SPRING 2014 1

Fine-Tuning MRI Techniques to Help MS patients

Bioengineering at MasonN e w S l e T T e R o F T H e D e pa RTM e N T o F B I o e N g I N e e R I N g

G e o r G e M a s o n U n i v e r s i t y | V o l g e n a u s c h o o l o f e n g i n e e r i n g | s p r i n G 2 0 1 4 | i s s U e 4

Advances in neuroimaging have revo-lutionized the way we look at and un-

derstand neurodegenerative diseases, and they have laid the foundation for develop-ing new ways to help patients who suffer from them. These advances have given us unique insight into the development and progression of brain lesions, brain atrophy, and more targeted therapeutic responses. Detecting such brain changes and un-raveling patterns in them, using different MRI techniques, is the focus of Vasiliki Ikonomidou’s work.

Ikonomidou is an assistant professor in Mason’s Bioengineering Department and has a joint appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the Volgenau School of Engineering. She came to Mason in 2009 from the National Institute of Neurological Disor-ders and Stroke (NINDS) where she had worked under Jeff Duyn in the Laboratory for Functional and Molecular Imaging,

Advanced MRI Section, developing high-contrast anatomical MRI techniques. From 2006 on—as part of the Neuroim-munology Branch of NINDS—she spe-cialized in brain imaging, using MRI and PET, in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Ikonomidou calls her general research area “Data Mining in Neuroimaging Datasets”—the extraction of patterns from neuroimaging datasets that are indicative of disease or its progression. Her research involves big data on many different levels—myriad images consisting of gigabytes of data from which features are extracted that in turn are broken down into such categories as volume, intensity values, and levels/growth of lesions. Using image and signal processing, as well as data mining techniques, she and her stu-dents sift through these endless numbers to find algorithms, hoping that these searches will at some point be automated and programmed to help doctors deliver fast and reliable diagnoses.

But big data is not the only challenge in her research. “MS is a kind of random disease,” says Ikonomidou. Not only is it hard to project outcomes, but there are always unexpected surprises in the way MS takes its course in patients, although

“there is some order there,” she says. Using dimensionality reduction techniques, she and her colleagues at the University of Maryland were able to detect progression patterns independent of the more random

continued on page 3

i n t h i s i ssu e

New 3D Printers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Virginia Tech’s Equine Medical Center . . . .4

Biomedical Engineering Society . . . . . . . . .5

Large-Scale Metagenome Analysis . . . . . .6

Senior Design: Robotic Arm Feeder . . . . . .8

Katona Scholarship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

Speech Recognition System . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Student Highlights and Awards . . . . . . . 10

Bioengineering Summer Under- graduate Research Experience . . . . . . . . . 11

Recent Faculty Awards and Grants . . . . . 11

New Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

lesion develop-ment. And using data from a clinical trial performed by collaborators at the University of Pado-va, students at the Neuroimaging Lab-oratory are working on the development of automated algorithms that characterize lesion progression over time.

Ikonomidou is currently partnering with Mason’s Sports Medicine Assessment Re-search and Testing (SMART) Laboratory to conduct research on concussions and is working with her students on data mining in neuroimaging datasets. In collabora-tion with the U.S. Army’s Night Vision Lab, she is using the same data-mining techniques for human signature detection.

Vasiliki Ikonomidou

ASSIP students working in Ikonomidou’s lab on one of her projects

2 bioengineering.gmu.edu

Dear Friends, Faculty, and Alumni of Mason Bioengineering—

fr o m t h e ch ai r

This has been an exciting year for our Department of Bioengineering and

I am very pleased to share our news with you. Our goal with this newsletter is to keep you updated on the progress our department, students, and faculty are achieving toward the creation of a national-ly recognized program. Our collaborations with national laboratories and medical facilities in the Washington, D.C., metro-politan area including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC), and the Food and Drug Admin-istration are creating opportunities for both research and education. This year, we have made significant progress:

• Accreditationofthebachelorofsciencedegree in Bioengineering by the Accredi-tation Board for Engineering and Tech-nology

• Developmentofonlineeducationthrough our launch of a Bioengineering 101 distance learning program

