Upfront

5ZAMAN NAMED GUGGENHEIM FELLOW 11 SPARKING INNOVATION

Antiracism in Action

A STUDENT’S OUTRAGE PROMPTS PUBLISHER TO REMOVE TRADITIONALLY USED RACIST LANGUAGE PHRASINGS FROM ENGINEERING TEXTBOOKS

For decades, engineering textbooks have termed the relationship of a device to others it controls as “master and slave.” In recent years, many attempts have been made to change the language and its racist connotation, but success has not been universal.

A Boston University computer engineering grad student is setting about to change that. Santiago Gomez was so perturbed when he encountered the terminology in a textbook in Professor Roscoe Giles’ (ECE) Logic Design course that he wrote to the publisher, Pearson, and asked that it be changed. His letter prompted Pearson to stop distributing the book while the text is revised, to review its other publications and replace the term throughout its catalog and to begin contacting standards bodies to stimulate broader changes.

“The use of the ‘master/slave’ metaphor to describe the phenomenon of combining two [circuits] is abhorrent,” Gomez Gomez’s letter struck a nerve not only at wrote. “As a Latinx student of computer engineering, I request that you update the publisher, but within the College of your terminology to prevent further disruption to the learning experience and to Engineering as well. take a concrete step towards dismantling systemic racism within engineering.”

After praising the engineering content of the book, Gomez added, “The ‘master/slave’ . . . terminology proved detrimental to my learning environment. It reminded me that Black people’s presence in the sciences is not fully respected. This issue can be remedied by updating the term to reflect current understandings of race in America.”

Gomez’s letter struck a nerve not only at the publisher, but within the College of Engineering as well. Upon learning of it, Dean Kenneth Lutchen and Electrical & Computer Engineering Department Chair Professor W. Clem Karl not only got behind Gomez’s effort, but reached out to the national engineering community to make sure engineering leaders were aware of the need to make the change.

“Historically, it’s been used pretty widely,” says Giles of the master/slave terminology in explaining electronic switches >

upfront

“The ‘master/slave’... terminology proved detrimental to my learning environment. It reminded me that Black people’s presence in the sciences is not fully respected. This issue can be remedied by updating the term to reflect current understandings of race in America.” Santiago Gomez

called “flip flops,” which are fundamental to computing technology. “It’s not an exotic or unusual use of the term. It has always been very striking to me. In most of my courses I try not to use it. I’ll use boss/worker or main/subsidiary or something like that.”

Giles, one of the longest-serving Black faculty members at BU, has encountered the term for many years. “I’ve been bothered by it all my life,” he says, noting that it also appears in other engineering contexts and even in photography. “I had come to see it as undesirable, but unavoidable.” But, when Gomez emailed him with the idea to write the letter and asked for his feedback, Giles says he saw the matter in a renewed light.

“The letter reminded me I should have been more outraged by it,” Giles says. “Continuing encounters with an irritation can make you build up a callus. I had built up a callus for this language that I wish I hadn’t built up.”

Giles says Gomez’s letter was eloquent and he did not offer any edits. “I was struck by the sincerity and energy of a student coming to this issue for the first time, and at the time we are in, where a large fraction of the country is ready to address racism. I thought this language can easily be changed. I could not have had the insight he had about how it impacted students. He wrote it very well.”

Giles forwarded the letter to a contact at Pearson on June 19, and it quickly rose up the chain of command to a vice president. On June 26, Pearson responded with the pledge to pull the book, revise the text there and in any other Pearson publication where it may appear, and review its policies on the matter.

Santiago also sent it to Assistant Dean for Outreach and Diversity Wynter Duncanson, who brought it to the attention of the dean and ECE chair.

“When I went to Dean Lutchen and ECE Chair Karl, there was an immediate response to make sure this language is removed,” Duncanson says. “Chair Karl recalled that this was the language he had seen in school and that we need to use this as a learning experience and change it. Dean Lutchen suggested we contact the executive directors of the American Association Society for Engineering Education and the National Society of Black Engineers. We wanted to let the leaders of our field know this is what we’re doing to be antiracist.”

Duncanson lauded Pearson’s quick decision but noted that the terminology pervades the engineering field beyond academia. “This is the foundation of our engineering language,” she says. “This is propagated throughout our field. The people who are building the field are building it on what is a racist idea. It’s really great that the voice of a student was able to speak so loudly and create a new language for the field.”

Gomez—who earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from BU in 2014 and recently enrolled in the college’s Late Entry Accelerated Program, which offers MS degrees in engineering to students with nonengineering bachelor’s degrees—said that while the language has offended him since he first encountered it in mid-February, the events of recent weeks prompted his action.

“Nothing would have changed if not for the events of the past couple of months,” “I was struck by the sincerity and energy of a student coming to this issue for the first time, and at the time we are in, where a large fraction of the country is ready to address racism. I thought this language can easily be changed.” Roscoe Giles (ECE)

Roscoe Giles (ECE)

he says. “I hope this will change their editorial policy there and everywhere else it happens. The broader goal is to get other publishers to address this as well, and, even more broadly, to get engineering to be antiracist.”

