An Engineering Librarian Recommends…
The UVa Nano and Emerging Technologies Club (NExT) and the Nanomedicine Engineering Academic Society (NEAS) are co-hosting a presentation by Dr. William H. Guilford, from the Biomedical Engineering Department, about his research in Molecular Motors and Nanomedicine!!!!
Refreshments and snacks will be provided!
When: Wednesday October 26th
Time: 6:00 PM
Room: Physics 204
Popular Science (8/31, Vlahos) reports that student engineers at University Of California At Berkeley’s Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory “built a machine that” allowed a paraplegic student “to stand up and walk across the commencement stage” in May. Until now, the exoskeletons developed in Berkeley’s Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory “have been elaborately engineered test pieces.” For the current project, director Homayoon “Kazerooni challenged the students to invent the Honda of exoskeletons, a bare-bones device that would cost $15,000 or less, not $100,000 or more.” Popular Science reports, “With the goal of developing an exoskeleton that costs close to what a powered wheelchair does, the students were forced to adopt a minimalist approach.” Currently, they are “working on a new exoskeleton, one that is even more streamlined and affordable than the” model used in May.
Reposted from the 8/31/11 issue of First Bell.
The following article is reposted from the ASEE Connections Newsletter for August 2010:
Biomedical engineering degrees have increased more than any other field over the past decade. Respectively, they’ve grown by 215 percent, 193 percent and 256 percent at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels since 2000.
| Biomedical Engineering Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded By School: 2009 |
|
| 1. Duke University | 141 |
| 2. University of California, San Diego | 136 |
| 3. Georgia Institute of Technology | 134 |
| 4. University of Texas, Austin | 102 |
| 5. Johns Hopkins University | 100 |
| 6. University of California, Irvine | 98 |
| 7. Boston University | 96 |
| 8. Case Western Reserve University | 93 |
| 9. University of Pennsylvania | 86 |
| 10. University of California, Berkeley | 85 |
| 11. Drexel University | 72 |
| 11. Washington University | 72 |
| 13. Arizona State University | 69 |
| 13. University of Michigan | 69 |
| 13. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities | 69 |
| 13. University of Southern California | 69 |
| 17. Rutgers University | 67 |
| 17. University of Virginia | 67 |
| 19. Northwestern University | 66 |
| 19. Texas A&M University | 66 |
| 89 schools reported. | |
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This article was provided by Engineering Trends. For more information, visit Engineering Trends at engtrends.com.
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| Growth in Biomedical Engineering Degrees by Degree Level |
| Bachelor’s 2000 – 1,156 2009 – 3,644 |
| Master’s 2000 – 476 2009 – 1,396 |
| Doctoral 2000 – 203 2009 – 722 |
The Washington Post (5/6, Kunkle) reports on “the MEDcottage, a portable high-tech dwelling that could be trucked to a family’s back yard and used to shelter a loved one in need of special care.” The shelter is the brainchild of the Rev. Kenneth Dupin of Salem, Virginia, who wanted to give the aged the option to “avoid a jarring move to the nursing home by living in small, specially equipped, temporary shelters close to relatives.” Critics, meanwhile, refer to the product as “the granny pod,” and “some local officials warn that Dupin’s dwellings — which have been authorized by Virginia’s state government — will spring up in subdivisions all over the state, creating not-in-my-back-yard tensions…and perhaps being misused.” The Post notes, “The enterprise has received backing from the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center,” and VT engineering professor Janis P. Terpenny said the shelter “could have a huge impact on revolutionizing health care.”
Reposted from the May 6, 2010 ASEE First Bell
The University of Virginia Applied Research Institute (ARI) presents a spring seminar series hosted by Battelle. The series will allow ARI to showcase the depth and range of technology being developed at the University of Virginia for the growing scientific and technology community in the region. The seminars are free and open to the public. Each seminar will be held at Battelle Memorial Institute in the U.Va. Research Park in Charlottesville, Va. Get directions here.
March 4 at 4 p.m. – Scott Acton, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering - “Image and Video Analysis”
In this talk, Scott Acton describes three active areas of research within the Virginia Image and Video Analysis (VIVA) laboratory. The first area highlights the image segmentation problem, which is a key step in image analysis. Applications such as the segmentation of microscopic cells, the segmentation of the heart in 3-D, and the use of segmentation in content-based image retrieval are detailed. In the second portion of the talk, the problem of target tracking in clutter is addressed. Two tools, the invariant feature transform and the particle filter, are emphasized. Finally, Acton describes the challenges involved with ongoing work in human pose detection and activity recognition from video.
If you are unable to attend in person, participate in this session online through Live Meeting. A software download may be required.
