Tag: Electrical Engineering

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‘Curious Minds: The Power of Connection’

Twin siblings and scholars Dani S. Bassett of Penn and Perry Zurn of American University collaborated over half a dozen years to write “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection.” (Image: Tony and Tracy Wood Photography)

With appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, as well as the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn Arts & Science, and the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry in Penn Perelman’s School of Medicine, Dani S. Bassett is no stranger to following the thread of an idea, no matter where it might lead.

Curious Minds book cover

Those wide-ranging fields and disciplines orbit around an appropriate central question: how does the tangle of neurons in our brains wire itself up to learn new things? Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor and director of the Complex Systems Lab, studies the relationship between the shape of those networks of neurons and the brain’s abilities, especially the way the shape of the network grows and changes with the addition of new knowledge.

 

To get at the fundamentals of the question of curiosity, Bassett needed to draw on even more disciplines. Fortunately, they didn’t have to look far; Bassett’s identical twin is Perry Zurn, a professor of philosophy at American University, and the two have investigated the many different ways a person can exhibit curiosity.

Bassett and Zurn have now published a new book on the subject. In Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, the twins draw on their previous research, as well as an expansive network of ideas from philosophy, history, education and art.

In an interview with The Guardian, Bassett explains how these threads wove together:

“It wasn’t clear at the beginning of our careers that we would even ever have a chance to write a book together because our areas were so wildly different,” Bassett says – but then, as postgraduates, Zurn was studying the philosophy of curiosity while Bassett was working on the neuroscience of learning. “And so that’s when we started talking. That talking led to seven years of doing research together,” Bassett says. “This book is a culmination of that.”

How exactly do philosophy and neuroscience complement each other? It all starts with the book’s first, and most deceptively simple question: what is curiosity? “Several investigators in science have underscored that perhaps the field isn’t even ready to define curiosity and how it’s different from other cognitive processes,” says Bassett. The ambiguity in the neuroscience literature motivated Bassett to turn to philosophy, “where there are really rich historical definitions and styles and subtypes that we can then put back into neuroscience and ask: ‘Can we see these in the brain?’”

Curious Minds: The Power of Connection is available now. Read Amelia Tait’s review “Are you a busybody, a hunter or a dancer? A new book about curiosity reveals all,” in The Guardian. 

This story originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today.

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The Penn Center for Precision Engineering for Health Announces First Round of Seed Funding

by Melissa Pappas

CPE4H is one of the focal points of Penn Engineering signature initiative on Engineering Health.

The Penn Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H) was established late last year to accelerate engineering solutions to significant problems in healthcare. The center is one of the signature initiatives for Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and is supported by a $100 million commitment to hire faculty and support new research on innovative approaches to those problems.

Acting on that commitment, CPE4H solicited proposals during the spring of 2022 for seed grants of $80K per year for two years for research projects that address healthcare challenges in several key areas of strategic importance to Penn: synthetic biology and tissue engineering, diagnosis and drug delivery, and the development of innovative devices. While the primary investigators (PIs) for the proposed projects were required to have a primary faculty appointment within Penn Engineering, teams involving co-PIs and collaborators from other schools were eligible for support. The seed program is expected to continue for the next four years.

“It was a delight to read so many novel and creative proposals,” says Daniel A. Hammer, Alfred G. and Meta A. Ennis Professor in Bioengineering and the Inaugural Director of CPE4H. “It was very hard to make the final selection from a pool of such promising projects.”

Judged on technical innovation, potential to attract future resources, and ability to address a significant medical problem, the following research projects were selected to receive funding.

Evolving and Engineering Thermal Control of Mammalian Cells

Led by Lukasz Bugaj, Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, this project will engineer molecular switches that can be toggled on and off inside mammalian cells at near-physiological temperatures. Successful development of these switches will provide new ways to communicate with cells, an advance that could be used to make safer and more effective cellular therapies.  The project will use directed evolution to generate and find candidate molecular tools with the desired properties. Separately, the research will also develop new technology for manipulating cellular temperature in a rapid and programmable way. Such devices will enhance the speed and sophistication of studies of biological temperature regulation.

