Month: April 2016

Megan Mancuso was awarded a three year 2016 NSF Fellowship. This year there were 2,000 awards given from the nearly 17,000 applications received.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program acknowledges and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at U.S. institutions.

Megan is conducting exciting research on changes in bone density in Professor Karen Troy’s lab.

On March 14, 2016 WPI celebrated the induction of faculty members who have received patents into the WPI chapter of National Academy of Inventors. Honors were also given for those patents that have been licensed and those that have resulted in a product. IGERT faculty inducted include: Kris Billiar, Terri Camesano, Tanja Dominko, Glenn Gaudette, George Pins, and Marsha Rolle.

Glenn Gaudette has been promoted to Professor of Biomedical Engineering. He joined the WPI faculty in 2006 after holding faculty appointments at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He conducts research in the area of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, with the specific aim of developing new methods for restoring function in hearts damaged by myocardial infarction. With support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and other organizations, he has experimented with the use of adult mesenchymal stem cells to regenerate cardiac tissue and has used fibrin microthreads to stitch stem cells into heart tissue. The microthreads formed the basis of VitaThreads, a company Gaudette founded with George Pins, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Actively engaged in bringing an entrepreneurial focus to teaching and research at WPI, he worked with other faculty members to win a $488,500 award from the Kern Family Foundation to promote entrepreneurship and innovation at the university. The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) named him its 2015 Outstanding Faculty of the Year. He holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Karen Troy has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. She joined the WPI faculty in 2013, after serving as an assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Laboratory, she conducts research on orthopaedic, whole-body, and comparative biomechanics. Current projects include a study of how bone structure changes over time in adult women who voluntarily apply mechanical loads to their bones and the measurement of changes in bone strength in individuals with spinal cord injury. Troy, who earned a PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Iowa, received the Orthopaedic Research Society’s New Investigator Recognition Award in 2010.