• Creationofa“BioengineeringHealth Informatics” concentration for our students to meet the rapidly expanding employment demands for this area

• 190studentsenrolledinourundergrad-uate Bioengineering major

• Outstandingstudents:35percent of new Bioengineering freshmen are honors students with three new University Scholars declaring bio- engineering as their major

• BioengineeringPhDprogramplanapproved by the Mason Board of Visitors

• Newhire:Dr.LaurenceBray,ResearchAssistant Professor, with expertise in neuromorphic engineering and computational neuroscience, joined the department. We will be recruiting to fill a new tenured or tenure-track faculty position this spring.

• NewgrantfundingfromtheNationalScience Foundation, NIH, and the Department of Defense

• Establishmentofaclinicalinternshipprogram for our students, developed in collaboration with Inova Fairfax Hospital’s Department of Neuroscience

• Thevastmajorityofundergraduatestudents are pursuing and earning opportunities for funded research through external summer internships and the Mason Students as Scholars program. This past summer, our students held internships at the NIH, NRL, and CNMC.

• Scholarshipdevelopmentiswellunderway. We are working to establish the department’s first named scholarship in honor of Professor Peter Katona. Once endowed, the scholarship will support an outstanding undergraduate student in Bioengineering.

With the arrival of a new university president, Ángel Cabrera, and new dean of the Volgenau School of Engineering, Kenneth Ball, we are charting an exciting path forward for Bioengineering at Mason. I am looking forward to the continued expansion of the department and its breadth of research as well as the next group of exceptional students joining Bioengineering.

Sincerely,

Joseph J. Pancrazio, PhD Professor and Chair, Bioengineering Department

WE ARE NOW ABET ACCREDITED!

SPRING 2014 3

Student exhibits Design Skills Using New 3D printers

The Bioengineering Department recentlyacquiredtwo3Dprinters

to support research and education.Undergraduate students will have access to the printers through senior design and through a new engineering course, Engineering Fabrication and Design. However, the person who is spending most of his time with these fascinating new instruments is Juan Pablo “JP” Moneta, a senior electrical engineering undergradu-ate student working as a lab assistant for the Bioengineering Department.

To find out more about how and for what purposethe3Dprintersareused,we sat down and talked with Moneta, who started working at the Neural Engineering Lab under the work-study program through the Office of Financial Aid. Moneta explains that his previous “real job” was as an engineering technician.

“I did civil engineering design using the same AutoCAD software we use in the lab forthe3Ddesign,”hesays.“Butforthemost part I always created 2D designs,

which means I am basically working in an improved version of my previous job.”

It makes sense that his work experience laid the groundwork for earning more responsibilities, and soon he was employed asalabassistantinchargeof3Ddesignand printing for the Bioengineering Department. Initially, he helped bioengi-neering affiliate professor Nathalia Peixoto with a project, and she quickly noticed his talent for design and new ideas.

3Dprintersworkatabout200degreesFahrenheit and use specific thermoplastics for molding products. So far, Moneta has used the printers to design and build several versions of a top plate for

Juan Pablo “JP” Moneta with the 3D printer.

MRI Techniques, continued from page 1

Vasiliki Ikonomidou, assistant professor of the Department of Bioengineering, with one of her ASSIP students

Ikonomidou with her graduate research assistant, Vikas Kotari, and her mentored ASSIP group

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

—Isaac Newton

microelectrode arrays, which, when connect-ed to brain tissue, measure the behavior of neurons. He also built a sample holder and a neuro-implant holder for in vivo surgeries. These are basically prototype devices to hold electrode probes, which are eventually inserted into a rodent brain. Moneta, who plans to graduate this fall, would like to work full-time for two years before he returns to school for his master’s degree.

Ikonomidou hopes to come up with tech-niques for better images, which in turn could lead to automated pattern detection for various diseases.

Ikonomidou, a native of Greece, teaches BENG 220 Biomedical Systems and Sig-nals,BENG499/ECE590MedicalImageProcessing, and ECE 699 Medical Image Analysis.

“Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.”

