy as a global force. Similarly, the widespread availability of consumer computer power and the invention of the Internet in the late 20th century created a K-wave that began in 1990 and is cresting now with the emergence of alternative media (e.g., cutting the digital cord with online media access), the Internet of Things, and the Big Data wave.

Where Engineers Fit In

As engineers, we are naturally attracted to the idea that technology starts the wave that affects everything else. But this belief raises a question: If technology triggers waves, then how can we predict where the next wave will start? And a second question follows: How do we organize and educate ourselves so that we make the most of these technologies so society can ride this wave effectively, rather than absorb the displacements these waves create? Well, we all know it is hard to predict the future. However, a recent report from the Brookings Institute helps us pinpoint areas of the economy that are most powerful in creating downstream economic output, whether it is additional jobs, more exports, or the forming of completely new industries. Given their potency, it is likely that new economic opportunities will emerge more frequently from this sector than any other.

educating engineersRather than using the traditional categorization scheme that breaks up the economy into bins associated with worker output (e.g., we manufacture, provide financial services, trade energy goods, supply food), the Brookings report asked a slightly different question: Which parts of the economy provide the downstream spark for the rest of us?  If we understood the origin of this spark, we would be much more informed about how to make strategic investments that will have broad economic trickle-down effects on the national economy. The answer? The most potent part of our economy consists of the industries that invest heavily in research and development and contain a high percentage of employees with STEM degrees.  The Brookings report termed these advanced industries. And this part of the economy is indeed potent. It generates 2.7 additional downstream jobs for every job in this sector, far outpacing the highly publicized downstream impact of the manufacturing sector (1.7 downstream jobs per manufacturing job).  Advanced industries contain 8% of the workforce but generate 19% of the national GDP, and advanced industries span everything from communications, defense, and security to health, medicine, and the environment.

Creating Economic Opportunity Waves

Knowing that this is the proverbial spark certainly places a premium on educating scientists and engineers and placing them in these advanced industries.  Some of them could become the next Elon Musk, a Penn alum (SAS ’97) whose vision will eventually electrify the entire fleet of motor vehicles in the US. Others could follow in the footsteps of Carl June, MD, a Penn faculty member who invented a radically new form of cancer immunotherapy that may be the biggest change in cancer treatment in several decades. But what can colleges and universities teach students today to make them thrive in the epicenters of these advanced industries? How can we teach so that our students are ahead of the curve and, in some cases, creating these curves?

educating engineers

We are constantly discussing the content of undergraduate and graduate education here at Penn. In these conversations, it is often easy to fall into the trap of saying “Well, I can’t imagine a degree in X not having a course in Y” or “If I had to learn X, then my students should learn X too.” I think we should step away from specific courses and distribution sequences for a moment and think about the core principles in an engineering education that will allow our graduates to successfully navigate any economic wave that falls across all of us. In the most successful form, we would educate people that successfully create waves to benefit everyone. I suggest focusing on three core principles in an undergraduate’s engineering education toward achieving this goal.

  1. Introduce the uncertainty of research to counterbalance the certainty of formal didactic instruction. For engineering, teaching the fundamentals makes the world a safer place, whether we are teaching safety factors, repeatability, or design standards. But the advanced industries are at the bleeding edge of uncovering knowledge not in textbooks. And this new knowledge eventually creates something useful and interesting. Yet there is always a major transition for students when they realize that technological advances never come from a script in a textbook. Many will ask, “How can I learn anything that isn’t known?” Historically, we would use undergraduate education to teach what is known, and graduate education to answer the unknown. But if creating new ideas in advanced industries requires one to determine some of the unknowns, we shouldn’t restrict research experiences to just graduate education anymore.

    Research forces one to learn the inexact science of breaking down a complex problem into more manageable parts, finding out which of these parts is most critical in solving the problem, and the finding a solution. Research uses failure as a mechanism to learn, and teaches persistence and patience. These are good things to learn if you want to be in industries that are searching for the Next Big Idea. In many ways, research experiences resemble learning a foreign language — the first language (research experience) is a real bear, but they get easier as you learn more of them (additional experiences). Jumping across different fields would parallel the learning of more than one foreign language and would be a good primer for a career in the advanced industries. If more of us became comfortable with uncertainty and failure, we would accelerate the creation and filtering of new ideas and products, in turn creating more opportunities for everyone in the economy.