A Quantum Sensing Platform for Rapid and Accurate Point-of-Care Detection of Respiratory Viral Infections

Combining microfluidics and quantum photonics, PI Liang Feng, Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, Ritesh Agarwal, Professor in Materials Science Engineering, and Shu Yang, Joseph Bordogna Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are teaming up with Ping Wang, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, to design, build and test an ultrasensitive point-of-care detector for respiratory pathogens. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, a generalizable platform for rapid and accurate detection of viral pathogenesis would be extremely important and timely.

Versatile Coacervating Peptides as Carriers and Synthetic Organelles for Cell Engineering

PI Amish Patel, Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Matthew C. Good, Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine and in Bioengineering, will design and create small proteins that self-assemble into droplet-like structures known as coacervates, which can then pass through the membranes of biological cells. Upon cellular entry, these protein coacervates can disassemble to deliver cargo that modulates cell behavior or be maintained as synthetic membraneless organelles. The team will design new chemistries that will facilitate passage across cell membranes, and molecular switches to sequester and release protein therapeutics. If successful, this approach could be used to deliver a wide range of macromolecule drugs to cells.

Towards an Artificial Muscle Replacement for Facial Reanimation

Cynthia Sung, Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Computer Information Science, will lead a research team including Flavia Vitale, Assistant Professor of Neurology and Bioengineering, and Niv Milbar, Assistant Instructor in Surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine. The team will develop and validate an electrically driven actuator to restore basic muscle responses in patients with partial facial paralysis, which can occur after a stroke or injury. The research will combine elements of robotics and biology, and aims to produce a device that can be clinically tested.

“These novel ideas are a great way to kick off the activities of the center,” says Hammer. “We look forward to soliciting other exciting seed proposals over the next several years.”

This article originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today.

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Dani Bassett Elected an American Physical Society Fellow

Dani Bassett, Ph.D.

Dani S. Bassett,  J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, has been elected a 2021 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) “for significant contributions to the network modeling of the human brain, including dynamical changes caused by evolution, learning, aging, and disease.”

The prestigious APS Fellowship Program signifies recognition by one’s professional peers. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the APS membership is recognized with this distinct honor. Bassett’s election and groundbreaking work in biological physics and network science will be recognized through presentation of a certificate at the APS March Meeting.

Bassett is a pioneer in the field of network neuroscience, an emerging subfield which incorporates elements of mathematics, physics,  biology and systems engineering to better understand how the overall shape of connections between individual neurons influences cognitive traits. They lead the Complex Systems lab which tackles problems at the intersection of science, engineering, and medicine using systems-level approaches, exploring fields such as curiosity, dynamic networks in neuroscience, and psychiatric disease.

Bassett recently collaborated with Penn artist-in-residence Rebecca Kamen and other scholars on an interdisciplinary art exhibit on the creative process in art and science at the Katzen Art Center at American University. They have also published research modeling different types of curiosity and exploring gender-based citation bias in neuroscience publishing.

“I’m thrilled and humbled to receive this honor from the American Physical Society,” says Bassett. “I am indebted to the many fantastic mentees, colleagues, and mentors that have made my time in science such an exciting adventure. Thank you.”

Read more stories about Bassett’s research here.

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Reimagining Scientific Discovery Through the Lens of an Artist

by Erica K. Brockmeier

Rebecca Kamen, Penn artist-in-residence and visiting scholar, has a new exhibition titled “Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery” at American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center that explores curiosity and the creative process across art and science. (Image: Greg Staley)

Rebecca Kamen, Penn artist-in-residence and visiting scholar, has long been interested in science and the natural world. As a Philadelphia native and an artist with a 40-plus-year career, her intersectional work sheds light on the process of scientific discovery and its connections to art, with previous exhibitions that celebrate Apollo 11’s “spirit of exploration and discovery” to new representations of the periodic table of elements.

