Writing

BU ENGineer Spring 2017 Magazine

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I served as the lead writer and managing editor for the Fall 2016 issue of ENGineer magazine.

Notable writing credits:

  • Page 3-4: “Study Supports Final Pivotal Trial of Bionic Pancreas”
  • Page 6: “NSF Grant Funds Neurophotonics Program”
  • Page 7: “ECE Symposium Honors Career of Professor Emeritus Theodore Moustakas”
  • Page 8: “Khalil Honored with Presidential Early Career and NIH New Innovator Awards”
  • Page 9: “BU Teams Earn Top Honors at iGEM Jamboree”
  • Page 10-21: “Cover story: Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts”
  • Page 22-23: “Small Problem. Big Solution.”
  • Page 23-24: “Time on Her Side”
  • Page 26: “An Internet of Cars”
  • Page 27: “Two Faculty Members Elected to BME Society Leadership,” “ENG Faculty Elevated to Prestigious Fellowships”

Duan Receives NSF CAREER Award

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Research and Outreach will Focus on Carbon Nanofluidics

Assistant Professor Chuanhua Duan (ME, MSE) netted a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in recognition of his outstanding research and teaching capabilities. He will receive more than half a million dollars over the next five years to pursue high-impact projects that combine research and educational objectives. Duan’s research will focus on developing an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that affect the flow of water and ions through nanoscale graphene conduits.

“This exciting project is at the intersection of fluid mechanics, nanotechnology, and materials science,” said Professor Alice White (ME, MSE), chair of ME. “It will inform the design of novel nanoporous membranes with impact on some of the world’s largest challenges.”

Graphene, a flexible sheet of pure carbon one atom thick, is a material that allows surprisingly easy passage for liquids and ions with high selectivity. Graphene sheets can be stacked horizontally to form channels, called graphene nanochannels, or rolled into carbon nanotubes. These structures could potentially be used for water desalination, improving the efficiency of batteries and fuel cells, lab-on-a-chip technologies and other biomedical applications. However, when researchers have tried to repeat experiments, large discrepancies in the data attributed to variables such as curvature, ion density, and membrane structure have resulted.

To address this challenge, Duan will use his NSF CAREER award to study water and ion transport in single graphene nanochannels and single carbon nanotubes with different sizes, surface properties, and substrate materials.  He will also perform molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate underlying mechanisms revealed by his experimental studies.  Using this combined experimental-computational approach, he expects to achieve a complete understanding of mass transport in carbon nanofluidic conduits.

“My lab has developed a novel technique, inspired by capillary flow, to accurately measure water and ion transport in a single carbon conduit,” said Duan. “To fully understand the effect that each variable has on the process and resolve discrepancies in previously reported results, this level of accuracy is key.”

In addition to the research component of his CAREER project, Duan will fulfill the educational objectives by creating a module to teach carbon nanofluidics to K-12 students for the Technology Innovation Scholars Program (TISP). In addition, Duan will work with an animator to develop a cartoon that depicts fast-mass transport in carbon nanofluidics using anthropomorphized molecules.

“For example, in one scene we will show water molecules wearing ice skates to demonstrate how easily they slip down the smooth walls of the carbon nanotubes,” said Duan. “Since I know the transport process well, if I can help them visualize that process with something that is familiar, it makes learning about it more accessible.”


Boston University College of Engineering

Appears on: BU ENG Website, BU Research

Forging a New Path

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New Outreach Initiative will Educate Community about Synthetic Biology

After a morning of composing DNA out of play dough and learning about genetically engineered mosquitos, the group of high school students put their heads together to solve an age-old question for Bostonians: how do we clean up the Charles River? Proposing solutions like programming microbes to eat toxins and simultaneously synthesize beneficial molecules, it was clear the group of students drew on everything they had learned earlier that day to find a solution using a relatively new field of study: synthetic biology, or engineering living systems.

When the National Science Foundation awarded the Living Computing Project, spearheaded by Associate Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE), a $10 million dollar grant to facilitate synthetic biology using computer engineering, one of the stipulations was an outreach component. The idea was to get research out into the community that is unfamiliar with the field of synthetic biology and foster a career readiness pipeline to the synthetic biology workforce. But Densmore wanted to take it even further than that.

“The NSF grant for the Living Computing Project has a five year research agenda, but we wanted to create an outreach program that would outlive it,” says Densmore. “STEM Pathways aims to formalize the outreach efforts and make it easier to funnel people to the right resources if they exist, and to create them if they don’t. Any individual has a low bandwidth working alone, but with a united effort, you can have a bigger impact.”

