Tag: faculty

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Penn Bioengineering Faculty Member Paul Ducheyne Receives the European Society for Biomaterials’ International Award

Ducheyne
Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D.

by Sophie Burkholder

We would like to congratulate Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D., a Professor in the Bioengineering Department and a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery Research at Penn, on being selected for the International Award by the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB). The International Award is one of the ESB’s highest honors, recognizing scientists who have spent the majority of their careers outside of Europe. They are internationally recognized, have a high scientific profile, and have made  major contributions to the field of biomaterials. Those nominated for the award typically also have had strong collaborations with the scientific community in Europe throughout their careers.

Beyond being a professor at Penn, Ducheyne is also the founder of XeroThera, a spin-out from Penn that develops novel concepts for tissue engineering and drug delivery based on his group’s twenty years of fundamental studies of sol gel-processed, nanoporous, oxide-based materials. XeroThera’s first product formulations focus on prophylaxis and treatment of surgical infections. A pipeline is being developed building from his group’s breakthrough data   that demonstrate the utility of sol-gel synthesized silica-based nanoporous materials for therapeutic use. These materials may well represent a next generation of agents for delivery of drugs, including antibiotics, analgesics, and osteogenic and anti-inflammatory molecules.

In being selected for the International Award, Ducheyne joins only five previous recipients of it so far, a group of scientists that represents those at the top of the field in biomaterials worldwide. Ducheyne will give a presentation and award lecture for the ESB at its next annual meeting this September in Dresden, Germany. Read more about the ESB’s awards here and see the full list of 2019 awardees here.

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Bioengineering Welcomes New Faculty Member Cesar de la Fuente

Cesar de la Fuente, PhD

by Sophie Burkholder

The Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania is excited to welcome César de la Fuente, Ph.D., as an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. De la Fuente, who is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and was recently named a Penn Presidential Professor, is the principal investigator of the de la Fuente Lab with current projects including the development of computer-made antibiotics, microbiome engineering technologies, and synthetic neuromicrobiology tools.

Dr. de la Fuente has wanted to learn the mysteries of the world around him from a young age, from the origins of life and human consciousness to how diseases can affect the body. His dream of understanding the building blocks of life began to take shape when he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia to study microbiology, immunology, and protein engineering. After earning his Ph.D. in these subjects, de la Fuente went on to complete a post doctorate in synthetic biology and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Recently, MIT recognized Dr. de la Fuente on its “35 Innovators Under 35” list, which honored de la Fuente as one of the world’s top 35 innovators and as a pioneer for his use of technology to improve antibiotics. Furthermore, GEN recently listed Dr. de la Fuente on its “Top 10 Under 40” list of young leaders in the life sciences, noting his development of transformative biotechnologies as a potential solution to antibiotic resistance. De la Fuente refers to this latest research as “Machine Biology,” a crossover of life and technology that “brings together elements of machines in order to computerize biological systems.”

His creativity in the merging of so many domains of science echoes throughout de la Fuente’s general approach to research and academia as well. While he emphasizes a thinking-from-the-ground-up approach, he also feels that “heterogeneous groups make better ideas,” and thus strives to maintain diversity in his lab — currently his entire lab is made up of international students and postdocs. In the future, de la Fuente hopes to extend his love of mentorship to the classroom in a course exploring the intersection of microbiology and synthetic biology, overlapping in a way similar to his research. We can’t wait for all of the innovation and creativity in engineering that de la Fuente will undoubtedly bring to our department.

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Six Penn Engineers Receive Tenure

Brian Chow, David Issadore, Dongeun (Dan) Huh, Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Amish Patel and Aleksandra Vojvodic

The School of Engineering and Applied Science has granted tenure to six faculty members, including three from the Department of Bioengineering.

Tenured faculty at Penn Engineering demonstrate teaching excellence and international leadership in their fields of study and research collaborations.

Brian Chow
Associate Professor in Bioengineering
Chow’s research focuses on the discovery and engineering of photoreceptors and sensory proteins for manipulating and monitoring the physiology of genetically targeted cells, and the application of these tools to reveal principles of cellular dynamics. His work has advanced the rational design of light activated proteins and the use of optogenetic reagents to study cell signaling.

David Issadore
Associate Professor in Bioengineering
Issadore’s research combines microelectronics, microfluidics, and nanomaterials to create miniaturized platforms for the diagnosis of disease. His work has the potential to radically change the way we diagnose and treat diseases by bringing the technologies out of the lab and directly to the point of care.

Dongeun (Dan) Huh
Associate Professor in Bioengineering
Huh’s research aims to develop innovative bioengineering tools and technologies using biologically inspired design principles and micro- and nano-scale engineering techniques to create systems that mimic the structure and function of human physiological systems.

Linh Thi Xuan Phan
Associate Professor in Computer and Information Science
Phan’s work focuses on making cyber-physical systems (CPS) safer, faster, and more secure, both by strengthening the theoretical foundations and by developing practical solutions. Her recent projects include a cloud platform with real-time capabilities, a new diagnosis technique for timing-related faults, and new ways to defend CPS against attacks from insiders and/or external attackers.

