Tag: GBS

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A Decade of BETA Day: Shaping the Success of Future Bioengineers

by Katherine Sas

Students learn about bioengineering in the BE Labs at the inaugural BETA Day (credit: Felice Macera)

Last year marked not just the 50th anniversary of the Department of Bioengineering (BE) but the 10th anniversary of Bioengineer-Teach-Aspire (BETA) Day, one of the most beloved and impactful programs run by the Graduate Association of Bioengineers (GABE).

BETA Day, an annual event in which a diverse group of Philadelphia middle school students learns about bioengineering and a variety of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields from BE graduate students, has grown into an institution, one whose impact no one could have foreseen.

GABE’s original goal was to provide social opportunities for BE graduate students. While this is still an important function of the group, in the mid-2010s, students and board members found themselves looking for opportunities to provide more formalized outreach and mentorship. They wanted to have an impact on Philadelphia and cultivate the next generation of bioengineers.

The Seeds of BETA Day

Benjamin Freedman, a principal investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and founder of biotech startup Limax Biosciences, earned his doctorate in Bioengineering in the lab of Louis Soslowsky, Fairhill Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery within the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) and in Bioengineering within the School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering). Freedman played a key role in BETA Day’s founding. 

In 2009, Freedman, then an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, attended a talk at the City College of New York (CCNY), which sparked his interest in mentorship. Sheldon Weinbaum, a Distinguished Professor in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at CCNY and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) inaugural diversity award winner, spoke about “fulfilling the dream” of mentorship and the struggle for inclusion in STEM fields, echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Inspired by this encounter, Freedman got involved with a mentorship program during his senior year. He later signed up for a lunch with Weinbaum to talk about mentorship. Freedman recalls that Weinbaum’s face “lit up” when he realized that this student didn’t just want to talk science but was genuinely interested in inclusion, diversity and mentorship.

Arriving at Penn Engineering and PSOM for graduate school in 2011, Freedman joined GABE, bringing this passion and experience with him and helping GABE to shape and clarify their outreach and mentorship programs. 

From Campus to Community

Along with other GABE board members, such as Cori Riggin and Shauna Dorsey, Freedman worked over the course of a year and a half to identify the mentorship needs within BE and gauge student interest. David Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor and then Chair of BE, and former BE faculty Susan Margulies, now Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, were particularly involved in these discussions. 

Benjamin Freedman (left) addresses the first BE mentoring cohort (credit: Felice Macera)

The GABE board reorganized to include mentorship and outreach chairs, and eventually started a formal mentorship program in partnership with the Penn undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The mentorship program continues to this day, creating opportunities for BE graduate students to engage with undergraduate concerns through one-on-one meetings to discuss career or graduate school advice, summer BBQ’s, roundtable discussions and monthly meetups.

With an internal mentorship program established, the team turned their focus to Philadelphia. Initially, GABE established a partnership with iPraxis, a local STEM education non-profit, to do some outreach activities in middle schools. This partnership resulted in an Outstanding Outreach Award from the national Biomedical Engineering Society in 2014. But with the department’s 40th anniversary approaching, GABE’s members wanted to do something spectacular to celebrate and give back to the community.

Service Learning in Action

By then, Ocek Eke, Director of Graduate Students Programming at Penn Engineering, had been recently appointed Director of Global and Local Service Learning Programs. Eke provided Freedman and GABE advice on setting up effective outreach programs and to determine what resources the School could contribute. “We have a role to play to fulfill our mission,” Eke says, citing Penn’s motto, “Leges Sine Moribus Vanae,” which translates to “Laws without morals are useless.”

GABE’s efforts were part of a “wave” of interest in outreach and community service in both the department and the School, Eke remembers, including the undergraduate group Access Engineering and several service learning courses which took students to Asia, Africa and Central America. He was impressed by the lack of cynicism in the BE student body. “These are students who saw a need, who are passionate about what they want to achieve. They could have just been comfortable but were willing to go and stick their necks out. They used the resources we have here in Penn Engineering to address these needs.”