STEM Pathways held its inaugural launch event, the Mini-Jamboree, on Feb. 11 when high school students, parents, undergraduates and educators came together for a day of interactive activities to learn more about the field of synthetic biology and how it can be used to solve real-world problems, both globally and locally. According to Tiffany E. Grant, the program coordinator, this is the first of many events that STEM Pathways hopes to host for students of all ages.

“Events like the Mini-Jamboree will expose young people to this exciting new industry and show them how it can improve society,” says Grant. “Our four power words are ‘inspire, mentor, train and empower,’ and the vehicle of choice we are using to strengthen and inform our community is synthetic biology.”

STEM Pathways will follow a three-prong approach to begin a cycle of long-term exposure to the field of synthetic biology, starting with high school students. By providing opportunities to participate in synthetic biology-related activities and providing resources to educators to include in their curricula, awareness will begin at a much earlier age. Undergraduates will have the opportunity to participate in synthetic biology research, mentoring and other educational opportunities to prepare them for careers in the field.  STEM Pathways will also tap industry leaders to establish partnerships for networking, career readiness development, and other resources.

“Not only is this initiative aligned with the mission statement of the College, but also it is addressing a national need to create a more diverse, informed workforce,” says Assistant Dean for Outreach and Diversity Gretchen Fougere. “Synthetic biology is a cutting-edge interdisciplinary field and to understand and develop this technology, it’s important to develop a long term plan that follows students from high school to college and beyond in order to strengthen the field and its potential.”

One of the flagship events for STEM Pathways for both high school and college students will be the iGEM Jamboree, the world’s premier synthetic biology competition for students that hosted more than 5,600 participants from 42 countries last year. Teams of students conduct research up until the competition, where they present their projects for prizes. Even though iGEM is based in Cambridge, there are no local high school students represented in the competition. While BU already has two undergraduate teams in place, Densmore wants to create an opportunity for local high school students to participate in the Jamboree as well, which will allow undergraduates to become mentors to younger students.

“The field of synthetic biology not only needs talented scientists but also more considerate citizens who have a deeper understanding of the field and the potential it has for innovation,” says Divya Israni, a graduate student in Assistant Professor Ahmad Khalil’s (BME) laboratory who serves as a team mentor for BU’s iGEM teams. “It’s an opportunity to open a connection to allow undergraduate students to affect the community outside of BU.”

Boston University College of Engineering

Appears on: BU ENG Website

An Internet of Cars

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Cassandras Nets Grant to Develop Smart Car Technology

Drivers who commute in and out of Boston — deemed as one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic — have all experienced the misery of rush hour. Now, Professor Christos Cassandras (SE, ECE) is part of a research group aiming to ease commuting, and the resulting air pollution, by developing efficient, smart vehicle technology under a $4.4 million grant from the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy NEXTCAR program.

“Right now, the car’s awareness of its surrounding relies completely on the eyes and ears of the driver operating it,” says Cassandras. “But when you look at the data, humans are terrible drivers. Humans get distracted, they get tired, they can’t react as quickly to sudden or multiple simultaneous changes. But computers thrive in an environment like that, so what we want to do is create a technology that allows the car that can access information about its environment on its own, process it and act accordingly, and communicate it to other vehicles and infrastructure. Essentially, we want to create an internet of cars.”

Working with researchers at the University of Michigan and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Bosch as a corporate partner, the goal of the project is to design a control technology that enables a plug-in hybrid car to communicate with other cars and city infrastructure and act on that information. By providing cars with situational self-awareness, they will be able to efficiently calculate the best possible route, accelerate and decelerate as needed and manage their powertrain. The idea, says Cassandras, is to improve the efficiency of vehicles to the point where you can drive from point A to point B without stopping, which would have transformative positive effects.

“You can reduce fuel and energy consumption, which benefits the environment and lessens our dependence on expensive energy sources and you make the traffic system work more efficiently by reducing congestion,” says Cassandras. “The government would be satisfied if we could increase these efficiencies by 20 percent.”

Currently, obstacles like stoplights, heavy volume, and poorly designed infrastructure that causes bottlenecking contribute to heavy traffic. The constant stopping and starting not only wastes energy, but also expels the most harmful emissions into the atmosphere. On top of environmental effects, there is a human element to snarled traffic as well. This project seeks to shift this paradigm to one where travelers cooperate with each other instead of compete with each other.

