Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture debuts at Biomedical Engineering Society
At the 2007 Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) fall meeting in Los Angeles, the inaugural Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture featured Antonios Mikos from Rice University.
Vincent Turitto, Director of the Pritzker Institute, led a campaign to develop an endowment for what will become the major lecture of the annual BMES meeting. The endowment will provide funding for organizing the lecture every year. Funding for the endowment was received from the Pritzker Institute, several Pritzker family members and friends of Robert Pritzker. The endowment will grow to $175,000 over the next five years.
There was a well-attended reception celebrating the inauguration of the lectureship. Many leading BME researchers attended the reception and had the opportunity to meet Robert Pritzker and learn about the BME-related activities at IIT. IIT was well represented in Los Angeles with BME faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, several IIT administators and some recent alumni.
The inaugural lecture included a short presentation about Robert Pritzker, IIT and the Pritzker Institute for Biomedical Science and Engineering, followed by the lecture "Biomaterials in Tissue Engineering" presented by Antonios Mikos, J.W. Cox Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Epilepsy: Synchronizing Research Conference
May 2 and 3, 2008 MTCC , IIT Main Campus
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IIT's Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering Research (CINNR) will host internationally recognized experts in the field of epilepsy.
Topics to be covered include the latest research in: molecular, celullar and network mechanisms of epilepsy; mathematical and computational models; animal and human studies, and more.
The goal of the seminar is to provide an introduction into epilepsy as a disease, and to present an overview of the state-of-the-art technology in related research areas.
Conference schedule
GlucoCalc Wins Senior-level Design Competition
The creators of GlucoCalc, BME students Brendan Inouye, Vishal Kadakia, Soham Patel, Prateek Sanan and Michael Turturro, won the BME Department's 2007 Senior-level Design Competition.
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As a result, the students have been encouraged to pursue a patent for their prototype, entitled "GlucoCalc: An Inclusive Pediatric Glucose Monitor."
The winning team of students was one out of five teams that designed different blood glucose meters for BME 420, a senior-level design course required for biomedical engineering students. The objective of BME 420 is to introduce strategies and fundamental biomedical design criteria for the development of biomedical devices. At the end of the course, students in teams of about five present their projects to faculty, staff and Ph.D. students. Of the five teams, two teams designed glucose meters for pediatric applications, one designed a glucose meter for visually impaired individuals, another designed a non-invasive glucose meter and the fifth team designed an implantable glucose meter.
Artificial Sight Research Receives Support from Local Charity
The artificial sight research conducted by Phil Troyk, associate professor of biomedical engineering in IIT's Pritzker Institute of Medical Engineering, was recently awarded a check from the Ethan and Seth Fight for Sight Foundation.
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The twin boys Ethan and Seth Martinez, along with their parents Rich and Debbie, were on campus to present the check to ensure research to restore vision is continued.
After meeting Ethan and Seth, Prof. Troyk commented that the event "has reinforced my own personal dedication to using technology to conquer blindness". After the twin boys were diagnosed with retinopathy of prematurity with retinal detachment, the Martinez family founded the Ethan and Seth Fight for Sight Foundation which benefits multiple programs and organizations for the blind.
"The prospect of restoring vision to those with blindness is rapidly moving from science fiction to reality. IIT's project is distinctive in that we are attempting to communicate visual information from a camera directly to the brain, bypassing the eyes and optic nerves. In addition to providing these funds for our project, through the Fight for Sight Foundation, Rich has generously dedicated his own time and resources to advancing engineering design of the IIT visual prosthesis," says Prof. Troyk.
Prof. Troyk and IIT colleagues currently provide program management and simulator development to a 20-member team of distinguished biological, behavioral and visual scientists devoted to completing an implantable system that will provide vision. Working collaboratively with this multi-institutional team, Prof. Troyk was successful in the development of a fully implantable 1024-channel transcutaneous cortical stimulation system at IIT. The achievement marked a significant milestone in the project's 30-year history and for a number of researchers who are still seeking to understand the science behind sight, through the stimulation of the primary visual cortex, using intracortical microelectrodes.
BME Earns Top Awards at 2007 IIT Research Day
BME Professor Konstantinos Arfanakis and BME doctoral candidate Haitao Chen received top honors at the 2007 IIT Research Day.
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Professor Arfanakis received the Sigma Xi Junior Faculty Award in recognition of his outstanding potential in research. Since completing his Ph.D. in 2002 in medical physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Arfanakis has established a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) lab that both supports and strengthens the overarching research objectives of the IIT Medical Imaging Research Center.
Dr. Arfanakis' research interests include the development of MRI data acquisition, image reconstruction, data analysis, and visualization techniques, and the application of these methods for the diagnosis and monitoring of neurological diseases. The impact of his work is demonstrated by the fact that his papers have already been cited more than 400 times.
Haitao Chen, BME doctoral candidate, also received the Sigma Xi Award for Excellence in Research, Doctoral Student category. Mr. Chen completed his doctoral degree in May 2007 and was a research assistant since the fall of 2002. His research on the use of magnetic particles for detoxification of blood or as drug carriers is extremely valuable and has made a novel contribution to both basic research and medicine. A highly prolific researcher, Dr. Chen published five papers as first author and served as collaborating author on ten others during his tenure at IIT.