Gomez and Giles had a follow-up phone call with Pearson on July 8. “The conversation went well,” Gomez says. “I am pleased with the expediency and genuineness of their response. They are actively working with their authors to revise the textbooks. They have also reached out to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery about this issue.” — MICHAEL SEELE

Zaman Honored with Guggenheim Fellowship

RECOGNIZED FOR GLOBAL HEALTH INITIATIVES

For the past decade, Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE), a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering and International Health, has aimed his considerable ingenuity at healthcare problems in the developing world. His efforts have included coinventing PharmaChk, an inexpensive, portable, rapid-screening technology that identifies the kind of substandard drugs that put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk in developing countries; designing and teaching a course in humanitarian engineering; and leading study and service projects focused on Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. He has also investigated the harm done by antimicrobial resistance. His 2019 University Lecture focused on the need for, and challenges involved in, developing ethical solutions for refugee health.

Now, in recognition of those and other achievements, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Zaman a fellowship, given to those who, according to the foundation’s website, “are appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise” and “have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

According to Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen, “Muhammad’s capacity and passion for bringing engineering creativity and mindset to address extraordinarily important health and medical challenges to under-resourced populations or neglected peoples—such as refugees—will have a broad impact on all of society. Moreover, he brings this passion and approach back to our students and

ENG Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME, MSE) has won a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded annually to individuals who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Zaman focuses on healthcare problems in the developing world.

Zaman is examining antibiotic inspires them even more to resistance become Sociein refugee tal Engineers.” Zaman says settlements. he is extremely honored by the award. “I recognize that I am in the company of exceptional scholars, artists, and practitioners,” he says. “And that’s not only this year’s cohort, but those who, over the years, have transformed my own thinking and work.”

He will use the award to develop a richer, multidisciplinary understanding of how antimicrobial resistance impacts refugee settlements. “The problem of antimicrobial resistance is a universal one,” he stresses. “But some communities are far more vulnerable due to lack of resources, poverty, lack of trust with the health authorities and poor access to accurate information. Now, in light of COVID-19, there is additional risk of bacterial infections, in addition to the viral infections— and the issue of antibiotic resistance is all the more relevant in these communities.”

Zaman’s current work examines antibiotic resistance in refugee settlements from several angles, including policy analysis and access to good-quality medicines. He is particularly interested in identifying resistance drivers that could be more relevant in a refugee camp than in a developed-world hospital. Such seemingly disparate approaches to healthcare problems, including an investigation of the processes behind tumor invasion, have long been part of his portfolio.

“I think there are similarities in the way we do problem-solving and analyze the various drivers that affect the overall outcome,” he reflects. “There are also similarities in the tools, both computational and experimental, that we develop, and every now and then tools that we develop for our cancer work come in handy for our global health work and vice versa.”

Zaman’s second book, Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle between People and Pathogens (HarperCollins, 2020), was published in June. His first, Bitter Pills (Oxford University Press, 2018), chronicles the global challenge of substandard and counterfeit drugs.

Zaman is also among this year’s 173 American and Canadian fellowship recipients, selected from almost 3,000 applicants. Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $375 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among them scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, Turing Award, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. —ART JAHNKE

upfront

Khalil Awarded Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship

Much like hacking a computer, Associate Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil (BME) hacks nature and the microscopic biological systems that make all life possible. In his lab, Khalil, who is also associate director of BU’s Biological Design Center, has created entire cell colonies capable of being programmed to perform tasks— from eliminating cancer cells to making new classes of drug compounds—by mimicking cellular systems that have evolved over the course of many millennia. Now, Khalil has been awarded the 2020 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Department of Defense’s most prestigious award for a single investigator, to explore how cells are capable of passing “memories” down to the next generation of offspring cells, a dynamic known as epigenetic memory.

With his work supported by the fellowship, Khalil will explore how to manipulate epigenetic memory in cells to program self-assembling biological materials, like tissue and other cellular structures.

How did you become interested in synthetic biology?

I was initially trained in mechanical engineering, where I learned the principles of designing and building complex systems. Traditional approaches to studying biology involve anatomic and genetic dissections, so what drew me to synthetic biology was its potential to offer an inverse approach to studying biological systems, such as designing [genetic components] and combining them in meaningful ways to create new and functional cellular systems from the bottom up.

What aspect of your work will you be exploring with the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship?

The fellowship will be used to explore a fundamental capability of all living cells: the ability to program long-lived memories of their environments. These epigene-

Associate Professor Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil (BME)

tic memories, which can be passed on as useful information from one generation to the next, are not encoded by changes to the genome of the cell. Establishing these epigenetic memories allows cells to learn and adapt to their environments, and crucially, is at the heart of how [similar] cells build multicellular structures, tissues, and organisms. Despite this appreciation, our ability to direct and engineer this capability is limited. Through the fellowship, [my team] will use synthetic biology approaches to learn about how epigenetic memory is established and manipulated, and how we can direct these processes to program cells to self-organize into desired multicellular structures and materials.

Can you explain the possible applications of epigenetic memory?

As we know, memory is fundamental to manufactured devices like computers. Thus, the ability to encode epigenetic [memories] is fundamental to programming complex computations in living cells. You can imagine future applications, such as engineered cellular sensors that can record and recall environmental signals. Epigenetic memory is also the basis of genetic switches toggling the expression of genes—like an ON/OFF switch. Many biomedical and biotechnological applications rely on precise control of gene expression, for example, controlling differentiation of stem cells or controlling [therapeutic delivery].