Now, in her latest exhibition, Kamen has created a series of pieces that highlight how the creative processes in art and science are interconnected. In “Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery,” Kamen chronicles her own artistic process while providing a space for self-reflection that enables viewers to see the relationship between science, art, and their own creativity.

The exhibit, on display at the Katzen Art Center at American University, was inspired by the work of Penn professor Dani Bassett and American University professor Perry Zurn, the exhibit’s faculty sponsor. The culmination of three years of work, “Reveal” features collaborations with a wide range of scientists, including philosophers at American University, microscopists at the National Institutes of Health studying SARS-CoV-2 , and researchers in Penn’s Complex Systems Lab and the Addiction, Health, and Adolescence (AHA!) Lab.

Continue reading at Penn Today.

Dani S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She also has appointments in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and the departments of Neurology and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn.

Rebecca Kamen is a visiting scholar and artist-in-residence in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

David Lydon-Staley is an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn and was formerly a postdoc in the Bassett lab.

Dale Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Penn’s Neuroscience Graduate Group.

“Reveal: The Art of Reimagining Scientific Discovery,” presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art and curated by Sarah Tanguy, is on display at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., until Dec. 12.

The exhbition catalog, which includes an essay on “Radicle Curiosity” by Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett, can be viewed online.

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BE Seminar: “Reaction-Coupled Solid-State Nanopore Digital Counting: Towards Sensitive, Selective and Fast Nucleic Acid Testing” (Weihua Guan)

Weihua Guan, PhD

Speaker: Weihua Guan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering & Department of Biomedical Engineering (courtesy)
Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021
Time: 3:00-4:00 PM EDT
Zoom – check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu

Abstract:

Due to their conceptual simplicity, the nanopore sensors have attracted intense research interest in electronic single molecule detection. While considerable success has been achieved, the solid-state nanopores still face three significant challenges, including repeatable nanopore size control, introduction sensing specificity, and prolonged sensor response time at low concentrations. In this talk, I will discuss a calibration-free solid-state nanopore counting method and two representative applications in nucleic acid testing. One is an isothermal amplification-coupled nanopore counting for malaria analysis. The other is the CRISPR-cas12a-coupled nanopore counting for HIV analysis. Finally, I will also discuss how we can develop a fully integrated ‘sample-to-result’ nucleic acid testing device using the solid-state counting strategy. I believe the reaction-coupled solid-state nanopore digital counting could open a new avenue towards compact, robust, low-cost electronic nucleic acid testing at the point of care.

Weihua Guan Bio:

Weihua Guan received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 2013 and did his postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University from 2013 to 2014. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University in Jan 2015. He also held a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Penn State. Dr. Guan’s research interests are in the multidisciplinary areas of micro- and nanotechnology, micro/nanofluidics, bioMEMS, lab-on-a-chip devices, and point-of-care devices. Dr. Guan’s research group at Penn State focuses on developing micro and nanoscale devices as well as novel sensing principles towards advanced medical diagnostics and testing. Dr. Guan is a member of IEEE, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Biophysical Society, and American Physics Society. Among other honors, Dr. Guan is a recipient of the HHMI International Research Fellowship and NSF CAREER award.

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‘As More Women Enter Science, It’s Time to Redefine Mentorship’

 

Danielle Bassett, Ph.D.

Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, investigates how the shape of networks impact the phenomena that arises from them. Much of that research is focused on networks of neurons, and how the different ways they are wired together in different people can influence their mental traits, such as memory or executive function.

Bassett is also interested in networks of people, however, as the shapes of those networks can have a major impact on a society’s traits. Last year, she and her colleagues published a study that investigated the network of citations neuroscience researchers produced in the course of their work, demonstrating a systemic gender bias that left women underrepresented in the literature.