—Louis Pasteur

4 bioengineering.gmu.edu

s t u d e n t Pr o fi le : l au r e n m ar fu r t

Mason Internship program partners with Virginia Tech’s equine Medical CenterBy Cathy Cruise

Combining a lifelong interest in horses with an opportunity to participate

in hands-on medical research proved a perfect match last summer for Lauren Marfurt, a junior in the Bioengineering Program at Mason. Marfurt was chosen to be the first Mason student to intern at Virginia Tech’s Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center in Leesburg, Virginia, which newly partnered with Mason’s Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP).

Marfurt’s 40-minute daily commute took her into the rolling hills of Leesburg and to the small but impressive laboratory situated amidst pristine stables, pastures, and a state-of-the-art hospital geared precisely for horses, ponies, donkeys, and mules.

“The ASSIP program was basically a nine-to-five job,” Marfurt says. “I would go in and do whatever needed to be done—helping to collect blood from a horse, running ELISA tests, organizing and analyzing data. It was a great experi-ence because I got to work in the lab, as well as interact with the people at the hospital.”

Marfurt heard about the internship from Bioengineering Department chair Joseph Pancrazio. “He thought it would be a really great opportunity to get lab experi-ence as well as experience outside the university,” Marfurt says. “And I thought the subject and the kind of work I’d be doing sounded really interesting.”

Pancrazio was familiar with the equine center because his wife is a lifelong equestrian. During an advising session, Marfurt mentioned to him that her family owned horses. “When I asked if she would be interested in exploring project oppor-tunities at the equine hospital if we could work it out, she was delighted,” he says.

Virginia Tech equine surgeon Jennifer Barrett, PhD, DVM, served as Marfurt’s mentor. Barrett says the equine center’s regenerative medicine and tissue engi-neering research, along with its close proximity to the Fairfax Campus, made it a good match for Mason’s Bioengineering program.

“It seemed a really synergistic relationship that we could develop, and I was excited about the opportunity,” Barrett says, adding that so far the initiative “has been wonderful for promoting equine research,

Lauren Marfurt

Jennifer Barrett, assistant professor of equine surgery at the Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center.

SPRING 2014 5

as well as for the teaching opportunity it provided.”

Marfurt’s work at the equine center involved investigating different formula-tions of platelet-rich plasma (PRP), a therapy developed for humans and animals to heal soft tissue injuries.

“The idea of PRP is to take the patient’s own blood, concentrate the platelets, and inject it into a site of injury,” Marfurt explains. “Therefore, when you have that many more platelets in the area, you have that much more activation and you improve healing.”

But the process for formulating PRP can be different for everyone, and processing that works for humans doesn’t necessarily work for horses. Marfurt’s job was to measure some of the positive healing-promoting growth factors in the PRP and also some of the negative, pro-inflammatory cytokines found in white blood cells.

“We did establish that there’s a positive correlation between platelet levels and these growth factors,” Barrett says. “One of the growth factors seems to also track with white blood cells, so there may be a positive contribution there as well. In contrast, it appears that pro-inflamma-tory cytokines increase with increasing white blood cells, so we need to deter-mine what level of white blood cells is beneficial versus detrimental to healing. We’re continuing to analyze data and perform statistical analysis.”

Barrett hopes to see a peer-reviewed report on the research submitted for publication, and she’s proud that Mar-furt’s name will be included. “To have Lauren involved in a project that ends up getting published is pretty exciting,” she says. “It is not common to have such a successful outcome for such a short project.”

Biomedical engineering Society

With the start of the fall 2012 semester, a group of active

bioengineering students came together and floated the idea of forming its own Bioengineering Society. One of the new instructors, Caitlin Laurence, associate chair of the Bioengineering Department, agreed to be the faculty mentor. She came to Mason from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Interventional Radiology. She stepped in to help her department form a new Biomedical Engineering Society.

The local chapter is set up with officers consisting of president, vice president, treasurer, etc. The Bioengineering Society started the semester with a Meet and Greet Kick-off meeting and is engaged in raising awareness to support the Katona Scholarship for Excellence in Bioengi-neering. They organized a career panel discussion with Mason’s Pre-Health advisor, Jane Rockwood, to discuss the graduate application process, lab experi-ence, shadowing, National Institute of Standards and Technology possibilities, and how nonbiomedical subjects fold into our curriculum and can be applied to

other schools such as nursing and dentistry. The invited guest speaker elaborated on the options and possibilities for bioengineers after graduation.