A (BETA) Day to Remember

The first BETA Day took place at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, which had only just opened. Held with the enthusiastic participation of around 70 middle schoolers, and almost as many volunteers, the event included a full day of programming, with representation from every Penn Engineering department. There were science talks, workshops, and even a drone demo with Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering. The entire day was student-driven and staffed by volunteers, demonstrating the students’ commitment to making a difference.

The first annual BETA Day was held in the Singh Center for Nanotechnology (credit: Felice Macera)

GABE never imagined BETA Day as an annual event, but the first instance was so successful, it became hard to imagine not repeating it. Ten years later, the GABE board continues to introduce bioengineering to a diverse and ambitious group of middle schoolers every spring. 

In recent years, the location has shifted to other venues, including Pennovation Works, in Gray’s Ferry, and BE’s own education lab, the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace. Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab has also become a key collaborator in BETA Day. 

In 2021, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the industrious and creative GABE board even tailored BETA Day activities to be held in an entirely virtual environment. “These types of events are not as successful when they’re only initiated by faculty,” says Freedman. Generating and sustaining student involvement has been a cornerstone of BETA Day’s continued success.

The Legacy of BETA Day

GABE’s mentorship efforts have grown as well, changing to meet evolving student needs. The mentorship program now involves students being placed in “families” of around four undergraduates and two graduate students, spanning a range of class years and experience levels. A third student association, the Master’s Association in Bioengineers (MAB), was established to better foster community and facilitate opportunities for master’s students.  

The department also launched an applicant support program in 2020, enhancing BE’s mission of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion by pairing Ph.D. applicants to current doctoral students, who serve as mentors to help navigate the admissions process, giving feedback on application materials and providing other support to prospective students.

Structures of support and outreach activities like BETA Day have become a key emphasis of the department’s graduate student recruitment, helping to attract students who value the department’s core mission and increasing opportunities for underserved or underrepresented communities.

The legacy of that original BETA Day also continues in Freedman’s Lab. After graduating in 2017, having served on the GABE board and as President from 2015-2016, Freedman continued to mentor over 20 students during his postdoctoral research at Harvard. He is now building his own independent lab where diversity, mentorship and outreach are foundational pillars.

A Nebula of Inspiration

Perhaps the most consequential impact of BETA Day is the impression it makes on the middle schoolers who participate each year. “To really get to know what happens on BETA Day and what it’s true impact is, you need to experience it,” says Ravi Radhakrishnan, Herman P. Schwan Chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Professor in Bioengineering and in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. 

The legacy of BETA Day continues into its second decade. (credit: Afraah Shamim, BE Labs)

“I walked into the Stephenson Foundation Education Lab during BETA Day 2024,” recalls Radhakrishnan, “and what I saw was teams of teenagers tinkering with pipes that were clogged, strategizing on unclogging them without damaging them: an assignment that got them thinking in teams about how to prevent heart attacks. 

“Expose these young minds to design thinking, versatile tools, and critical problems in biomedical engineering, and the elegant solutions they brainstorm are truly mind blowing. BETA Day is like the nebula where future biomedical stars are born.”

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Ruby Washington: Poised to Make Her Mark in Bioengineering

by Amy Biemiller

Ruby Washington

Data show that healthcare disparities plague the Black community in America, making it harder to receive adequate treatment and care. But rather than just accepting the status quo, Ruby Washington, senior in the Department of Bioengineering, is dedicated to leveraging her interest in biomedicine to change outcomes and systems.

“I feel that I have a duty to help my community and make the healthcare system better for people who look like me,” she says.

That’s a challenge well suited to a woman who is both fascinated by the intersection of materials science and biology and dedicated to representing and leading a community of Black engineers.

Read the full story at Penn Engineering Today.

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Week in BioE (August 9, 2018)

Converting Fat to Fight Obesity

White fat stories calories and provides the body with insulation.