Recently, Bassett spoke with WIRED’s Grace Huckins about the big-picture changes that must take place within academia for it to become truly equitable.

When a group of researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi published a paper in Nature Communications last fall suggesting that young women scientists should seek out men as mentors, the backlash was swift and vociferous. Countless scientists, many of them women, registered their indignation on Twitter—some even penning open letters and their own preprints in response. The original paper had found that female junior scientists who authored papers with male senior scientists saw their papers cited at higher rates. But a number of critics contested the assertion that this result established a link between male mentors and career performance. Scientists routinely coauthor articles with people who are not their mentors, they argued, and citation rates are just one metric of achievement. In response to these criticisms, the authors eventually retracted their paper. (They declined to comment to WIRED.)

But the paper had already stirred up a broader discussion about gender and mentorship in academia. For Danielle Bassett, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the methodological concerns that prompted the paper’s retraction were far from its worst sin. She herself has researched citation practices and found that, in neuroscience, papers with male senior authors are cited at a disproportionately high rate—primarily because other male scientists preferentially cite them. To suggest that young women should therefore try to author papers with men is, she believes, a grave error. “That was a problem in assigning blame,” she says. “The onus is on us to create a scientific culture that lets students choose a mentor that’s right for them.”

Continue reading Grace Huckins’s ‘As More Women Enter Science, It’s Time to Redefine Mentorship‘ at WIRED.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering Today.

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Studying ‘Hunters and Busybodies,’ Penn and American University Researchers Measure Different Types of Curiosity

by Melissa Pappas

Knowledge networks were created as participants browsed Wikipedia, where pages became nodes and relatedness between pages became edges. Two diverging styles emerged — “the busybody” and “the hunter.” (Illustrations by Melissa Pappas)

Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants’ curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, such as asking questions, playing trivia games, and gossiping. However, such methods focus on quantifying a person’s curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed.

Efforts to better understand what curiosity actually looks like for different people have underappreciated roots in the field of philosophy. Varying styles have been described with loose archetypes, like “hunter” and “busybody” — evocative, but hard to objectively measure when it comes to studying how people collect new information.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University, uses Wikipedia browsing as a method for describing curiosity styles. Using a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, their analysis of curiosity opens doors for using it as a tool to improve learning and life satisfaction.

The interdisciplinary study, published in Nature Human Behavior, was undertaken by Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Penn Engineering’s Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, David Lydon-Staley, then a post-doctoral fellow in her lab, now an assistant professor in the Annenberg School of Communication, two members of Bassett’s Complex Systems Lab, graduate student Dale Zhou and postdoctoral fellow Ann Sizemore Blevins, and Perry Zurn, assistant professor from American University’s Department of Philosophy.

“The reason this paper exists is because of the participation of many people from different fields,” says Lydon-Staley. “Perry has been researching curiosity in novel ways that show the spectrum of curious practice and Dani has been using networks to describe form and function in many different systems. My background in human behavior allowed me to design and conduct a study linking the styles of curiosity to a measurable activity: Wikipedia searches.”

Zurn’s research on how different people express curiosity provided a framework for the study.

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick are Among World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers

Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick
Danielle Bassett and Jason Burdick

The nature of scientific progress is often summarized by the Isaac Newton quotation, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Each new study draws on dozens of earlier ones, forming a chain of knowledge stretching back to Newton and the scientific giants his work referenced.

Scientific publishing and referencing has become more formal since Newton’s time, with databases of citations allowing for sophisticated quantitative analyses of that flow of information between researchers.

The Institute for Scientific Information and the Web of Science Group provide a yearly snapshot of this flow, publishing a list of the researchers who are in the top 1 percent of their respective fields when it comes to the number of times their work has been cited.

Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering, and Jason Burdick, Robert D. Bent Professor in the department of Bioengineering, are among the 6,389 researchers named to the 2020 list.