For the upcoming semesters, the busy executive board plans to develop a mentorship program between under- and upperclassmen to give students a heads-up and help them navigate around the sometimes seemingly overwhelming requirements. The board is also organizing a student tour of the NIH’s Critical Care Center.

Congratulations to the new executive boardforthe2013-14academicyear:Laith Alhussein (President), Mohamed Ali (Vice President), Zeb Zaheer (Secre-tary), Mohamed Lahlou (Treasurer), and Nimra Ahmed (Events Manager).

Overall, the Bioengineering Society has been a great success. It promotes dialogue among freshmen and upperclassmen and facilitates student information access so students have resources to address more detailed questions.

For more information on how to join, please visit bioengineering.gmu.edu/bmes.

Biomedical Engineering Society members at Engineering Week—Lauren Marfurt (left) and Manish Kakadiya

6 bioengineering.gmu.edu

Dr. Huzefa Rangwala, Assistant Professor of the Dept. of Computer Science and Affiliate Assistant Professor of the Dept. of Bioengineering

Using algorithms to Conduct large-Scale Metagenome analysisBy Robin Herron

Huzefa Rangwala is a problem solver; no, make that a big problem solver.

As a computer scientist, Rangwala is hungry for data on which to test his algorithms. And metagenomics—the collective genome of communities of microbes—provides lots of data.

“If you ask a computer scientist what a genome is, he’ll say it’s a long, long string of characters—it’s a big sequence. Com-puter scientists get very excited about these kinds of structures,” he explains.

In 2007, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome project to study the microbial communities that live within the body and even on a person’s skin: bacteria, fungi, and viruses. More recently, the Earth Microbiome project was established to analyze the microbial communities that live on the planet. Understanding the functions and relationships of these microbial communi-ties to one another—and to their hosts—begins with sequencing the DNA of these communities or reading their structure.

But they are so numerous that innovative and scalable computational algorithms must be developed to do it. This is where Rangwala comes in.

As an undergraduate in his native India, Rangwala was trained strictly in computer science. But when he took a bioinformatics class at the University of Minnesota while studying for his PhD, he says, “I got more and more interested in understanding the biology and developing algorithms or methods that might be applicable to biologists.”

Shortly after joining Mason in 2008, Rangwala connected with Mason environ-mental biologist Patrick Gillevet, director of the Microbiome Analysis Center. A mutually fruitful collaboration developed, and Rangwala has collaborated on several joint projects.

Rangwala says, “Pat has all these biological questions with big challenges, and I’m

here to solve those for him. Metagenome association is one of the projects he’s working on related to the field of data mining—finding patterns in data.”

“Huzefa has been a very valuable colleague and collaborator,” Gillevet says. “He has helped develop novel algorithms and tools to analyze the microbiome data.”

In developing algorithms to analyze such data, Rangwala

aims for speed, efficiency, and accuracy. “If your algorithm is faster than someone else’s algorithm, then you’ll be able to process the data much faster. We want to split the algorithm and run this algorithm on several machines. Doing that can be challenging because different parts of the algorithm may need to finish at the same time or they might have some sort of dependencies on each other. So, when I’m designing my algorithms, I’m thinking, what is the best way to find concurrency?”

Above that, Rangwala wants to develop algorithms that are user friendly.

When he first began working with Gillevet, Rangwala developed a laboratory information management system for him that included a web interface.

Gillevet’s lab has a sequencing machine that produces about 100,000 sequences of data per run. “How do you store this data efficiently, how do you back it up, how do you transfer it over your Internet or cable? All these factors become core issues, and he was facing these kinds of problems,” Rangwala says.

SPRING 2014 7

With the management system in place, the two were able to collaborate more efficiently. “He’s providing me some biological expertise and data, and I’m providing him these tools within a web interface that are really helpful to him. He can proceed with his analysis on his own and repeat them as often as he likes,” Rangwala says.

“He also wanted to analyze these data sets individually on a single machine,” Rangwala continues. “But that takes too long. So we came up with some ideas on approximations. Instead of analyzing the entire set, could we cluster them?” A recent paper Rangwala published with colleagues explained how they developed a process to do that: putting similar

examples or similar objects in the same groups and analyzing the representatives for each group.

With the technology available, Rangwala can sequence all the bacteria on a slide sample. But since all the bacteria are mixed together, the sequence doesn’t tell biologists what they need to know: what kinds of bacteria there are, how abundant they are, which are the dominant species, and what the bacteria do.

“That’s a huge problem,” Rangwala says. He’s now working on approaches that will extract the underlying relationship between these different problems— combine them and produce a better annotation of the bacterial species.

In addition to working with Gillevet, Rangwala is collaborating with other researchers at Mason and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). His research is supported by grants from Mason, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the USDA.

“My job is to create new algorithms, but I’m excited that [my work] has an impact in the fields of biology and environmental sciences right now,” Rangwala says.

Q u i ck fac t s ab o u t m a s o n :

AffordableCollegesOnline.com

(AC Online) recently identified the 20

engineering programs in the United

States with the highest return on

investment, and George Mason

University is ranked number 6.

Students who graduate from these

programs earn more over their

lifetimes, on average, than engineering

graduates from other institutions, after

subtracting tuition and fees. You can

view the full list of programs and

colleges via the following page:

AC Online: Best Colleges for Engineering Majors: www.affordablecolleges online.org/college-rankings-online/engineer-ing-colleges-roi/

Mason is listed as one of Forbes’ “America’s Top Colleges.” newsdesk.gmu.edu/2013/ 07/mason-on-forbes-americas- top-colleges-list/

Final Prototype

This research was funded by the NSF.

8 bioengineering.gmu.edu

Bioengineering Senior Design: Robotic arm Feeder

People with limited upper-body mobility, such as those with cerebral

palsy, require assistance, especially during meal time. Robotic arms have been used to help people with cerebral palsy feed themselves. But because many robotic arms are fixed onto a wheelchair, such a design not only binds the user to the wheelchair during the meal, but also limits the user’s ability to socialize. For instance, the user may avoid gatherings for fear of standing out in a crowd with a bulky wheelchair or accessing places that are difficult to navigate with a wheelchair.  A team of bioengineering students built a robotic arm that assists the user in eating, and that is not fixed onto a wheelchair, enabling its use in any setting. 

solutions:

• Locatebothfoodanduserusingacolorsensor.

• Controlarmmovementbypositioningfour servos using the acquired data from the system’s sensors.

Faculty Advisors: Caitlin Laurence, Nathalia Peixoto, Vasiliki Ikonomidou

Team Members—From left: Dan Stetson, Omar Rojas, Hanim Song, and Rebecca Song, with advisor Caitlin Laurence.

Katona Scholarship for excellence in Bioengineering

The Volgenau School of Engineering established the Katona Scholarship

Fund for Excellence in Bioengineering in 2012. Our goal is to raise $100,000 dollars to support an endowment for an undergraduate student scholarship in the Department of Bioengineering at Mason. To date we have reached $20,850.

Peter Katona has been a pioneer in the field of bioengineering. He served as president of the Biomedical Engineering Societyin1984and1985,andheisnow

a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Medical and Biological En-gineering, and the cardiovascular section of the American Physiological Society. He served on numerous advisory committees of academic, government, and private organizations. In 1991, Katona joined the Whitaker Foundation as vice president for biomedical engineering. His responsi-bility was to design and administer grant programs that would enhance and establish

educational programs in biomedical engi-neering at U.S. universities. In July 2000, he was appointed president and CEO of the Whitaker Foundation, a position he held until the foundation’s closing in June 2006. After his appointment in September 2006 as professor of electrical and computer engineering at George Mason, he started to lay the groundwork for what was to be-come Mason’s new Department of Bioengi-neering and has been the cornerstone of its development and growth ever since.