This work could also be used to program self-assembling cellular materials that could utilize epigenetic memory to enable on-demand fabrication, maintain structural organization in light of cell division, selfrepair following stress or disruption, and have diverse and tunable material properties that respond to surrounding environmental conditions. We believe that these biological materials will enable [new] dynamics and properties [that are currently] impossible in conventional materials.

What are some of the biggest problems you are working to solve with synthetic biology?

Much of our work has been foundational in nature, focused on understanding the design of molecular circuits that control how genes are regulated in cells. Through this work, we have developed new tools and a strong intellectual foundation for predictably controlling cell and tissue behavior, which we believe will ultimately lead to breakthrough diagnostics and therapeutics for human health. In one immediate application, we are collaborating with [BU College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering] Wilson Wong to develop genetic tools that allow better control of immune cell function to improve cell-based cancer therapies. Another problem we are working to solve with synthetic biology and related technologies in the lab is curbing the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance. —JESSICA COLAROSSI

Team Led by Ramachandran Wins MURI Award

As the lead principal investigator, Professor Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE, Physics, MSE) was awarded a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant to study the science and applications of singular light beams in the presence of spin-orbit interactions. On June 1, Ramachandran began collaborating with co-PIs at Harvard and Stanford Universities as part of a team that will experimentally and theoretically probe fundamental interactions between the spin and orbital angular momentum of light Students Shine a Light on Creativity students can work on extracurricular projects and advance their education outside the classroom, the Singh Imagineering Lab hosted a smart light building competition sponsored by Lutron Electronics—a global lighting technology company with advanced products in smart lighting, control and design—in February.

The inaugural Lutron Competition drew interest from 25 students, with 14 teams competing as they learned and showcased new skills. The first Imagineering Lab contest with industry sponsorship gave each team a $50 budget to build a project.

Former Imagineering Lab advisor Noah Abbott (ENG’18), who works at Lutron in optical fibers, free space and metamaterials.

Generally, light can carry both orbital angular momentum (OAM) and spin angular momentum

Professor Siddharth Ramachandran (SAM) related to wavefront (ECE, Physics, MSE) rotation and polarization, respectively. This has led to several scientific and technological applications, including secure quantum communications, super-resolution microscopy and alternative modalities of image processing and sensing. Ramachandran’s team will study spin-orbit coupling that provides a less-exploited degree of freedom to manipulate the linear and nonlinear properties of light carrying SAM and OAM, and manifests Electronics, approached ENG about hosting a smart light building competition after the company began ramping up recruiting efforts on campus.

Abbott kicked off the event with a presentation about the contest and Lutron, showing one of the company’s smart lights featuring a vibrancy control that changes the emitting spectrum of white light, helping to tune lights to match their environments and highlight artwork in new ways. He demonstrated how the color of Play-Doh changed with the light’s vibrancy adjustments.

Because Lutron encouraged the students to be creative, the broad scope of the competition allowed teams to produce a wide range of products. Isabella Kuh’s team won $250 with the first-place project called Inside Out, a functional art piece depicting a man with a cloud over his head that’s triggered to turn on through sound.

Second place ($100) went to Roman Addokhu for a rustic light bulb that senses and responds to its environment and can be controlled over Wi-Fi; third ($50) to Brian Jung and Peter Siegel for their VU meter, strongly in nanostructures, high numerical- aperture systems and high index-contrast optical fibers. The project will focus on three interrelated topics: pairing topologically complex light with acoustic and optical phonons (which will rewrite design principles for fiber lasers); studying metasurfaces and artificial structures, which are topologically complex and can create new device schematics for OAM/SAM beams; and researching topological invariants to inform the design of spinorbit coupled optical fibers and metasurfaces.

Ramachandran has received several awards for his research on exotic beams in fibers and was recently named to a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship in 2019, the most prestigious award for basic research bestowed by the US Department of Defense. Ramachandran is using his fellowship to explore light-matter interactions with twisted light beams. His groundbreaking work has also been covered in publications including Science, Nature Communications

Designed to be a creative space where

and Optica. — COLBI EDMONDS 14 TEAMS COMPETED

The winning project

which responds to sounds by displaying different patterns on an LED strip according to the volume of its surroundings.

Most teams built smart functionality into their projects, allowing the lights to be controlled by inputs like sound, or had remote control capabilities through the internet. Other inventive projects included Tupperware that changed colors depending on temperature, and a lamp with a shade that expanded and contracted through sound input. — LIZ SHEELEY

upfront

Students Take On the Business of Tissue Engineering

CELL-MET RESEARCH TAKES FIRST STEPS INTO COMMERCIALIZATION

Although there are hundreds of university spin-off companies, the vast majority are founded by professors aiming to bring their technology or ideas to the market. Graduate students often don’t have the space or resources to build a company based on their research, even if that research could be commercialized.

When graduate students Josh Javor (ME), Christos Michas (BME) and Jenny Sun (EE) heard about the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) Business Plan Competition, they wanted to team up to explore what building a spin-off company from their research would be like. In the end, their team placed second overall in the competition, held in Orlando, Florida, in December.

Instead of selling a physical product for researchers to purchase, the team decided to market a comprehensive screening platform that would deliver analysis of drug performance, toxicity and more, all related to cardiovascular tissue. Their company, CardioMetry, is designed for drug developers and researchers to quickly and accurately test their products.

They teamed up with colleagues from the University of Michigan who were already doing research under the same $20 million grant awarded in 2018 from the National Science Foundation known as CELL-MET, a multi-institutional Engineering Research Center based at Boston University aiming to synthesize personalized heart tissue for clinical use. Though they come from varying backgrounds, Javor, Michas, Sun, Ayse Muniz and Ben Swanson—all from the University of

In February, the team competed at the TigerLaunch competition in Chicago, earning a spot in the finals in April (from left to right, Jenny Sun, Christos Michas, Ayse Muniz, Ben Swanson and Josh Javor).

Their company Michigan—work toward this goal through their is designed research. “The students got for drug together and had to developers create a product plan, a marketing plan, and researchers discover an unmet need, and figure out how to address the to quickly and unmet need,” says CELL-MET Industrial Liaison Officer/ accurately test their Innovation Ecosystem Leader Tom Dudley, who alerted products. the students to the competition. “It was a lot of work to create their business plan—all work they did outside of their normal requirements.”

The first step was submitting their business plan to TERMIS, who judged submissions and sent the top three to Orlando to give final presentations, which mentors within the tissue engineering industry helped them refine and create with feedback throughout the process.

“The CELL-MET grant provides a good ecosystem to grow types of research that can be used in industry and applied to companies,” Javor notes. “One reason I wanted to take this on was that it was a new learning experience for me. Usually I’m focused on the technical aspects of the work, but I was able to learn about the business perspective, and how to create a marketable, packaged product.”

The team continues to refine and build their company, competing as regional finalists at the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club’s TigerLaunch, the nation’s largest student-run entrepreneurship competition that features prizes including $35,000 to invest in business, along with mentorship opportunities with venture capitalists and industry professionals. —LIZ SHEELEY

Goyal Elected OSA Fellow

Associate Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE) has been elected a fellow of The Optical Society (OSA) “for outstanding inventions in computational imaging and sensing, including unprecedented demonstrations of the utility of weak, mixed and indirect optical measurements.”

“I’m deeply honored to be elected to fellow of the OSA, especially since my research career started far from optics,” Goyal says. “It’s a testament to the value in letting academic research be driven by curiosity.”

According to the OSA, “Fellows are members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. No more than 10 percent of the total OSA

Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE)

Goyal’s innovations have changed our understanding of what’s possible with optical measurements.

Ünlü Elected AIMBE Fellow

In recognition of his contributions using optical interference in biological sensing and imaging, Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, MSE, BME) has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, a distinction bestowed upon the top two percent of medical and biological engineers in the country.

“I’m honored to be chosen as an AIMBE fellow and thrilled to join the growing group of fellows at Boston University,” Ünlü says. “The College of Engineering at BU has allowed me to expand my research in biological sensing and imaging by providing a rich and highly collaborative environment.”

Boston University now has 33 AIMBE fellows, sixth most in the nation, with Professor Joyce Wong (BME, MSE) serving as chair.

A faculty member since 1992, Ünlü is currently doing research focused on

Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, MSE, BME)

Ünlü’s research is focused on developing innovative methods for optical imaging and microscopy.

developing innovative methods for optical imaging and microscopy.

Ünlü has been able to apply light interference—a concept documented since the 1600s—to enhance the light collection efficiency of photodetectors and develop 10% MAXIMUM PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL OSA MEMBERSHIP THAT MAY BE CHOSEN AS FELLOWS.

membership may be chosen as Fellows, making the process both highly selective and competitive.”

“Goyal’s innovations have changed our understanding of what is possible with optical measurements,” says his colleague, Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, MSE, BME).

Ünlü points to Goyal’s work in demonstrating that very few detected photons are sufficient for imaging. His research has focused on using very small amounts of information, like a weak light signal, to extract much more information than seems possible. In one recent publication in Nature, Goyal and his team showed how to extract a full-color, 2D-picture of a scene from a photograph of indistinct shadows, known as a penumbrae, on a neighboring wall—demonstrating a way to see around a corner. — LIZ SHEELEY

33

NUMBER OF AIMBE FELLOWS FROM BU, SIXTH IN THE NATION.

novel biological sensing and imaging technologies. Light interference can be observed in the colorful reflections created by soap bubbles, as their film partially reflects back light at its closely spaced surfaces, preferentially enhancing or decreasing the reflection of colors constituting the white-light illumination.

Ünlü uses this concept to detect nanoparticles, as the presence of particles modifies the interference of light reflected from the sensor surface, producing a distinct signal that reveals the size of the particle (which is not otherwise visible under a conventional microscope). This technique has allowed Ünlü to quickly and accurately detect viruses in blood samples. His method doesn’t require the user to be highly skilled or trained, sample preparation is unnecessary and the instrument does the work—making it ideal for transfer to resource-poor areas.

Most recently, Ünlü is working to pivot his technique to detect the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. —LIZ SHEELEY

upfront

Competition Sparks Sustainability Solutions

Last fall, the College of Engineering launched a competition aimed at bringing an interdisciplinary approach to solving real-world sustainability problems, particularly carbon recycling processes and materials. The Born Global Competition for Innovation in Sustainability succeeded in producing inventive solutions, doing so even when COVID-19 forced everyone into remote mode in the middle of the project.

Sponsored by the Born Global Foundation—a technology commercialization program for innovation in the bioeconomy focused on economic, process and product innovation at the intersection of waste, energy and food—the competition aimed to change the way students think about renewable energy solutions.

Spanning the entire academic year, the competition and all involved had to pivot when the COVID-19 crisis struck. Instead of a final, in-person presentation, student teams presented their project reports via Zoom.

The Born Global competition aimed to have students focus on developing innovative renewable energy solutions that are easy to implement and economical. Each participating team had to be interdisciplinary, and comprised of students from the College of Engineering as well as from other schools and colleges at BU.

Associate Professor Emily Ryan (ME, MSE), whose research focuses on understanding renewable energy storage systems, headed up the contest.

“We were very impressed with all of the teams,” says Ryan, who judged the contest along with Born Global Foundation Chief Executive Officer Kimberly Samaha (ENG’89) and Institute for Sustainable Biomimicry— the method of taking inspiration Energy Executive Director Jacquie from nature and utilizing Ashmore. “And particularly impressed with it to develop strategies to their motivation and ability to complete the solve human challenges— competition in this challenging and stressful time is a driving given COVID-19, principle lockdown and remotely finishing at Born the semester.” Global, and a “The first year of the Born Global process that Foundation Innostudents were vation Competition was focused on encouraged carbon cycling, and to use. many of the finalists found process innovation solutions,” Samaha notes. “We were particularly pleased with how many students incorporated biomimicry into their design process.”

Biomimicry—the method of taking inspiration from nature and utilizing it to develop strategies to solve human challenges— is a driving principle at Born Global, and a process that students were encouraged to use in their project development.

Four teams participated; three received prizes. The first-place, $5,000 prize went to a project titled “Redesigning the Urban Environment” by Cathy Cheng (ME’23) and Lekhya Sathi (Sargent’23); second, to “BeagleNet” by Dylan Derose (ME’22), Pavel Gromov (ME’20), Jordan Nichols (CAS’22) and Peter Siegel (ME’22); and third, to “Energy Efficient Architecture” by Kaihui Gou (ECE’20) and Lin Fan (EE’20).

Cheng and Sathi embraced the contest’s theme by bringing biomimicry to their design with their plan to recycle wastewater and produce both food and biomass—a goal they’d achieve by developing photobioreactors to produce biomass and vertical farms to produce food, both of which could be retrofitted onto buildings. The systems would be fed with already nitrogen-rich filtered wastewater acting as a fertilizer. Both systems capture CO2 to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with little impact and cost, and would produce food as well.

According to Ryan, “All the teams presented creative, well-thought-out projects that have great potential to help create a more sustainable world.” — LIZ SHEELEY

Dean’s Catalyst Awards Spark Innovation and Collaboration

Researchers must show proof-ofconcept on their new ideas to win grants and funds from large institutions, an initial investment that can be risky. To help, the College of Engineering set up the Dean’s Catalyst Awards (DCA) in 2007.

Established by Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen, the competitive grant rewards faculty collaboration and innovation by bestowing two years of seed funding on projects to explore new areas of interest that could spark long-term research endeavThe grant ors and yield new rewards applications across fields. faculty These grants collaboration and have fostered collaboration at the College of innovation by bestowing Engineering and at the University as a whole. In two years of seed funding recent years, the $1 million investment in on projects to explore the program has produced at least 19 grant proposnew areas of interest that als, resulting in $7.9 million in funding from could spark long-term institutions such as the National Science Foundaresearch endeavors. tion and the National Institutes of Health. DCA research has resulted in 35 journal or conference papers published or under review, and another 11 in preparation. $1M PROGRAM INVESTMENT 19 GRANT PROPOSALS $7.9M FUNDING FROM OUTSIDE INSTITUTIONS 35 PAPERS PUBLISHED OR UNDER REVIEW

This year, the dean and selection committee chose five projects to fund:

1. Joerg Werner (ME) and Keith Brown (ME) are teaming up to combine their expertise to develop a new method of manufacturing and studying thin electrochemical films that could potentially revolutionize battery technology.

2. Hadi Nia (BME) and Bela Suki’s (BME) new research will build a novel experimentation system that will be able to integrate long-term mechanobiology features (like breathing) into drug development research. In addition to creating the environment for physical stress, this model will allow researchers to personalize cell types in both the tumor and non-tumor cells, allowing them to study how lung cells affected by COPD and cancer will react to cancer drugs, which is currently unknown. It will also let them study how the mechanical stress of breathing affects the immune response in lung cells affected by COPD, also unknown.

3.

Kamal Sen (BME), David Boas (BME)

and Laura Lewis (BME) will study how the normal human brain solves complex scene analysis, potentially leading to pathways we can explore to improve the quality of life in those with impairment disorders. Boas and Lewis bring their expertise in brain imaging, and Sen his work in auditory processing.

4. Gianluca Stringhini (ECE) studies how disinformation starts and then circulates through the internet after the fact. This research will create a web application allowing anyone to interactively explore disinformation campaigns and come to a better understanding of how information transmits through the web. Chris Wells (COM/ CAS), an assistant professor in Emerging Media Studies, will inform on how the new tool communicates with users. Researchers hope to make the new tool available before the 2020 presidential election to help identify false information on the web, so voters can make the most informed decision. The tool is aimed at identifying fake social media accounts and how posts on those sites are disseminated into conversations happening on real accounts.

