Month: January 2017

IGERT Fellow Joshua Gershlak recently acted as rapporteur at the National Academies meeting on November 7, 2016. The meeting was the semi-annual roundtable meeting on Biomedical Engineering Materials and Applications (BEMA), where the roundtable was focused on biofabrication. Speakers included leaders in the field of biofabrication in academia, industry, and government. During the meeting, Gershlak took and later presented notes on all the speakers’ talks. Gershlak was applauded for his dutiful note-taking, ability to concisely summarize all the talks, and his analysis on the overarching themes from the meeting.  He represented the WPI IGERT program when dealing with the leaders of the field.  Josh studies biomedical engineering in the Gaudette Lab where he works on decellularization of different plant species in order to develop new, pre-vascularized, sustainable scaffolds for tissue engineering.

IGERT Fellow Dan Lawler spent his summer expanding his research on sleep in C. elegans with Dr. William Schafer at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC) at the University of Cambridge England. He began behavioral screens to assess sleep of adult C. elegans containing mutations affecting neuromodulators in C. elegans. This includes the mammalian sleep implicated hormone melatonin, mutants of neuropeptide processing machinery and signaling components, and mutants shown to have altered arousal or developmental quiescence behavior. Mutants which show sleep abnormalities will be further studied to understand changes on the neural level using a behavioral and neural activity screening system developed this summer.

Frank Benesch –Lee completed a summer internship at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, MA. The objective was the development of a functional research model to evaluate the effects of compounds on human skeletal muscles with Fascioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD). Fundamentally based on previous work performed in his startup company, this collaboration is meant to establish an active working relationship between Novartis and WPI and greatly benefits Frank’s experience at WPI in the mechano-biology lab of Prof. Kristen Billiar.

David Dolivo is thankful for the opportunity his summer internship provided him, which was, the opportunity to experience what it’s like to do research at the largest research hospital in the nation, the 3.4 million square foot National Institute of Health (NIH) Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. There, he worked under Dr. Levine and was able to witness true interdisciplinary research and translational science, bringing a perspective that only personal experience can furnish. Though most of David’s time was spent hard at work in the lab, he was also involved in everything from bioinformatics, to keeping up on the literature, to writing, to negotiating a clinical trial, to reviewing a manuscript, to attending lectures given by world-class intramural and extramural speakers. The experience David received at the NIH completments his research being done with Professor Dominko.

Investigating Degree of Particle Melt at the Centre for Advanced Additive Manufacturing (AdAM)

Over this past summer IGERT fellow Anthony D’Amico work in the Centre for Advanced Additive Manufacturing (AdAM) at the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, UK. Selective laser sintering (SLS) which is a widely commercially available additive manufacturing (AM) method applicable to both polymeric and metallic powders. As with almost all AM methods, SLS builds up parts layer by layer. At each layer, a laser scans across a powder bed to melt a pre-determined pattern. The melt then re-solidifies, forming a layer. In high speed sintering (HSS), print heads lay down ink in a pre-determined pattern and a lamp then heats the powder bed. Because the inked powder absorbs more radiation than un-inked powder, the inked pattern melts and then re-solidifies to form a layer. For semi-crystalline polymers the crystallinity of the built part and the powder used can be different. Ideally the built part would consist only of powder particles that had melted completely and recrystallized, leading to uniform crystallinity throughout the part; however this is not the case in practice. A portion of many of the powder particles remains un-melted throughout the build process. Upon recrystallization, this leads to a bulk phase with one crystallinity and un-melted cores with a different crystallinity. The mismatch in properties can weaken parts and cause failure.

To study this phenomenon, the idea of degree of particle melt (DPM) has been developed. DPM is the mass fraction of the melted phase of the final part. For parts with multiple semi-crystalline phases, different melting occurs at multiple temperatures and with multiple enthalpies of melting. By analyzing the melt peaks observable in a differential scanning calorimetry curve (DSC), the DPM can be determined. Anthony’s work over this past summer looked at how DPM varies both with characteristic length of parts printed (to examine the impact of variance in heat transfer with part size) and with changes in several process parameters. In particular he varied the amount of ink deposited, the temperature the build bed was held at, and the layer height used for the build. He found that DPM does not vary significantly with characteristic length. This indicates sacrificial test samples built during a larger part build can be tested and will be representative of the properties of the part being built. For variations in process parameters, DPM varies significantly only with changes in layer height. This indicates the current baseline parameters used provide resilience in properties even if variations occur during the build.