There are two types of fat in the human body: brown and white. Brown fat, the “good” fat, is rich in mitochondria, which gives it its brown appearance. Whereas white fat stores calories and acts as an insulator, mitochondria-rich brown fat burns energy to produce heat throughout the body and maintains body temperature. White fat, conversely, uses its stored energy to insulate the body and keep its temperature level. While all fat serves a purpose in the body, an excess of white fat cells causes obesity, a condition affecting one in three adults in the U.S. and the root cause of many potential health problems. Finding ways to convert white fat to brown opens a possibility of treating this problem naturally.

A new study in Scientific Reports proposes a clever way to convert fat types. Professor of Biomedical Engineering Samuel Sia, PhD, of the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science, led a team which developed a method of converting white fat into brown using a tissue-grafting technique. After extracting and converting the fat, it can then be transplanted back into the patient. White fat is hard-wired to convert to brown under certain conditions, such as exposure to cold temperatures, so the trick for Dr. Sia’s team was finding a way to make the conversion last for long periods. The studies conducted with mice suggested that using these methods, newly-converted fat stayed brown for a period of two months.

Dr. Sia’s team will proceed to conduct further tests, especially on the subjects’ metabolism and overall weight after undergoing the procedure, and they hope that eventual clinical trials will result in new methods to treat or even prevent obesity in humans.

Cremins Lab Student Appointed Blavatnik Fellow

Linda Zhou is currently pursuing her MD/PhD in Genomics and Computational Biology under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Phillips-Cremins.

The Perelman School of Medicine named Linda Zhou, a student in BE’s Cremins Laboratory, a Blavatnik Fellow for the 2018-2019 academic year. The selection process for this award is highly competitive, and Linda’s selection speaks to the excellent quality of her scholarship and academic performance. The fellows will be honored in a special ceremony at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Linda received her B.S. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and is currently pursuing her M.D./Ph.D. in the Genomics and Computational Biology Program at Penn. “I am honored to be named a Blavatnik Fellow and am extremely excited to continue my graduate studies investigating neurological disorders and the 3D genome,” she said. “This support will be integral to achieving my long term goal of driving scientific discovery that will help treat human disease.”

Linda’s research is overseen by Penn Bioengineering Assistant Professor Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, PhD. “Linda is an outstanding graduate student,” said Dr. Cremins. “It is a true delight to work with her. She is hard working, intelligent, kind, and has extraordinary leadership ability. Her unrelenting search for ground-state truth makes her a shining star.”

The Blavatnik Family Fellowship in Biomedical Research is a new award announced by the Perelman School of Medicine in May of this year. This generous gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation awards $2 million to six recipients in the Biomedical Graduate Studies Program at Penn for each of the next four years.

Growing Lungs in a Lab

As the demand for lung transplants continues to rise, so does the need for safe and effective transplanted lungs. Bioengineered lungs grown or created in labs are one way of meeting this demand. The problem – as is ever the case with transplants – is the high rate of rejection. The results of success are always better when cells from the patient herself (or autologous cells) are used in the transplanted organ.

Recently Joan Nichols, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine, and Microbiology and Immunology, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, successfully bioengineered the first human lung. Her latest study published in Science Translational Medicine describes the next milestone for Dr. Nichols’ lab: successfully transplanting a bioengineered lung into a pig.

These advances are possible due to Dr. Nichols’ work with autologous cells, continuing the trend of “on demand” medicine (i.e. medicine tailor for a specific patient) which we track on this blog. Dr. Nichols’ particular method is to build the structure of a lung (using the harvested organs of dead pigs in this case), de-cellularize the tissue, and then repopulate it with autologous cells from the intended recipient. This way, the host body recognizes the cells as friendly and the likelihood of acceptance increases. While further study is needed before clinical trials can begin, Dr. Nichols and her team see the results as extremely promising and believe that we are on the way to bioengineered human lungs.

Nanoparticles Combat Dental Plaque

Combine a diet high in sugar with poor oral hygiene habits and dental cavities likely result. The sugar triggers the formation of an acidic biofilm (plaque) on the teeth, eroding the surface. Early childhood dental cavities affect one in every four children in the United States and hundreds of millions more globally. It’s a particularly severe problem in underprivileged populations.

In a study published in Nature Communications this week, researchers led by Hyun (Michel) Koo of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine in collaboration with David Cormode of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science used FDA-approved nanoparticles to effectively disrupt biofilms and prevent tooth decay in both an experimental human-plaque-like biofilm and in an animal model that mimics early-childhood caries.

Dr. David Cormode is Assistant Professor of Radiology and Secondary Faculty in Bioengineering at Penn. His research includes Bioengineering Therapeutics, Devices and Drug Delivery and Biomaterials.

Read the full story at Penn Today. Media contact Katherine Unger Baillie.

Stopping the Flu from Catching On

The flu virus is notoriously contagious, but there may be a way to stop it before it starts. In order for the influenza virus to successfully transport itself into the cells of a human host, it needs a certain protein called hemagglutinin which mediates its entry. By interfering with this vital ingredient, researchers can effectively kill the virus.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discusses a method of disrupting the process by which this protein causes the virus to infect its host cells. This discovery could lead to more effective flu vaccines that target the flu virus at its root, rather than current ones which have to keep up with the ongoing changes and mutations of the virus itself. Indeed, the need for different vaccines to address various “strains” of the flu is moot if a vaccine can stop the virus from infecting people in the first place.

This breakthrough results from grants provided by the NSF, the Welch Foundation, and the NIH to Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. Lead researchers José Onuchic, PhD, Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Chair of Physics and Professor of Chemistry and BioSciences at Rice University; Jianpeng Ma, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University and Lodwick T. Bolin Professor of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine; and Qinghua Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine. Their team will continue to study the important role proteins play in how the flu virus operates.

People and Places

This week, we congratulate a few new leadership appointments in bioengineering. First, the Georgia Institute of Technology appointed Penn BE alumnus Andréas García, PhD, the new Executive Director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. In addition to his new role, Dr. García is also the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Regents Professor. He conducts research in biomolecular, cellular, and tissue engineering and collaborates with a number of research centers across Georgia Tech. Dr. García graduated with both his M.S.E. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Bioengineering.

Secondly, the University of Minnesota Institute for Engineering in Medicine (IEM) named the Distinguished McKnight University Professor John Bischof, PhD, their new director. This follows Dr. Bischof’s recent position as interim director for the IEM. Dr. Bischof earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, and is currently a faculty member in both the Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Departments at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Bischof holds the Carl and Janet Kuhrmeyer Chair in Mechanical Engineering.

At an earlier, but no less impressive, point in his academic career, Tanishq Abraham became the youngest person to graduate with a degree in biomedical engineering. The fifteen year old recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Davis. As part of his graduating research, Abraham – a first-generation Indian-American – designed a device to measure the heart rates of burn victims. Abraham has already been accepted by U.C. Davis for his Ph.D. and plans to continue on to his M.D.

Finally, the work continues to create affordable and well-fitted prosthetics, especially for remote, rural, and underfunded areas both in the U.S. and abroad. Unfortunately, recent studies published by the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the India Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT) demonstrate the uphill nature of this battle; stating that India alone contains over half a million upper limb amputees. To address this explosive population, researchers and entrepreneurs are using new bioengineering technologies such as digital manufacturing, 3D scanning and printing, and more. The best innovations are those that save time, resources, and money, without sacrificing quality in the prosthetic or patient comfort. Penn Engineering’s Global Biomedical Service (GBS) program similarly responds to this need, as each year students follow an academically rigorous course with a two-week immersive trip to China, where they learn how to create and fit prosthetic limbs for local children in conjunction with Hong Kong Polytechnic University.