  2. Teach invention, as it will continue to drive economic development. Over a decade ago, the American university system was recognized for its almost unique ability to educate students who would thrive as innovators over their careers. American higher education was sought after by students around the world, and world universities started to tweak their own models of education, inspired by the US success story. Much of what was written about the ‘secret sauce’ for American higher education was the magical ingredient of innovation that existed on college campuses in the US. However, we are overlooking the one critical ingredient upstream of innovation that makes the innovation engine go: inventing new ideas. So much activity surrounding innovation involves how to package ideas for marketplace needs or how to use marketplace needs to filter through existing technologies to create new products.

    Our science and engineering infrastructure is driven by inventing technologies and algorithms that appear years to decades later in innovative products. And we are sorely overlooking how to best educate to invent, e.g., the classroom environment that forms the best ideas, or the best methods to teach the abstraction of several seemingly unrelated problems into a common group of invention challenges that will serve hundreds of innovations. Just as philosophy class in college can shape people’s views of morality for the rest of their lives, the practical experience of conceiving and executing a new idea for a market can leave a lifelong impression on a college student for seeing and creating opportunity in the world. Many students graduate nowadays with a much better idea about how to take ideas and commercialize them into products. Adding the teaching of invention will replenish the ideas that feed the future of these innovation pipelines.

  3. Include the economists, artists, and philosophers. Jason Silva has a wonderful quote about engineering: “The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it.” I couldn’t agree more. Artists and philosophers have an interesting reflection role in society, whether it is to challenge one’s perception of the ordinary or to make the ordinary unusual (artist) or to provide a more holistic view of a human’s purpose (philosopher). Likewise, economists can explain how technology can drive development locally and globally and the subsequent changes expected in the workforce. In other words, they all provide different optics on the same idea.

    Engineering may enjoy a sterling reputation as creating a world that others do not see, but we are sometimes too enamored with this vision to ask a very simple question: If we can do it, should we do it? Technologists can cite several inventions in the past as drivers of economic change that pushed society forward (see K-waves, above) and never backward. The mechanization of the agriculture industry coincided with the emergence of manufacturing and heavy industries in the US and elsewhere in the 19th century, and this advanced the world. People moved from working on farms to working in factories, and the urbanization movement swept across the country. In a similar manner, artificial intelligence could cause a similar shift in the services sector today and create a supply of highly educated people to tackle the world’s next big problem. For this reason, they can help engineers understand the impact of their ideas even before they are implemented.

    Creating new technologies without a thoughtful mulling about how they could really change the world seems irresponsible to me, given how some of these technologies could completely change large parts of the economic landscape quickly. And it could lead to other societal crises — e.g., do we really want to interrupt nature’s evolutionary clock without considering the impact of editing our own genome? Similar questions exist when we start to understand how our minds work and the principles by which we can (and should) study and influence the human traits of identity, reasoning, and self. One of our faculty recently wrote about the ethical constructs by which we should view these advances in understanding how we think, and how they can influence the science of mind control. Broadly speaking, initiating these conversations in advance will help engineers realize that these technologies should not be created in a vacuum, and they must be developed in parallel with conversations about the impact of their use.

A Mirror, Not a Trigger

All of this brings us back to the beginning. The election wasn’t the trigger but the mirror, and we must answer the call to think about engineering education to create future economic opportunity instead of passively watching it happen. We now know that advanced industries are the most powerful part of our economy for generating downstream economic output. We are fortunate that engineers are a central part of these industries. And we now know the dramatic changes in the demographics of opportunity among the electorate that occurred in the past two decades. By re-emphasizing core principles to impress upon our engineering students, we can be part of a future that focuses more on opportunities for the society rather than the individual. And we can use this new mindset to tackle some of the most pressing problems we see in front of us (e.g., affordable health care, energy, climate change) and those problems that we don’t see yet.

Mind Control and an Ethical Appeal

mind control brain
A “wiring diagram of the human brain,” produced using diffusion MRI scans of the brain.

A group of four scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, including Bioengineering professor Danielle Bassett, have issued a call in the journal Nature Human Behaviour for greater safeguards for patients as treatments in the field of neuroscience evolve and come ever closer to resembling “mind control.”