Bassett is a pioneer in the field of network neuroscience, which incorporates elements of mathematics, physics,  biology and systems engineering to better understand how the overall shape of connections between individual neurons influences cognitive traits. Burdick is an expert in tissue engineering and the design of biomaterials for regenerative medicine; by precisely tailoring the microenvironment within these materials, they can influence stem cell differentiation or trigger the release of therapeutics.

Bassett and Burdick were named to the Web of Science’s 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list as well.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering Today.

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Nader Engheta Awarded Isaac Newton Medal and Prize

 

Nader Engheta, PhD

Nader Engheta, H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering, Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering, has been awarded the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics (IOP). The IOP is the professional body and scholarly society for physics in the UK and Ireland.

Engheta has been recognized for ” groundbreaking innovation and transformative contributions to electromagnetic complex materials and nanoscale optics, and for pioneering development of the fields of near-zero-index metamaterials, and material-inspired analogue computation and optical nanocircuitry.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

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BE Seminar: “Emerging Technologies for Detection of Early Stage Bladder Cancer” (Audrey Bowden)

Audrey Bowden, PhD, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. (Vanderbilt University / Steve Green)

Speaker: Audrey Bowden, Ph.D.
Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Vanderbilt University

Date: Thursday, November 19, 2020
Time: 3:00-4:00 PM EST
Zoom – check email for link or contact ksas@seas.upenn.edu

Title: “Emerging Technologies for Detection of Early Stage Bladder Cancer”

Abstract:

Bladder cancer (BC) —  the 4th most common cancer in men and the most expensive cancer to treat over a patient’s lifetime — is a lifelong burden to BC patients and a significant economic burden to the U.S. healthcare system. The high cost of BC stems largely from its high recurrence rate (>50%); hence, BC management involves frequent surveillance. Unfortunately, the current in-office standard-of-care tool for BC surveillance, white light cystoscopy (WLC), is limited by low sensitivity and specificity for carcinoma in situ (CIS), a high-grade carcinoma with high potential to metastasize. Early detection and complete eradication of CIS are critical to improve treatment outcomes and to minimize recurrence. The most promising macroscopic technique to improve sensitivity to CIS detection, blue light cystoscopy (BLC), is costly, time-intensive, has low availability and a high false-positive rate. Given the limitations of WLC, we aim to change the paradigm around how BC surveillance is performed by validating new tools with high sensitivity and specificity for CIS that are appropriate for in-office use. In this seminar, I discuss our innovative solutions to improve mapping the bladder for longitudinal tracking of suspicious lesions and to create miniature tools for optical detection based on optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT and its functional variant, cross-polarized OCT, can detect early-stage BC with better sensitivity and specificity than WLC. We discuss the critical technical innovations necessary to make OCT and CP-OCT a practical tool for in-office use, and new results from recent explorations of human bladder samples that speak to the promise of this approach to change the management of patient care.

Bio:

Audrey K. Bowden is the Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Vanderbilt University. Prior to this, she served as Assistant and later Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering at Stanford University. Dr. Bowden received her BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, her PhD in BME from Duke University and completed her postdoctoral training in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. During her career, Dr. Bowden served as an International Fellow at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore. From 2007-2008, she was the Arthur H. Guenther Congressional Fellow sponsored by the OSA and SPIE and served as a Legislative Assistant in the United States Senate through the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows Program. Dr. Bowden is a Fellow of SPIE, a Fellow of AIMBE and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Air Force Young Investigator Award, the NSF Career Award, the Hellman Faculty Scholars Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the NSBE Golden Torch Award. She is a former Associate Editor of IEEE Photonics Journal, former Lead Guest Editor of a Biomedical Optics Express Special Issue and is a member of numerous professional committees. Her research interests include biomedical optics – particularly optical coherence tomography and near infrared spectroscopy – microfluidics, and point of care diagnostics.