Amish Patel
Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Patel’s research strives to achieve a molecular-level understanding of solvation and transport in aqueous and polymeric systems, with applications ranging from the prediction of protein interactions to the design of advanced materials for water purification and energy storage. His group combines principles of statistical mechanics and liquid state theory with state-of-the-art molecular modeling and atomistic simulation techniques to study these biological, nanoscopic and polymeric systems.

Aleksandra Vojvodic
Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Vojvodic’s research focuses on theory and computation-driven materials design. Her lab uses computational frameworks to obtain fundamental understanding of surface and interface properties of complex materials that can be used to develop theoretical models for chemical transformations and energy conversion. These models have been used to predict new catalyst materials for several chemical reactions which have been experimentally synthesized and tested, validating the desired properties of the computationally predicted catalyst material.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

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Brian Chow, Dan Huh, and David Issadore Promoted to Tenured Positions as Associate Professors in Penn Bioengineering

by Sophie Burkholder

We would like to congratulate Penn Bioengineering faculty members Brian Chow, Ph.D., Dongeun (Dan) Huh, Ph.D., and David Issadore, Ph.D., on all of their recent promotions to tenured positions as Associate Professors. Both Chow and Issadore taught the second half of the foundational course in the Penn Bioengineering undergraduate curriculum, Bioengineering Modeling, Analysis, and Design Laboratory, in which students form lab groups to complete modules in microfluidics, synthetic biology, bioelectrical signal analysis, and bioanalytical spectroscopy.

Chow R01
Brian Chow, Ph.D.

Outside of the classroom, Chow’s research focuses on the creation of dynamic input and output interfaces for cells through the use of optogenetics, synthetic biology, genomics, and device engineering. The Chow lab’s current projects include the exploration of functional diversity of photoreception, engineering optically active genetically encoded tools, and their applications in neuroscience and mammalian synthetic biology. His research is supported by the NIH and he is the recipient of a 2017 NSF CAREER Award. Chow also supports undergraduate innovations in research by hosting the annual Penn team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, a program which he helped to create during his time as a graduate student at MIT. One group of Bioengineering students under Chow’s mentorship used the iGEM project as a springboard to create an accessible, open-source plate reader.

David Issadore, Ph.D.

The Issadore lab at Penn focuses on the use of microelectronics and microfluidics for medical diagnostics. In projects that combine elements of bioengineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and applied physics, Issadore and his team use an interdisciplinary approach to create miniaturized low-cost platforms for disease diagnosis. His company Chip Diagnostics received the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge Award last month. Earlier this year, Issadore taught the Penn Engineering course Appropriate Point of Care Diagnostics (APOC), which culminated in a service trip to Ghana (read blog posts written by participating students here). This fall, he will take over the core Bioengineering undergraduate course in Bioengineering Signals and Systems, which focuses on applications in ECG signaling, cochlear implants, and biomedical imaging.

organ-on-a-chip
Dan Huh, Ph.D.

Dr. Huh is the principal investigator of the BIOLines Lab at Penn, which is best known for its work on bioinspired engineering systems that Huh calls “organs-on-a-chip.” Using design and engineering principles based on microfluidics and biomimicry, the Huh lab creates microengineered systems that can reconstitute the structural and functional complexity of healthy and diseased human physiological systems in ways not possible using traditional cell culture techniques. His research has been featured in TEDx, and he has won several prestigious honors and awards including the Bernard Langer Distinguished Lectureship, Lush Prize, the McPherson Distinguished Lectureship, CRI Technology Impact Award, John J. Ryan Medal, Design of the Year Award and Best Product of the Year Award from London Design Museum, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award. This fall, Huh will teach a graduate level course in biomicrofluidics that will cover the use of microfluidics for biomedical application.

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Ravi Radhakrishnan Named Director of the Penn Institute for Computational Science

Ravi Radhakrishnan, Ph.D.

Ravi Radhakrishnan, professor in the departments of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named the new Director of the Penn Institute for Computational Science (PICS).

PICS is a cross-disciplinary institute for the advancement, integration, and support of Penn research via the tools and techniques of high-performance computing. It promotes research through a regular seminar series, an annual conference, by hosting joint research projects and through researcher and student training. PICS also enables computational science research by providing an ongoing series of short technical “how to” workshops or bootcamps for Penn researchers and graduate students.

Radhakrishnan’s research interests lie at the interface of chemical physics and molecular biology. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1995 and earned his PhD from Cornell University in 2001. He is a member of the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery and the Center for Engineering Cells and Regeneration.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

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Congratulations to Danielle Bassett and Arjun Raj on Their Promotions to Full Professors

We would like to congratulate Penn Bioengineering faculty members Arjun Raj, Ph.D., and Danielle Bassett, Ph.D., on their promotions from associate to full professors.