“It’s hard not to behave selfishly when driving when we are all competing for the same space or to make the same green light, or to pass each other so we can reach our destinations faster. When you think of it, it’s total anarchy,” says Cassandras. “The price of this anarchy can be measured with the difference of this selfish traffic control versus social-optimal traffic control, and the only way to really achieve better social-optimal control is to remove the person from the equation and let the car make these decisions as long as safety is always guaranteed.”

The project—Ultimately Transformed and Optimized Powertrain Integrated with Automated and Novel Vehicular and Highway Connectivity Leveraged for Efficiency, or UTOPIAN VEHICLE — has several parts. Cassandras will helm several phases of the project, including one that focuses on the eco-routing algorithms to help establish the connection between vehicles, infrastructure and the environment.

Other partners will work on the cars themselves. On the spectrum of automobile autonomy, this project will generate a car that performs some functions automatically but will still require human input, which may help ease the public with the transition towards smart cars.

Boston University College of Engineering

Originally published on November 14, 2016

Appears on: BU ENG Website

Khalil Wins NIH ‘New Innovator Award’

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Project Will Focus on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

The improper and excessive use of antibiotics has led to the rise of “superbugs,” treatment-resistant bacteria causing a public health crisis of global proportions. To help combat this problem, Assistant Professor Ahmad “Mo” Khalil (BME) has been awarded a New Innovator Award under the High-Risk, High Reward program sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH). His proposed project will focus on developing new and rapid techniques for diagnosing antibiotic resistance to more effectively manage and treat gonococcal infections.

“The Center for Disease Control and Prevention keeps a running list of high-priority antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and N. gonorrhoeae is high on that list,” says Khalil. “It’s spreading very quickly and we are basically at the last line of defense in terms of options, so being able to prescribe the proper treatment quickly is critical.”

The current clinical methods for diagnosing and treating bacterial infections rely heavily on techniques that have been around since the discovery of penicillin. When a patient presents to a clinic with an infection, a sample is taken and sent to the laboratory, where the bacteria causing the infection is grown out. To determine an effective therapy, the bacteria are then grown in a panel of antibiotics to see which one inhibits bacterial growth, a process called antibiotic susceptibility testing, or AST. It’s a long process that can take days to weeks to elicit an appropriate answer to direct the targeted therapy, which is often a luxury that providers do not have. For certain infections, such as gonorrheal infections, AST is not even performed, making it difficult to know which antibiotic will be the most effective.

Because of these issues, doctors often treat with a broad-spectrum antibiotic instead of a targeted therapy, which has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistance. Khalil’s proposed project will reengineer AST using synthetic biology, which is the engineering of molecular and cellular systems for useful applications. The resulting technology he aims to develop will allow providers to prescribe a targeted therapy tailored to the particular organism in a matter of hours instead of days.

“When you treat susceptible bacteria with an antibiotic, they express specific RNAs that act as biomarkers that tell you the antibiotic will be an effective treatment, while resistant bacteria do not,” says Khalil. “We are going to be looking at harnessing these molecular signatures as the basis of a new form of rapid AST for N. gonorrhoeae.”

Khalil and his team, collaborating with Tufts University and MIT, will engineer synthetic RNAs to act as biosensors that can detect these specific biomarker RNAs and subsequently express a readable output, such as a color change. Next, they will create a tool that will allow clinicians to prepare a patient sample and test it on a single chip that contains RNA sensors for a full panel of antibiotics, with the best treatment options lighting up. This will provide clinicians with rapid information to determine a targeted therapy for a particular strain of gonorrhea, including antibiotic resistant strains.

In addition to providing networking opportunities for young investigators, as well as initiating access to NIH funding, the New Innovators Award will provide a monetary grant of $1.5 million direct to Khalil’s research project. Recipients of this highly selective honor are chosen based on innovative, ambitious project ideas.

“It is a testament to our department, and to the young people we are hiring, that we currently have three active NIH New Innovator Awardees: Xue Han, Wilson Wong, and now Mo Khalil,” says Professor John A. White (BME), chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department.

“I’m overwhelmed that I was chosen for this award, and it’s a testament to my entire lab and the hard work that they are doing here at BU,” says Khalil, echoing White’s sentiments. “It’s also exciting because synthetic biology is such a new field and this award recognizes its potential to solve real-world problems.”

Boston University College of Engineering

Originally published on October 14, 2016

Appears on: BU ENG website, BU Research