“While we don’t believe,” Bassett said, “that the science-fiction idea of mind control, totally overriding a person’s autonomy, will ever be possible, new brain-focused therapies are becoming more specific, targeted and effective at manipulating individuals’ mental states. As these techniques and technologies mature, we need systems in place to make sure they are applied such that they maximize beneficial effects and minimize unwanted side effects.”

Read more at the Penn News Web Site.

Henrietta Lacks Film Addresses Ethical Issues

by Andrew E. Mathis

henrietta lacks hela cells
HeLa cells after staining

In January 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 30-year-old African-American woman from Baltimore, was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center. She was treated with radium brachytherapy, the standard of care at the time, but her condition worsened. In August, a week after she turned 31, she was admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pain. Less than three months later, she died. An autopsy showed widespread metastasis of the original cancer.

Henrietta Lacks had died, but strangely, her cancer cells have lived on. Unbeknownst to her and her family, Henrietta’s doctors had sampled her cancer cells for research — a common practice at the time, particularly from patients treated in wards. Those cells were given to George Gey, a JHU biologist who had been trying for years to establish a cancer cell line that could be grown outside the body. Henrietta Lacks’s cells ended up being the first cell line so established.

The cell line was named “HeLa” by Gey’s laboratory assistant, who coded cell samples using the first two letters of the donor’s first and last names. With Henrietta Lacks’s cells, Gey was able to establish an immortal cell line, i.e., a line of cells that would continue to divide indefinitely. The ability of these cells to divide like this lent itself to the line being used in numerous scientific studies since the 1950s, including Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine.

Notwithstanding the tremendous accomplishments achieved using the HeLa cell line, the case nevertheless evokes serious ethical issues regarding the consent of patients to having their tissue used for research. In recent years, the case has attracted significant attention, with a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, published by Rebecca Skloot in 2010 and now an HBO feature film of the same title produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey as Lacks’s daughter. The film debuted on April 22.

Brittany Shields, PhD, a senior lecturer in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed some of the issue raised by Lacks’s story. “Henrietta Lacks’s story has brought public attention to a number of ethical issues in biomedical research, including the role of informed consent, privacy, and commercialization in the collection, use and dissemination of biospecimens,” Dr. Shields says.

“In the United States, biomedical research at federally-funded institutions must follow the policy set by the Department of Health and Human Services. The current policy, known as the ‘Common Rule,’ calls for informed consent and oversight through Institutional Review Boards for research conducted with human beings,” she explains.

However, she continues, “these regulations may or may not apply in different situations related to biospecimens. If an anonymous biospecimen had already been collected for another purpose, informed consent is generally not required.”

In the case of Henrietta Lacks, or more precisely her descendants, an agreement was reached between the family and the National Institute of Health stipulating that the family must give consent when certain genetic information gleaned from the cell line is used. However, controversy between the family and the medical research community has persisted.

Creativity, Curiosity, and Engineering

by Dave Meaney and Dani Bassett

James Dyson
James Dyson

One can easily see that many of the world’s greatest challenges — producing enough food for the world population, providing each person with a set of fundamental human rights, or creating a sustainable environmental footprint as our societies move forward — must tap into two uniquely human traits: creativity and curiosity. In the fields of science and engineering, one can look at history and easily find creative and curious pioneers who ranged from Leonardo de Vinci (pioneered the field of human physiology), Grace Hopper (invented computer compilers), and Sir James Dyson (brought elegance to common household tools – the vacuum cleaner, the fan, the hand dryer, and the hair dryer).

Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper

Although we can look around and identify creative people, a natural question would be: What events in these individuals’ lives led to this creativity? We may see people around us who are creative and curious, but we often simply shrug and say ,“Wow, pretty ingenious person there.” Maybe we even think of this with a bit of yearning: “Boy, I wish I could think of things like that.”  We often make the observation and get back to our daily lives, accepting that creative people are born or “just happen.” In other words, we are either struck by lightning, or we are not. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci

Creative and curious people are not genetically wired differently than others. Curiosity and creativity are not rare skills conferred by serendipity. Instead, creative and curious people have benefited from mentors who pushed them to ask “Why?” at the right time in their lives: perhaps being in the right science class with the right teacher in middle school or reading a novel that made them imagine a world they could not see.