5. Muhammad Zaman (BME) and Ahmad ‘Mo’ Khalil’s (BME) research proposes to study how low-quality medicines contribute to antimicrobial resistance, which is currently unknown. Substandard drugs, which are most common in low- and middle-income countries where there is already a high burden of antimicrobial resistance, include those with inappropriate amounts of active ingredients, poor dissolution, or increased impurities or degradation products. — LIZ SHEELEY

THE WORLD STOPPED.

THE WORLD STOPPED. WE DIDN’T.

Left to right: Mark Grinstaff, Jessie Song, Ari Trachtenberg, Joyce Wong

ENG researchers respond to the coronavirus By Liz Sheeley

Photograph by Janice Checchio

“I ’m glad I’m an engineer right now,” says Professor Joyce Wong (BME, MSE). “There are so many problems that need to be solved in this crisis and I can actually use my expertise to help.” Like many other engineers and researchers, Wong dove straight into research to do what she could to help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the College of Engineering, professors began pivoting their research and curriculums in early March to tackle the many problems associated with the outbreak. These actions augmented their first wave of efforts in early March, when they gathered personal protective equipment (PPE) from now-closed labs and donated it to healthcare workers in Massachusetts. After learning of pandemic-related problems that plagued hospitals and testing facilities, such as equipment shortages or the lack of existing devices to help battle the novel disease, BU engineers like Wong applied their expertise to the situation. Collaborations quickly formed across the college and University, with professors, researchers and doctors all eager to lend a hand.

PROTECTING HEALTHCARE WORKERS Wong started working on two projects after talking to her cousin, Dr. Steven Horng, an emergency medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“I started hearing about the PPE shortages from Steven, and then he started to tell me about more of the challenges healthcare workers are facing,” she says. “In mid-April, we were getting close to the predicted peak of cases in Massachusetts, so I wanted to help out any way I could.”

Both of Wong’s projects—collaborations with Master Lecturer Enrique Gutierrez-Wing (ME) and Associate Professor J. Gregory McDaniel (ME, MSE)—are aimed at keeping the virus contained. The first flips who is wearing the protective equipment from the healthcare workers to the patients—her cousin saw a photo of an intubation box a Taiwanese doctor had built, and Horng and Wong thought that they could expand on that idea by making the box a negative pressure chamber to isolate the source of the virus.

Their goal was to design the respiratory isolation box with features that would allow doctors to maintain the same standard of care, with an added layer of protection. In addition to being a negative pressure chamber that keeps air from flowing out of the

Like many other engineers and researchers, Wong dove straight into research to do what she could to help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic.

A sketch of a new type of healthcare protective equipment: a respiratory isolation box. The box would isolate the source of the virus using negative pressure.

The new 3D-printed bracket (in red) clips onto an endotracheal tube.

box, it’s also being designed to allow three people to work on one patient at a time, and they’re testing the dimensions to make sure healthcare workers can still use the specialized equipment they may need when intubating a COVID-19 patient.

Later in April, they recruited BME engineer Aleks Zosuls to the project, who showed them a photo of the acrylic box based on the Taiwanese design he helped make for Boston Medical Center

5

TEST SITES AROUND BU CAPACITY TO PROCESS 6,000+ TESTS PER DAY

95+

TESTING ACCURACY PERCENTAGE

(BMC). But the box he designed cracked when it was dropped, so the team decided to pivot their research. They converted the box to a negative-pressure tent and brought on Christine McKee, Wong’s graduate student, to work on designing and testing it. The team also recruited colleagues across the University, all of whom either donated supplies or their time to the project.

As of September, the tent is in the final testing phase, and Wong has been reaching out to various companies to transition the prototype from final testing to manufacture stage.

To find the best design, Wong and the team are testing each variable that could affect performance. During optimization, they need to make sure the enclosure pressure is always negative so that infected air is not escaping from the tent. The team is figuring out how large the holes can be for a healthcare worker’s hands to go through the shield in order to treat the patient while maintaining negative pressure.

The second collaboration is a 3D-printed bracket that will hold together an endotracheal tube and the respirator circuit it’s attached to. In normal use, these connections between the tube that’s inserted down the patient’s throat and the ventilator machine are loose, designed to be easily disconnected in case the patient needs to be moved in an emergency situation. Sometimes, however, the loose connection comes apart randomly, triggering an alarm that alerts a nurse to reconnect it.

But now, when that disconnection happens, the air coming out of the tube into the room is full of virus, putting anyone in the room at an unnecessarily high risk of infection. The bracket the team is developing easily clips into place to hold the tube and respirator hookup together to prevent this from happening.

The bracket is 3D-printed in a material that can be sterilized, and the prototype is designed with rounded edges so it won’t rip latex gloves.

REAL-TIME LEARNING AND TEACHING In addition to research, Wong teaches the undergraduate course Device Diagnostics and Design. After stay-at-home orders went into place around mid-March, faculty and students had to adjust to remote learning. Since building physical prototypes in engineering classes was no longer an option, Wong ended up scrapping her curriculum for the rest of the semester to create new lectures and projects.

