Author: FORW-RD NRT

In April , WPI’s graduate research held its annual Graduate Research Innovation Exchange (GRIE) poster competition where more than 60 finalists faced off in in a chance to win cash prizes. This was followed by the i3: Investing in Ideas with Impact pitch contest where 11 master’s and PhD candidates had just three minutes to convince the judges that their research innovations could be translated to bring value to the marketplace without using any visuals.

The IGERT fellows were big winners in the poster competitions Life Sciences and Bioengineering PhD level with awards given to:

• 1st Place: Megan O’Brien, Biomedical Engineering; Advisor: George Pins
• 1st Place: Dalia Shendi, Biomedical Engineering; Advisor: Dirk Albrecht
• 2nd Place: David Dolivo, Biology & Biotechnology; Advisor: Tanja Dominko
• 3rd Place: Todd Alexander, Chemical Engineering; Advisor: Terri A. Camesano

In addition, guests at the GRIE finals voted for their favorites for the People’s Choice Award and the winner was:

• Megan O’Brien, Biomedical Engineering; Advisor: George Pins

In the i3 finals the judges select one Best Overall presentation and award it to an IGERT fellow:

• Lindsay Lozeau, PhD Candidate, Chemical Engineering; Advisor: Terri A. Camesano; “AMProtection: Tomorrow’s Antimicrobials Fighting Today’s Infections”

It was a big night for Lindsay who not only won Best Overall pitch, but was also chosen as the favorite in the People’s Choice Award competition!

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.

The work which Christopher Nycz conducted at ETH Zurich last summer during his IGERT international experience has been accepted for publication in the journal Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) as well as for presentation at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm. The work focused on creating a portable remote actuation system for a hand exo-skeleton, intended for the assistance and rehabilitation of stroke patients. His work was successful in reducing, by half, the weight placed on the user’s hand of an exoskeleton originally developed by researchers at ETH Zurich and Kyushu University. The design relocated all of the motors and electronic components of the exoskeleton to a small back-pack actuation unit. This unit was lightweight, weighing only a pound and a half, and represents a substantial reduction in weight over previous similar devices. The work is expected to improve the practicality and acceptance of assistive devices.

This work was a successful collaboration between three international universities, each of which brought a particular area of expertise to contribute to a refined research platform. The opportunity to jointly publish in RA-L and present at ICRA this coming May has also been a great opportunity to present this work to the research community.

Seven IGERT fellows were selected from nearly 190 master’s and PhD candidates who shared their innovative  research at WPI’s 2016 Graduate Research Innovation Exchange (GRIE) poster celebration. There were 62 PhD and MS candidates selected as finalists from the following divisions: Business and Social Science, Engineering, Life Sciences and Bioengineering, and Science. The IGERT fellows will compete again at the Poster Finals in  April.  Congratulations to the following  IGERT students: Todd Alexander, Chemical Engineering, David Dolivo, Biology and Biotechnology, Daniel Lawler, Biomedical Engineering, Megan Mancuso, Biomedical Engineering, Christopher Nycz, Robotics, Megan O’Brien, Biomedical Engineering, Dalia Shendi, Biomedical Engineering.

Professor Glenn Gaudette honored for his commitment to instilling the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students.

Glenn Gaudette, a biomedical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has been recognized by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) as its 2015 Outstanding Faculty of the Year. Gaudette is credited with leading a team at WPI to implement a new program on campus, “Developing the Entrepreneurial Engineer.” The program is designed to infuse the undergraduate experience with entrepreneurial experiences, challenges, and opportunities as students develop the skills they need to solve the grand challenges of the world.

The Kern Family Foundation created KEEN to support colleges and universities interested in developing innovative ways of instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students to help ensure that the United States remains competitive in the global marketplace. Its approach centers on teaching students to recognize and act on opportunities to create economic, personal, and societal impact. Students are challenged to be continually inquisitive about the world’s problems, to investigate them fully, to connect discoveries and ideas in order to seek solutions, and to develop viable results that create real value and meet the needs of the world around them.

“Glenn was a clear choice for the 2015 Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award”, said Doug Melton, KEEN program director. “He has been a constant promoter of the transformative education students receive at WPI and provided exemplary leadership in establishing a connection with KEEN. He is respected by his peers and has the ability to work collegially within our network of schools.”

Congratulations to Sarah Hernandez who is graduating December 2015. Sarah started as an IGERT fellow in July, 2012 in Professor Tanja Dominko’s lab. During her time in the IGERT program Sarah spent a summer conducting research in Prof. Wei Sun’s lab at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She has made many presentations including Gordon Conferences in Vermont and Italy, TERMIS-AM 2014 and Massachusetts Life Science Innovation Day. Sarah has also won multiple awards including the 2014 Kalenian award, Sigma Xi membership award, WPI’s i3: investing in Ideas with Impact competition.

We wish Sarah well as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Leslie Thompson, PhD. at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Thompson’s lab works on understanding the molecular pathogenesis of Huntington’s disease (HD). Sarah’s project will specifically focus on uncovering epigenetic differences between people with and without HD using ChIP-seq and RNA-seq. Then she will use bioinformatics to map those differences.

Pre-IGERT fellow Joshua Gershlak recently represented the WPI IGERT program at the annual International Conference on Biofabrication. This year’s meeting was held in Utrecht, the Netherlands where the world leaders in Biofabrication met to discuss the state-of-the-art of the field of Biofabrication as well as “out of the box” insights from related fields. The meeting was very multidisciplinary and brought together research leaders, scholars, clinicians, and company representatives from around the world.

Gershlak, a member of Professor Glenn Gaudette’s Myocardial Regeneration Lab, presented a poster at the conference. The poster was entitled “Native Decellularized Cardiac ECM Incorporated into Fibrin Microthreads to Provide In Vivo-like Microenvironment for Stem Cell Adhesion” and in which Gershlak described the incorporation of native extracellular matrix from decellularized hearts into the fibrin sutures that the Gaudette Lab is known for. The poster was met with high praise from those who attended the conference and were very excited by the work being accomplished in the Gaudette Lab.

After successful completion of VentureWell’s E-Team program Stage 1 Todd Alexander and Lindsay Lozeau have received the Stage 2 Award. With this award they could receive up to $20,000 in funding and will participate in a second workshop where the team will create their business model hypotheses and a plan to test them. Also, included are monthly coaching sessions to keep the progress going. VentureWell defines “E-Team” as a multidisciplinary group of students, faculty, and mentors working together to bring an invention to market.