Tag: faculty

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Alumni Spotlight: Penelope Georges

Penelope earned her Ph.D.  in Bioengineering in 2006. She is now Associate Director of STEM Initiatives at Princeton University.

Penelope Georges, Ph.D.

“My time at Penn spoiled me for many job experiences that followed.  The Institute for Medicine and Engineering (IME) was collaborative, familial, and stimulating. During my Ph.D. work, I felt simultaneously nurtured and challenged.  Most credit for this prolific phase of my career is due to the members of Dr. Paul Janmey’s laboratory during my tenure at Penn – starting with the big man himself.  My research mentor promoted a research experience that centered on respect for others, not only within our field of study but also outside the academy.   Respect meant the expectation of forming strong relationships and collaborations and having reverence for scientific experts and practitioners alike.  The foundation of the lab’s ethos was collaboration for the greater good. 

Dr. Janmey set the tone for lab members to hold each other in high regard and to be team players.   I would not have been as successful without this support.  Beyond the lab, the IME at the time had a remarkable staff assistant in Marvin Jackson who was central to promoting camaraderie across the Institute.  Marvin was a critical presence in the IME and I believe that many scientific collaborations were made possible due to the environment he cajoled.

Outside the IME, some the most meaningful moments of my Ph.D. studies came from traveling outside the U.S. to collaborate internationally.  I was fortunate to travel as close as Mechanicsville, PA and as far as the Czech Republic to attend meetings, perform experiments, and make connections with colleagues.   Through travel and meeting many different types of people, I learned the culture of being in academia and developed a broader view of scientific research. 

As of recently, my career has focused on pedagogy in higher education.  At Princeton, I serve within an entity that has a central mission of improving science and engineering literacy for all its constituents: the Council on Science and Technology.  I develop new science and engineering courses and introduce interactive research-based teaching methods into these courses. I am involved in policy issues on STEM education at Princeton and beyond.  The skills I learned at Penn that are critical to my current position are to recognize problems and design innovative solutions and the ability to communicate and collaborate with researchers across many disciplines.  I am very grateful to be an alumna of a remarkable program.”

Learn more about Georges’s work and research.

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Erin Anderson Wins Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students

Erin Anderson, PhD student

The Office of the Provost awards the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students in recognition of their profound impact on education across the University. Nominations come directly from undergraduate and graduate students in their courses and are narrowed down to ten awardees each year.

Erin Anderson, a graduate student in the Department of Bioengineering, is one of the ten 2022 recipients.

Anderson is a Ph.D. student who studies the computational modeling of injury in full-brain networks in the Molecular Neuroengineering Lab of David Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor in Bioengineering and Senior Associate Dean of Penn Engineering. Anderson has served as a teaching assistant for Bioengineering Senior Design since Fall 2019.  Senior Design (BE 495 & 496) is the Bioengineering Department’s two-semester capstone course in which students work in teams to conceive, design and pitch their final projects, and is taught by Meaney and Sevile Mannickarottu, Director of Educational Laboratories in Bioengineering.  Anderson earned her B.S. in Bioengineering from Rice University in 2016. Her doctoral thesis focuses on how subconcussive head trauma affects subsequent concussion outcomes.

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Shapeshifting Microrobots Can Brush and Floss Teeth

by Katherine Unger Baillie

In a proof-of-concept study, researchers from the School of Dental Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science shows that a hands-free system could effectively automate the treatment and removal of tooth-decay-causing bacteria and dental plaque. (Illustration: Melissa Pappas)

A shapeshifting robotic microswarm may one day act as a toothbrush, rinse, and dental floss in one.

The technology, developed by a multidisciplinary team at the University of Pennsylvania, is poised to offer a new and automated way to perform the mundane but critical daily tasks of brushing and flossing. It’s a system that could be particularly valuable for those who lack the manual dexterity to clean their teeth effectively themselves.

The building blocks of these microrobots are iron oxide nanoparticles that have both catalytic and magnetic activity. Using a magnetic field, researchers could direct their motion and configuration to form either bristlelike structures that sweep away dental plaque from the broad surfaces of teeth, or elongated strings that can slip between teeth like a length of floss. In both instances, a catalytic reaction drives the nanoparticles to produce antimicrobials that kill harmful oral bacteria on site.

Experiments using this system on mock and real human teeth showed that the robotic assemblies can conform to a variety of shapes to nearly eliminate the sticky biofilms that lead to cavities and gum disease. The Penn team shared their findings establishing a proof-of-concept for the robotic system in the journal ACS Nano.