What does all of this have to do with engineering?  Well, some research suggests that many U.S. engineering undergraduates are weaker than their international counterparts in divergent and convergent thinking, which are two critical ingredients for creativity. These two thinking modalities may be propelled by different sorts of curiosity. Assessment tests for creative thinking traits often measure the ability to synthesize ideas, observations, and other information to make something new. From many possibilities, only one emerges as the ideal solution. This process is generally referred to as convergent thinking.  A second creativity trait is the raw ability to generate ideas, given a particular problem.  For example, one could be asked to generate as many possible uses of a brick that one can think of, and the resulting ideas are scored — both in terms of the number of ideas generated and the distinctiveness of each idea separately. This assessment, known as the alternative use test, measures divergent thinking. Ideally, engineers would have high ability in both divergent and convergent thinking, which would mean that they could both think of many possible solutions and pick the best among them.  However, one study performed almost a decade ago showed that half of the engineering undergraduates in the U.S. showed deficiencies in both convergent and divergent thinking — troubling, to say the least.

Adapted from an image in: Hany EA, Heller KA, “Entwicklung kreativen Denkens im kulturellen Kontext,” in Entwicklung und Denken im kulturellen Kontext, Mandl H, Dreher M, Kornadt H-J, eds (Toronto: Hogrefe Verlag für Psychologie, 1993), pp. 99-118. Reprinted with generous permission of Hogrefe Verlag.

However, all is not lost. Many changes have occurred over the last decade for engineering education in the U.S. We embraced the laboratory as a platform for problem-based learning, which cultivates the ideation phase of creativity and the convergence to a solution. We have also ‘tipped’ and ‘flipped’ the classroom to introduce more methods of open-ended problems as teaching tools, again using this change to reinforce that there are many ways and, rarely, one best way to solve a particular problem.

Yet with all of these very positive changes, we still don’t have a good road map for how ideas form in the mind, how we trade off one idea versus another, and how we decide which is the best idea. Our tools for creativity are based on countless efforts to try different methods, measure whether they have an effect, and take the most successful empirical methods and transform them into practice. Until recently, we had no idea what was going on in the mind during the creative process.

Fortunately, we now have ways to both interrogate and model how the mind works when we think and create.  Inspired by the principle that blood flow will increase to areas of the brain with high neural activity (side note: the brain is a remarkable energy hog for the body, representing less than 3% of body mass but consuming nearly 20% of its energy resources), researchers are measuring how flow to different areas of the brain change when people are asked to perform specific tasks. Early work showed these beautiful, color-coded images of how one task would increase blood flow to one area, while another task would increase blood flow to a different area.

Patterns of connectivity in the brain can be represented as
dynamic networks, which change in their configuration as
humans change mental states or cognitive processes while
performing a task.

However, scientists began to realize, that instead of looking at one pattern of brain activation at one time, we needed to study how the pattern changed over time. Analyzing these changes over time allowed us to estimate the brain areas that activated simultaneously with another during a mental task. If they activated together frequently, we assumed that they would have a functional connectivity between them. Simply put, areas that fire together are wired together, metaphorically speaking.  Very quickly, we saw maps of the brain’s own functional network emerge when volunteers would work on math problems, navigate a maze, and even when they were asked to just daydream.

Where does this lead us? Well, we stand on the cusp of learning and predicting the coordinated steps that our mind takes when we imagine different ideas and pick one as ‘the best.’  Not only can we map this process in real time, but we can also develop new theories about how to ‘steer’ from one brain network state to another. We can also apply this new knowledge to individuals on a case-by-case basis, rather than relying on the one-size-fits-all approach that is the current and common practice in cultivating divergent and convergent thinking.  In practice, this means that we would move away from prescribing the same creativity training exercise for everyone — with a large variation in the results — to a far more customized, efficient cognitive exercise. In fact, we could directly test the possibility that some of these exercises work for some people and not others because of an individual’s brain wiring map.  Science fiction? Nope, just modern day bioengineering at work.

David F. Meaney, Professor of Bioengineering and Neurosurgery

Danielle S. Bassett, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering