Brian Litt Promoted to Professor of Bioengineering and Neurology
Penn Engineering is pleased to announce the promotion of Brian Litt to Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Neurology. In his announcement, David F. Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor and Chair of Bioengineering, said, “We are very proud of Dr. Litt’s wonderful accomplishments and we congratulate him on this achievement.” Dr. Litt’s laboratory focuses […]
New Faculty: Christopher Fang-Yen
Penn Engineering is pleased to announce the appointment of Christopher Fang-Yen, Ph.D. as assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering. Dr. Fang-Yen obtained his Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics from Stanford University in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. He comes to Penn Engineering following […]
Bioengineering Students and Alumni Receive NSF Research Awards
Graduate Recipients Brent Showalter, doctoral student in the laboratory of Dawn Elliott, associate professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering, and Rachel Truitt, doctoral student in the laboratory of Kenneth B. Margulies, professor of Medicine, have been awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships by the National Science Foundation. Showalter earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical […]
Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas Receive CSRS Award
Macrophage as a Potential Biomarker for Imaging Radicular Pain, a paper co-authored by Beth Winkelstein and Andrew Tsourkas, has been selected as the First Place Basic Science Research Award Paper by the Cervical Spine Research Society’s (CSRS) Research Committee. The research was performed by students Dan Hubbard (Ph.D. ’08) and Christine Weisshaar in Winkelstein’s Spine […]
Cracking the code inside a worm’s brain
Christopher Fang-Yen, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, studies worms. Specifically, Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans in short). These transparent, one-millimeter-long creatures have just 302 neurons, and their study allows Fang-Yen to combine his training as a physicist, optical engineer and neurobiologist. Interested in bringing his expertise in imaging devices to biology, Fang-Yen states, […]
Two Approaches to Tissue Engineering Converge
Recently, Jason Burdick and Robert Mauck talked about their collaborations on cartilage and meniscus regeneration and engineered biomaterials. Q. What projects do the two of you work on together? Jason: Rob and I are primarily working on two projects in collaboration, both related to musculoskeletal tissue engineering. The first project is to develop strategies for […]
Can We Help to Heal Injures Without Causing Scarring?
By transplanting injured fetal sheep tendon tissue into an adult environment, Lou Soslowsky and his colleagues in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory, have astonishingly shown that tendons can heal in a scar-less, regenerative manner rather than through a scar-filled, reparative mechanism, a finding that would greatly benefit our tendons when injured. Scar tissue formed during […]
Building Better Building Blocks
Designer Proteins, Molecular Networks, and Cells One of the ongoing challenges in cancer detection and therapy is to target imaging agents and deliver toxic drugs only to tumor cells and not to normal cells. To achieve this critical selectivity, Casim Sarkar, assistant professor of bioengineering, is targeting protein antigens that are uniquely or abundantly expressed […]
Understanding Cancer
Drug Efficacy and Development of the Oncosimulator “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Ravi Radhakrishnan. “We don’t even know what we are looking for.” What he wants to know sounds simple: why a drug therapy for non-small cell lung cancer and glioblastoma (cancer of the brain) works in only about 5 […]
Translational Research
From Bench to Bedside and Back Again in Pediatric Brain Injury Susan Margulies and her colleagues used to study a brain or lung injury in vivo in the lab and only record what happened. If an animal stopped breathing, they observed. If its blood pressure fell, they waited. But clinicians who are integral members of […]