Department of Science, Technology and Society Spring 2010 Colloquium Series
Speaker: Gerard J. Fitzgerald, NYU/UVA
Title: Turn on the Light: The Technological Challenge of Airborne Disease Control in the United States, 1930-1947.
Date: Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Location: Rodman Room, A207 Thornton Hall
Abstract:
During the 1930s, questions about the nature of airborne disease led American physicians, engineers, scientists, architects, and public health officials to analyze the airborne spread of bacteria and viruses. Interdisciplinary research programs were established by academic, industrial and military researchers to probe not only possible causal relationships between airborne microorganisms and the onset of infection in humans, but to also simultaneously investigate the feasibility of creating airborne disease containment technologies. One such technology, a potential key to a future free from airborne infection, was unveiled in the Westinghouse Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. The Westinghouse Sterilamp, an ultraviolet lamp with germicidal properties, was developed by Dr. Harvey Rentschler who was the research director at the Westinghouse Lamp Division from 1917-1947. Unable to test the full experimental potential and commercial viability of the Sterilamp through in-house testing before the war, Westinghouse researchers willingly participated in Research Project No. X-231, a joint United States Navy, National Institutes of Health, and General Electric field trial between 1943 and 1945 carried out with large number of barracks bound navy recruits. Postwar debate over the interpretation of the epidemiological data from wartime studies such as X-231, which was codified in a 1947 American Public Health Association committee report, not only doomed the commercial viability of UV based containment technologies but also provides a useful historical case study on the nature of interdisciplinary research at a critical juncture in American history.
Brief Bio:
Gerard J. Fitzgerald is a visiting scholar in the University of Virginia Department of Science, Technology and Society and at New York University where his is finishing his first book on the history of airborne disease. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and a Sitterson Fellow to UNC, Chapel Hill. He has published in the Journal of American History and the American Journal of Public Health. His new work is a sensorial and architectural history of southern textile mills and villages.
Technology Review (1/29) reports, “Researchers at Princeton University have created” a piezoelectric material that “can harness 80 percent of the energy applied when it is flexed–four times more than existing flexible piezoelectric materials.” The researchers used PZT, “the most efficient piezoelectric material known, but its crystalline structure means that it must be grown at high temperatures, which normally melt a flexible substrate. The Princeton researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Michael McAlpine, got around this by making PZT at high temperatures and then transferring thin ribbons of the material onto silicone.” The researchers are particularly focused on biomedical applications.
The above reposted from the January 29, 2010 issue of ASEE First Bell.
The AP (12/21) reports on the prototype Human-Powered Off-Road Wheelchair, developed by engineering students at Michigan Technological University to make the trails around the school more handicapped accessible. “The operator pulls back on the handlebars in a rowing motion to propel it at up to 4 miles per hour.” The AP describes the wheelchair’s design and some of the challenges the students encountered over the course of the project, which took about 140 hours of work from each student. Among the wheelchair’s features are “one-way bearings for zero rollback, a total weight of 55 pounds, a consistent color scheme for aesthetics, a suspension seat to minimize pressure points (and) the ability to accommodate a range of heights.”
Reposted from ASEE First Bell for 12/21/09
The following is reposted from the Scout Report for December 4, 2009:
Wading through the tremendous online resource that is the BioMed archive can be a bit tricky at times. This process just got much easier through the creation of the BioMedSearch feature. The goal of this work is “to make these important works available to the community in a way that is fast and easy, while still offering the advanced features demanded by power users such as portfolios, collaboration features, bibliographical citation export, alerts, and more.” Their search engine contains all of the data in Pub Med/Medline, along with additional full-text documents, and a large database of theses and dissertations. Many users will find the “Clusters” section of the site most useful. Here, visitors can view “clusters” of documents grouped together thematically into topics such as clinical trials, exercises, diet and cholesterol, and medical imagining. The homepage contains a basic search engine, and visitors may also wish to use the “Search Tutorial” to gain a better understanding of how best to use the archive.
This research tool will be particularly useful for biomedical engineers. Access BioMedSearch at http://www.biomedsearch.com/
Traditionally, treatment for severe second-degree burns consists of adding insult to injury: cutting a swath of skin from another site on the same patient in order to graft it over the burn. The process works, but causes more pain for the burn victim and doubles the area in need of healing. Now a relatively new technology has the potential to heal burns in a way that’s much less invasive than skin grafts. With just a small skin biopsy and a ready-made kit, surgeons can create a suspension of the skin’s basal cells–the stem cells of the epidermis–and spray the solution directly onto the burn with results comparable to those from skin grafts.
Learn more about this new technology in an article by Lauren Gravitz in Technology Review at