She decided to focus the rest of the semester on COVID-19 and the far-reaching impact the pandemic has had on the world. Klapperich’s team has Guest lecturers shared their expertise with her validated a version of class, covering topics such as supply chain, the test for influenza epidemiology, vaccine using a bank of de- and drug development, ventilators and how identified H1N1 patient countries other than the US handled the pandemic. samples from the Because class was online, guests could easily join 2009-2010 pandemic. the class from their homes and from Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Although students couldn’t build their prototypes, Wong had them come up with new project ideas that could help any aspect of the pandemic. One team came up with a fast way to sterilize masks; another proposed a wearable device that beeped if you attempted to put your hand near your face.

“It wasn’t just the students who were learning in real time,” Wong says. “I am also able to bring my experience of building new devices back into the classroom and integrate what I learned during my research into teaching.”

CAMPUS TESTING As campus prepared to welcome students, faculty and staff back in the fall, BU established a COVID-19 testing facility to be headed by Professor and Director of the Precision Diagnostics Center Catherine Klapperich (BME, MSE), whose expertise in point-ofcare testing makes her ideal for the job.

Her first call was to colleague Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE, ME, BME). Densmore’s lab—which builds robots that perform sample preparation—can help scale up her test to process samples on a large scale. This will help with the high numbers of repeat testing that have to be performed to protect tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff.

VALIDATING NEW TESTS At the beginning of the pandemic, Klapperich’s lab worked to validate new types of tests. An extreme testing ramp-up was needed, but there were roadblocks and supply shortages; her team has been trying to speed the process up.

Mollorrumquo vellore seruptatius modis que voloribusci que rero blabo. Nem libeaque nonsequos quam, cullorporia nullabo. Tus acide posandandi natet ABILITY TO COLLECT AROUND 500 TESTS PER HOUR ACROSS CAMPUS TEST RESULTS AVAILABLE IN 24 HOURS

The Precision Diagnostics Center has also been taking on preclinical lab validation of newly developed tests, such as an RNA test that’s faster than the standard one, has limited sample preparation and is being developed by a group at Harvard Medical School.

Klapperich’s team has validated a version of the test for influenza using a bank of de-identified H1N1 patient samples from the 2009–2010 pandemic. Now, with proof-of concept, developers can tweak their assay to make it work for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In the meantime, Klapperich awaits de-identified COVID-19 patient samples from collaborators at Boston The primary Children’s Hospital that will be used to validate the next iteration of the benefit of (Ünlü’s) test. approach is A DIFFERENT TYPE OF TEST that its testing Elsewhere at the college, Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, MSE, BME) is mechanism developing a new test of his own by teaming up with longtime collaboradoes not require tor John Connor from the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Labextensive sample oratories (NEIDL) at BU and Propreparation; fessor Mehmet Toner from Harvard Medical School to develop a rapid another is a and reliable test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. reduced chance of false negative The current tests look for viral RNA. Building on his previous research, Ünlü’s test is fundamenresults. tally different; it would count indi vidual SARS-CoV-2 viruses using antibodies to capture the viruses on the sensor’s surface, which can detect and count them.

The primary benefit of this approach is that its testing mechanism does not require extensive sample preparation; another is a reduced chance of false negative results. Viruses can mutate, and the current tests rely on knowing specific genetic sequences of the virus to detect it. If the virus mutates within one of those sequences, the test could report a false negative (which happened during the 2014 Ebola outbreak). Yet another benefit of the test is that it gets closer to indicating that someone is infectious, as it detects intact viruses rather than viral genetic material. IMPROVING NASAL SWABS Because of disruptions in the supply chain due to the pandemic, there has been a shortage of nasopharyngeal swabs used to collect patient samples for testing. Seeking to find an alternative, pathologist Joel Henderson of BU’s School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center reached out to the College of Engineering for help. Jessie Song, a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering, answered the call.

Song, who does research with Professors Alice White (ME, MSE, BME, Physics) and Mark Grinstaff (BME, Chemistry, MSE, MED), is an expert at using nanoscale 3D printing to create tissue scaffolds, and immediately saw the potential of using it to fabricate nasopharyngeal swabs. Song selected a safe and sterilizable resin— often used to fabricate FDA-approved dental medical devices—and assembled the tools necessary to make several different prototypes. Within a week of receiving Henderson’s call, the first batch of nasopharyngeal swabs was printed at BU’s Multiscale Laser Lithography laboratory.

Henderson and his team evaluated different swabs Song fabricated and offered their feedback; for example, they asked if she could make the shafts more flexible and the tips smoother.

She incorporated their suggestions and went through several iterations with Henderson’s team. Her honeycomb design is expected to ease patient discomfort and reduce the chances of false negative results.

“If I got feedback from the medical research team in the morning, I could create a new design by the afternoon and print overnight,” she says. “I would have a new batch of swabs to send to the team to test the next morning.”

“Jessie is a prime example of what makes BU a great place— it is the students,” Grinstaff says.

The team is putting together materials for clinical trial approval. If all goes well, their swabs could be in production before the end of the year.

“Everyone we’ve reached out to has been extremely responsive and cooperative,” says White. “We’ve been able to secure access to six printers around campus, which together could produce over 3,500 swabs a day, if needed.”

The researchers have been in contact with Klapperich and the BU-wide COVID-19 testing facility to make her aware of the new swab design.

BU engineers are designing 3D-printed nasal swabs that improve upon current designs that could help reduce the chance of false negative test results (top left, new swab; right, 3D printer used to make swabs).