SPRING 2014 9

Speech Recognition System Helps Those with Communication DisabilitiesBy JS Ham

The goal of our project, Speech Rec-ognition System for Persons with

Disability, is to create a speech recognition system that can be used by persons with communication disabilities. Specifically, our project focuses on a client named Stephen Kozma who has cerebral palsy. Working with Professor Joseph Pan-crazio, we are creating a system that can understand Kozma’s nonlinear words to give him the ability to communicate with greater ease and to better control various aspects of his environment.

Some individuals with severe speech disabilities have severe motor activity handicaps as well. Those limited only by motor activity (e.g., those who are paralyzed), but who can still speak clearly, could control something with their voice. However, voice control is far more difficult when a person has a speech disability in addition to having impaired motor activity. Our goal is to make a system that can understand a much larger range of

Team members, from left: Johnny McLaughlin, J. S. Ham (project manager), Stephen Kozma (client), and James Beatty

Peter Katona

vocalizations than the standard, commer-cial speech-recognition systems.

There are two primary steps we plan to make in this process. The first involves extracting a feature set from the audio of the person speaking by finding its mel (short for melody) scale cepstral coeffi-cients. This is one of the most common methods of feature extraction in speech recognition because it highlights the frequencies according to the mel scale, which accentuates the frequencies best

heard and produced in human speech. Once these features are extracted, they then form a basis of comparison. Feature sets stored from a “training mode” will be compared to features extracted from the user’s speech in “detection mode.”

The system then compares audio input with the feature sets and determines the most accurate match. Finally, the system can send control signals through a basic API suite so that it can interact with po-tentially any computer-controlled system.

The faculty, staff, and students here are very humbled to have Peter Katona on staff, and feel there is no better tribute to his work than to support this scholarship for students to continue his legacy.

If you would like to donate, please contact Jennifer Lamb at jlamb@gmu.edu or at

Attn: Jennifer Lamb George Mason University 4400UniversityDrive,MS4A3 Fairfax,VA22030

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation…even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

—Leonardo da Vinci

10 bioengineering.gmu.edu

congratulations to our newest alumni!

SUMMeR 2012Santosh Poudel

Fall 2012Andrew NelsonBinod Silwal

SpRINg 2012Noran HusseinBrittney WooleyAmanda Zuzolo

At convocation, from left: Brittney Wooley, Noran Hussein, and Amanda Zuzolo

Student Highlights and awards

Emily Eastlake and Von Botteicher received the “Distinguished Academic Achievement and Commitment to Scholarship” departmental award.

Katrina Nguyen was accepted to Chil-dren’s National Medical Center’s summer internship. During her time there she worked on an inexpensive mechanism replicating a partial seizure in the SimBaby mannequin using common bicycle components. She is also a recipi-entofthefall2013UndergraduateResearch Scholars Program (URSP) award.

Cameron Grady was accepted into the prestigious National Institutes of Health Summer Internship Program. Cameron worked side-by-side with other scientists in the biomedical research area of bioinformatics. To learn more about the internship, visit www.training.nih.gov/programs/sip.

Fall 2013 URSP awards went to the following Bioengineering students:

Student Mentor project Title

Anuraag Ravikumar(Bioengineering)

Qi Wei(Department of Bioengineering)

“Biomechanical Analysis of Neck and Shoulder Movement Associated with Neck Pain Syndrome”

Justin Sellman(Bioengineering)

Qi Wei(Department of Bioengineering)

“The Learning of Biomechanical Co-ordination During Parallel Bar Swing Training”

Katherine McDonald(Bioengineering)

Siddhartha Sidkar(Department of Bioengineering)

“Design and Fabrication of Ultrasound Probe Stabilization Cuff for Upper Extremity Prosthetic Control Research”

Katrina Nguyen(Bioengineering)

Wilsaan Joiner (Department of Bioengineering)

“Influence of Method of Applied Perturbing Force on Retention of Motor Adaptation”

Kathryn Radom was selected for the 2013HollingsUndergraduateScholarshipProgram, which includes an academic scholarship and an internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in summer 2014. She was the only one selected from George Mason University! To learn more about the

Santosh Poudel

scholarship, visit www.oesd.noaa.gov/scholarships/hollings.html.