“Routine oral care is cumbersome and can pose challenges for many people, especially those who have hard time cleaning their teeth” says Hyun (Michel) Koo, a professor in the Department of Orthodontics and divisions of Community Oral Health and Pediatric Dentistry in Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and co-corresponding author on the study. “You have to brush your teeth, then floss your teeth, then rinse your mouth; it’s a manual, multistep process. The big innovation here is that the robotics system can do all three in a single, hands-free, automated way.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Hyun (Michel) Koo is a professor in the Department of Orthodontics and divisions of Community Oral Health and Pediatric Dentistry in the School of Dental Medicine, co-director of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry, and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group at the University of Pennsylvania.

Edward Steager is a senior research investigator in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Koo and Steager’s coauthors on the paper are Penn Dental Medicine’s Min Jun Oh, Alaa Babeer, Yuan Liu, and Zhi Ren and Penn Engineering’s Jingyu Wu, David A. Issadore, Kathleen J. Stebe, and Daeyeon Lee.

This work was supported in part by the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research (grants DE025848 and DE029985), Procter & Gamble, and the Postdoctoral Research Program of Sungkyunkwan University.

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Kevin Johnson: Informatics Evangelist

by Ebonee Johnson

Kevin Johnson is used to forging his own path in the fields of healthcare and computer science.

A picture of Johnson as a child, from his children’s book “I’m a Biomedical Expert Now!”

If you ask him to locate his niche within these fields, Johnson, David L. Cohen and Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor with appointments in Penn Engineering and the Perelman School of Medicine, would say “informatics.” But that doesn’t tell the whole story of the board-certified pediatrician, who has dedicated his career to innovations in how patients’ information is created, documented and shared, all with the goal of improving the quality of healthcare they receive.

Informatics, the study of the structure and behavior of interactions between natural and computational systems, is an umbrella term. Within it, there’s bioinformatics, which applies informatics to biology, and biomedical informatics, which looks at those interactions in the context of healthcare systems. Finally, there is clinical informatics, which further focuses on the settings where healthcare is delivered, and where Johnson squarely places himself.

“But you can just call it ‘informatics,’” says Johnson. “It will be easier.”

He mainly studies how computational systems can improve ambulatory care — sometimes known as outpatient care, or the kind of care hospitals give to patients without admitting them — in real time. If you’ve ever heard your doctor complain about the amount of time it takes them to input the information they get from you during your visit, or wondered why they need to capture this information during the visit in the first place, these are some of the questions Johnson is investigating.

“We’re taking care of patients but we’re getting frustrated by things that we thought these new computers should be able to fix,” says Johnson.” I think there’s a very compelling case for using engineering principles to reimagine electronic health records.”

Read the full story in Penn Engineering Today.

Kevin Johnson is the David L. Cohen University of Pennsylvania Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics and Computer and Information Science. As a Penn Integrates Knowlegde (PIK) University Professor, Johnson also holds appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Pediatrics, as well as in the Annenberg School of Communication. Johnson is the Vice President for Applied Informatics for the University of Pennsylvania Health System and has been elected to the American College of Medical Informatics (2004), the Academic Pediatric Society (2010), the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine) (2010), and the International Association of Health Science Informatics (2021).

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Penn Startup Vittoria Biotherapeutics Raises $10M in Seed Funding

Marco Ruella, MD

A Philadelphia life sciences company spun out of Penn is emerging from stealth mode with nearly $10 million from a seed funding round. Vittoria Biotherapeutics’ mission is to overcome limitations of CAR T cell therapy by using unique cell engineering and gene editing technologies to create new therapies that address unmet clinical needs. The technology the company is attempting to commercialize was developed by Marco Ruella, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group, who is the company’s scientific founder.

Read “Penn spinout Vittoria Biotherapeutics emerges from stealth mode with $10M seed round” in the Philadelphia Business Journal.

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Penn Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Announce Partnership with Costa Rica for CAR T Cell Therapy

Carl June, MD

Carl June, MD, Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group, was quoted in a recent press release  announcing a new international partnership between Penn Medicine (PSOM), the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP), and Costa Rica’s CCSS, or the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (Social Security Program), to develop CAR T research in Costa Rica. June is a world renowned cancer cell therapy pioneer whose research led to the initial development and FDA approval of CAR T cell therapy:

“‘At least 15,000 patients across the world have received CAR T cells, and dozens more clinical trials using this approach are in progress, for almost every major tumor type, but people in many parts of the globe still do not have access to treatment with these transformative therapies,’ said Carl H. June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We are honored to work with our colleagues in Costa Rica in hopes of building a path for patients in underserved areas to have the opportunity to benefit from clinical research programs offering this personalized therapy.’”

Read the the announcement in Penn Medicine News.

 

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“The nanobots are among us”: Penn Bioengineering Research Featured in Wired

César de la Fuente, PhD

César de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, Microbiology, Psychiatry, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, co-led a team of researchers who created autonomous particles covered with patches of protein “motors,” with the goal that these bots can eventually carry livesaving drugs through bodily fluids.