TRACING POTENTIAL INFECTIONS Testing is usually the first step Each device taken toward understanding a deadly virus, but contact tracing is right behind it. When patients would record the random signals test positive for the virus, public health officials manually conduct that it transmits, contact tracing to alert those in the patient’s orbit that they may have and, with been exposed. But with hundreds consent, share of thousands of cases nationally, and thousands of new ones every it with others if day, traditional contact tracing is not practical. the device owner Professor Ari Trachtenberg (ECE, Computer Science) along becomes sick. with Research Associate Professor Mayank Varia (Computer Science) and Professor Ran Canetti (Computer Science) have proposed an alert system that can augment manual contact tracing through a voluntary smartphone app. They developed it as part of a larger group of faculty and students over the summer, and Trachtenberg says they are on track to finish a working prototype app soon.

The app would leverage a short-range communication signal (such as Bluetooth) to constantly broadcast a random signal to nearby participating devices. Each device would record the random signals that it transmits, and, with consent, share it with others if the device owner becomes sick. In this way, close contacts would know that they have been near a sick individual.

If they wish to share this information with their contacts, participants could choose to update their health status within the app after testing positive for the virus. The advantage of such automated contact tracing is that it can identify contacts who are not known to the user, or were made before the onset of visible symptoms. Trachtenberg’s team is working on ways to assure security and patient privacy, and even develop wearable devices for those without smartphones.

STEPPING UP TO BE SOCIETAL ENGINEERS These projects began almost immediately after the college realized how dramatic the effects of COVID-19 would be, and are just some of the efforts faculty, staff and students are making to help fight the pandemic. To help students understand how many aspects of life have been affected, faculty not only changed how they taught, but some changed what they taught. Putting their own research aside, College of Engineering researchers took their expertise and, as Societal Engineers, put it to work to help their own communities—and they aim to put their ideas into practice beyond Boston, so we can all get back to the new normal soon.

The COVID-19 pandemic has kicked scientists, engineers, doctors and others in related fields into high gear as people step up to help solve new problems that have surfaced since early 2020. As chief commercial officer at Quest Diagnostics, a diagnostics information services laboratory company, Manuel

Mendez (ENG’91) is one of those people. Before the pandemic, Quest served one in every three Americans; now—after the company performed more than 7 million of the COVID-19 tests in the US as of the middle of July—that number is likely to be much greater.

Having joined Quest in October of 2019, Mendez says the pandemic has sped up the learning curve at his new position. He focuses daily on managing

Quest’s response to the crisis, proactively working with the public and private sectors to provide testing solutions and make sure every patient is cared for.

“Molecular diagnostics play an important role in safeguarding the general health and welfare of our society; this has never been so clear as during the COVID-19 public health crisis,” he says. “This pandemic has been a challenging time for all of us.

We have a social responsibility to ensure access to testing for every patient, especially those in underserved communities.”

That type of social responsibility drives him.

“‘What impact can I make in someone’s life today?’ is the question that gets me out of bed in the morning,” he says.

From a young age growing up in Puerto Rico,

Mendez was exposed to how healthcare can make a real impact on people’s lives through his father, a hospital administrator. He was first turned on to engineering through the television show The Six Million

Dollar Man, in which the main character has a partially bionic body. (Later, Mendez would learn that the clip of a bionic arm they show during the opening credits was actually filmed at Boston University in the Neuromuscular Research Center.)

Mendez began his career at Abbott Laboratories in Puerto Rico, after hearing about an opening for a biomedical engineer from his grandfather, who had seen a newspaper ad. Growing up, Mendez frequently drove past Abbott, musing that he may work there one day. After graduating from BU, he fulfilled that dream.

Before joining Quest, he worked at QIAGEN, bioMérieux, ThermoFisher Scientific and Abbott

Laboratories. He also received his MBA from Kellogg

School of Management at Northwestern University.

Throughout his career, Mendez has relied on his College of Engineering training to navigate the corporate landscape. “An engineering degree prepares you by teaching you critical thinking. That way you always look to understand the ‘why’ behind everything,” he says. “I took that approach into the business world, and it has been invaluable.”

Mendez appreciates the ingenuity and teamwork at Quest, which has been crucial during the pandemic.

“One of the most rewarding aspects of my job so far is getting to be involved in the collaborative environment at Quest,” he says. “There are no silos, the executive committee is extremely collaborative and navigating the company is easy. While the pandemic has brought The a lot of challenges to our business, it’s pandemic also brought us even closer together, as has everyone is driving toward one mission increased to help address the pandemic.” the impact Mendez is also proud of the work of those he and Quest are doing to close health disparities on communities of color. disparities in the US; Quest has been working with federally qualified health centers and the National Association of Community Health Centers to provide COVID-19 testing to underserved communities. Typically, fewer tests are available due to the lack of care in those areas, but since those communities are the most significantly impacted by the pandemic, Quest is focusing on providing them with additional, much-needed tests.

“The pandemic has increased the impact those disparities have on communities of color. We know this is a moment when we need to act, have a big voice and make those investments to help balance out these inequities as much as we can,” Mendez says. “This type of work isn’t a fad for me. I understand what it is like to not have much, and I have been able to live my dream and help others. And the COVID-19 health crisis shows there is much more work to be done so that maybe the people who are suffering the most can live their dream one day, too.”