German Borda was the recipient of a summer2013URSPaward.Heworkedwith his mentor Nitin Agrawal on “The Role of Microtubules in Cell Cycle Regulation of Cancer Cells.”

SPRING 2014 11

Recent Faculty awards and grants

New Faculty

Laurence Bray, PhD Research Assistant Professor, Bioengineering Department

PhD Biomedical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno (2010)

MS Bioengineering, Clemson University(2005)

BS Biological Sciences, Clemson University (2004)

Before coming to George Mason University, Laurence Bray worked as a research assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and acquired expertise in computational neuroscience by modeling biological neural networks to replicate brain dynamics underlying navigational learning. Bray focused on improving her models and integrating them in a virtual neurorobotic environment to study high-level human behaviors (e.g., navigation). Here at George Ma-son, she continues her research in the field of computational neuroscience working with Wilsaan Joiner in de-veloping a biologically realistic neural computational model of sensorimotor adaptation. Her main interests are brain modeling, real-time systems, and virtual neurorobotics.

Joseph Pancrazio of the Department of Bioengineering received $20,000 from Excet Inc. and the U.S. Army for his project, “Electrophysiological Analyses of Human Neural Progenitor Cells,” and $172,000 from the National Institutes ofHealthforhisproject,“U13:NeuralInterfaces Conference.”

Nathalia Peixoto (Electrical and Comput-er Engineering Department and Depart-ment of Bioengineering), Daniel Ander-son (Mathematical Sciences Department), and John Cressman (Krasnow Institute) received$360,000fromtheNSFfortheirproject, “Identification and Control for Pattern Steering in Dynamical Networks.”

Huzefa Rangwala of the Computer ScienceDepartmentreceived$550,000 as a CAREER award from the NSF for his project, “CAREER: Annotating the Microbiome using Machine Learning Methods.”

Carolina Salvador Morales of the Bioengineering Department received $74,000 from the NSF for her project, “Exploring the Role of Polymer Thermo-dynamics in the Formation of Patches on Polymer-Core-Shell Particles.”

Amarda Shehu of the Computer Science Department and Estela Blaisten-Barojas of the College of Science received $100,000 from the Jeffress Memorial Trust for their project, “Probabilistic Search Algorithms Meet Statistical Mechanisms: Powerful Novel Tools for Peptide Modeling.”

Siddhartha Sikdar of the Department of Bioengineering received $48,000 from the Department of Veterans Affairs for his project, “Asymptomatic Carotid Stenosis: Cognitive Function and Plaque Cor-relates.”

Siddhartha Sikdar (Bioengineering Department), Jana Kosecka (Computer Science Department), Huzefa Rangwala (Computer Science Department), and Houman Homayoun (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department) received$995,000fromtheNationalScience Foundation (NSF) for their project, “CPS: Synergy: A Novel Biome-chatronic Interface Based on Wearable Dynamic Imaging Sensors.”

Bioengineering Summer Undergraduate Research experience (SURe)

Every year the Bioengineering Depart-ment gives students the opportunity

to apply for SURE. SURE is a competitive program that offers support for under-graduate students to spend eight weeks during the summer working under the supervision of Bioengineering Program faculty at George Mason University. The

objective of the SURE program is to cultivate an interest in research and development for undergraduate students in the emergent field of bioengineering. Congratulations to this year’s SURE recipients: Laith Alhussein, Alex Baker, Von Botteicher, Susheela Meyyappan, Justin Sellman, and Hozaifah Zafar.

Department of Bioengineering4400 University Drive, Ms 1G5Fairfax, va 22030

bioengineering@gmu.edu

W h e r e I n n o v at I o n I s t r a d I t I o n

Then and Now

Keep in Touch!Stay connected to us… . We want to hear from you!

e-mail the department with any questions you may have about the program, and any projects featured in the newsletter at bioeng@gmu.edu.

website information can also help answer questions about the department, and provide up-to-date information about any upcoming events that the department is undertaking . Please visit our site to follow our progress at bioengineering.gmu.edu.

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