 

 

Read “These Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria” in Wired.

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Spencer Haws Receives Druckenmiller Fellowship

Spencer Haws, Ph.D.

Spencer Haws, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the laboratory of Jennifer E. Phillips-Cremins, Associate Professor and Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Bioengineering and in Genetics, was awarded a 2022 Druckenmiller Fellowship from the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute (NYSCF). This prestigious program is the largest dedicated stem cell fellowship program in the world and was developed to train and support young scientists working on groundbreaking research in the field of stem cell research. Haws is one of only five inductees into the 2022 class of fellows.

Haws earned his Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences in 2021 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied metabolism-chromatin connections under the mentorship of John Denu, Professor in Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a NYSCF – Druckenmiller Fellow in the Cremins Laboratory for Genome Architecture and Spatial Neurobiology, Haws is using this previously developed expertise to frame his investigations into the underlying mechanisms driving the neurodegenerative disorder fragile X syndrome (FXS). “Ultimately, I hope that this work will help guide the development of future FXS-specific therapeutics of which none currently exist,” says Haws.

Read the full list of 2022 Druckenmiller Fellows and view introductory videos on the NYSCF website.

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Yale Cohen Appointed Assistant Dean of Research Facilities and Resources at Penn Medicine

Yale E. Cohen, PhD

Yale E. Cohen, Professor of Otorhinolaryngology, with secondary appointments in Neuroscience and Bioengineering, was appointed Assistant Dean of Research Facilities and Resources at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, effective April 1, 2022. Cohen is currently Chair of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group, and Director of the Hearing Sciences Center:

“Many of you are already quite familiar with Dr. Cohen, as his leadership roles in research training and education at PSOM and the University are far-reaching and impactful. Dr. Cohen is a Professor of Otorhinolaryngology with secondary appointments in the Department of Neuroscience and Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering. Recognized widely for his deep commitment to our teaching and training community, Dr. Cohen chairs the Bioengineering Graduate Group, and in 2020 received the prestigious Jane M. Glick Graduate Student Teaching Award, which honors clinicians and scientists who exemplify outstanding quality of patient care, mentoring, research, and teaching.”

Read the full announcement in the Penn Medicine archive.

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Taimoor Qazi Appointed Assistant Professor at Purdue University

Taimoor H. Qazi, Ph.D.

The Department of Bioengineering is proud to congratulate Taimoor H. Qazi, Ph.D. on his appointment as Assistant Professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. Qazi’s appointment will begin in Fall 2022.

Qazi obtained his Ph.D. at the Technical University of Berlin and the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany working on translational approaches for musculoskeletal tissue repair using biomaterials and stem cells under the co-advisement of Georg Duda, Director of the Berlin Institute of Health and David Mooney, Mercator Fellow at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. After arriving at Penn in 2019, Qazi performed research on microscale granular hydrogels in the Polymeric Biomaterials Laboratory of Jason Burdick, Adjunct Professor in Bioengineering at Penn and Bowman Endowed Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While conducting postdoctoral research, Qazi also collaborated with the groups of David Issadore, Associate Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering, and Daeyeon Lee, Professor and Evan C. Thompson Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and member of the Penn Bioengineering Graduate Group. Qazi’s postdoctoral research was supported through a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, and resulted in several publications in high-profile journals, including Advanced Materials, Cell Stem Cell, Small, and ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering.

“Taimoor has done really fantastic research as a postdoctoral fellow in the group,” says Burdick. “Purdue has a long history of excellence in biomaterials research and will be a great place for him to build a strong research program.”

Qazi’s future research program will engineer biomaterials to make fundamental and translational advances in musculoskeletal tissue engineering, including the study of how rare tissue-resident cells respond to spatiotemporal signals and participate in tissue repair, and developing modular hydrogels that permit minimally invasive delivery for tissue regeneration. The ultimate goal is to create scalable, translational, and biologically inspired healthcare solutions that benefit a patient population that is expected to grow manifold in the coming years.

Qazi is looking to build a strong and inclusive team of scientists and engineers with diverse backgrounds interested in tackling problems at the interface of translational medicine, materials science, bioengineering, and cell biology, and will be recruiting graduate students immediately. Interested students can contact him directly at thqazi@seas.upenn.edu.

“I am excited to launch my independent research career at a prestigious institution like Purdue,” says Qazi. “Being at Penn and particularly in the Department of Bioengineering greatly helped me prepare for the journey ahead. I am grateful for Jason’s mentorship over the years and the access to resources provided by Jason, Dave Issadore, Ravi, Dave Meany and other faculty which support the training and professional development of postdoctoral fellows in Penn Bioengineering.”

Congratulations to Dr. Qazi from everyone at Penn Bioengineering!