Arjun Raj, Ph.D.

The Raj lab studies how biological processes work at the level of individual cells. Their work combines quantitative tools from genomics, imaging, biology, math, and computer science to develop models for how individual cells function, and in particular, how these individual cells can behave differently from each other. One major interest is in cancer, in which the lab is studying how individual cells can drive resistance to anti-cancer drugs. He and his lab also have a regularly updated blog discussing general topics related to scientific academia.

Danielle Bassett, Ph.D.

The Bassett lab takes an in-depth look at the use of network science and complex systems theory to study computational neuroscience in projects that involve the architecture of knowledge networks, the controllability of brain networks, and the dynamic networks in neuroscience. This fall, she will teach an elective course in network neuroscience open to graduate and undergraduate students that covers the use of network science in understanding overall brain circuitry. Bassett was recently profiled in Science Magazine.

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Michael Mitchell Elected Society for Biomaterials Drug Delivery Chair

by Sophie Burkholder

 

Michael Mitchell, Ph.D., Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, was elected Chair of the Drug Delivery Special Interest Group for the Society for Biomaterials at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. According to the Society for Biomaterials website:

The Drug Delivery Special Interest Group will deal with the science and technology of controlled release of active agents from delivery systems. Controlled drug release is achieved by the use of diffusion, chemical reactions, dissolutions or osmosis, used either singly or in combination. While the vast majority of such delivery devices are based on polymers, controlled release can also be achieved by the use of mechanical pumps. In a broader sense, controlled release also involves control over the site of action of the active agent, using the active agent using pro-drugs, targetable water soluble polymers or various microparticulate systems. Relevant aspects of toxicology, bioavailability, pharmacokinetics, and biocompatibility are also included.

The Society for Biomaterials is an interdisciplinary organization comprised of academic, industry, health care, and governmental professionals dedicated to promoting advancements in all aspects of biomaterial science and engineering, education, and professional standards to enhance human health and quality of life. The Society for Biomaterials was established in 1974, and is the oldest scientific organization in the field of biomaterials.

Michael Mitchell, Ph.D.

Mitchell joined the Department of Bioengineering at Penn in 2018 as Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation. Previously, he was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow with Institute Professor Robert Langer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. His research interests include biomaterials, drug delivery, and cellular and molecular bioengineering for applications in cancer research, immunotherapy, and gene therapy. Since joining Penn in 2018, Mitchell has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, a Rising Star Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the T. Nagai Award from the Controlled Release Society.

Mitchell’s new role as the Chair of the SFB’s Drug Delivery Special Interest Group will allow him to lead conversations across academia on the future of drug delivery as it relates to biomaterials. With his fellow officers, Mitchell will help spread knowledge about the field of controlled drug release by hosting research forums, helping to publish news and activities of the SFB in Biomaterials Forum, and foster connections and mentorship among members of his and other Special Interest Groups. We can’t wait to see where Mitchell’s leadership will help take the community of research on areas like toxicology, pharmacokinetics, and biocompatibility next!

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César de la Fuente on 35 Innovators Under 35 List

Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, PhD

César de la Fuente, assistant professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was named one of MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” for 2019.

“It’s part of our ethos that technology can and should be a force for good. Our annual list of 35 innovators under 35 is a way of putting faces on that idea,” reads the 2019 award announcement. “This year’s list shows that even in our hard, cynical world, there are still lots of smart people willing to dedicate their lives to the idea that technology can make a safer, fairer world.”

De la Fuente was named in the list’s “Pioneers” category for his work researching antibiotics with a computational approach. Using algorithms, he creates artificial antibiotics to better understand how bacteria will evolve and how scientists can optimize treatments. De la Fuente, who was also recently featured in GEN’s Top 10 Under 40 list, further expands his search for medical solutions by extensively studying a variety of proteins, searching for molecules to develop into antimicrobials.

Included in the honor of being named on the 2019 Innovators List is an invitation for de la Fuente to speak at the EmTech MIT conference in September, an event that reflects on the potential impacts of the year’s biggest developments.

Read MIT Technology Review’s coverage of de la Fuente’s pioneering work and learn more about de la Fuente’s research on his lab website.

Originally posted on the Penn Engineering Medium Blog.

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César de la Fuente Named One of GEN’s ‘Top 10 Under 40’

Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, PhD

César de la Fuente, assistant professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been listed as one of the top 10 emerging professionals in his field under the age of 40 by GEN, a publication that covers genetic engineering and biotechnology news. The list recognizes up-and-coming leaders in the field of life sciences, both in industry and academia.

De la Fuente, who started at Penn earlier this year, was recognized because he “is pioneering the computerization of biological systems for the development of transformative biotechnologies designed to solve societal grand challenges such as antibiotic resistance.”

Read the full story at the Penn Engineering Medium blog.

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BE’s Danielle Bassett Profiled in Science Magazine

Danielle Bassett, PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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