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Riding a small wave of new faculty appointments, USC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology is aggressively pursuing an array of biomedical research opportunities.
The new faculty are key to the college’s goal of more collaborative research with USC’s medical school and the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. The appointments also support a wider research agenda of increasing the breadth of the University’s biomedical research.
“We think we’re building on our existing strengths as well as expanding our research focus by adding these new faculty,” said Ralph White, dean of the college. “We’re all recognizing that engineers can make substantive contributions in the field of medicine.”
The engineering college and the School of Medicine have together initiated a seed grant program that provides funding for collaborative projects among the two faculty groups.
Engineering’s biomedical research initiatives include faculty from chemical, mechanical, civil, and computer science and computer engineering. Some of the projects involve veteran faculty members who have long been involved in engineering/medical research collaborations.
Here are some of the soon-to-come or newly arrived engineering faculty and their research interests:
• Esmaiel Jabbari from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Melissa Ann Moss, from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., will join the Department of Chemical Engineering this summer. Jabbari focuses on combining stem cells and polymers to grow orthopaedic tissue, while Moss studies large biomolecules such as plaques that cause disease. Her research, which has implications for arterial blockage and strokes, recently received funding from the American Heart Association.
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| Michael Amiridis |
“If you think about it, chemical engineers have been looking at deposits in pipes for decades, so Moss’ research is a very natural direction,” said Michael Amiridis, chair of USC’s chemical engineering department.
• Jeffrey Bischoff and Marc Garland are recent faculty appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
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| Jeffrey Bischoff |
Bischoff’s major focus is on biomechanics and modeling the mechanical behavior of soft tissue such as skin and heart muscle. He is collaborating with Tom Borg, chair of the cell and developmental biology and anatomy department at USC’s School of Medicine, and is working on collaborations with the orthopaedic surgery department at USC and the pediatric burn unit at MUSC. His research is aimed at developing a better understanding of the relationship between the structure and mechanical properties of soft tissue, including the influence of mechanical constraints on dynamic cell behavior and structural evolution during normal and pathologic growth.
Garland’s research interests are in production and application of radioisotopes in medicine, for both diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Research collaborations are being pursued with Department of Energy national laboratories, private companies, and MUSC.
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| Abdel Bayoumi |
“The mechanical engineering department has a history of biomedical research and collaboration with the medical school,” said Abdel Bayoumi, chair of USC’s mechanical engineering department.
“Over 20 years ago Bill Ranson and Wally Peters, both professors in mechanical engineering, investigated the mechanical properties of the heart in collaboration with the cell and developmental biology and anatomy (CDBA) department in USC’s School of Medicine. This collaboration has paved the way for several current collaborations between these two departments.”
• Jijun Tang and Homayoun Valafar will join the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering later this summer. Tang is a new Ph.D. graduate from the University of New Mexico. Valafar joins USC from the genomics center at the University of Georgia.
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| Duncan Buell |
“This is a new emphasis but not a new direction for computer science and computer engineering,” said department chair Duncan Buell. “I take a broad view of what we ought to be doing in this discipline. Computer science gets its vitality from solving problems, and we have to be tied to what people want to solve—in this case, complex problems in biology.”
Other engineering faculty involved in biomedical research include Branko Popov, a chemical engineering professor who is helping to develop batteries that could be used for implantable defibrillators.
Tangali Sudarshan, an electrical engineering professor, is working with Yuehuei An, director of the Orthopaedic Research Laboratory at MUSC, to test the bioimplant potential of silicon carbide. Sudarshan has conducted extensive research on the material as a semiconductor, and its inert and durable properties bode well for biomedical applications.
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| Mike Matthews |
Chemical engineering professor Mike Matthews spent a recent sabbatical conducting research in the School of Medicine’s orthopaedics department and now holds an adjunct professorship in the department. One of his research areas focuses on using liquid carbon dioxide as a non-destructive sterilizing agent for biomaterials.
Jim Ritter, another chemical engineering professor, is studying a mechanism that uses magnetic particles to deliver micro amounts of medication to targeted body tissues or organs.
“We’re in the top 20 or 30 chemical engineering programs in the country,” Amiridis said. “With the biomedical focus, we hope to be among the top 15.”
Mechanical engineering professors Abdel Bayoumi and Jeff Darabi are building the first micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) research center in South Carolina. A new collaboration between Bayoumi, Darabi, and Daniel Knapp, director of the MUSC Proteomics Center, will use MEMS capabilities at USC to develop “lab on a chip” technologies for drug delivery and DNA analysis.
Two other mechanical engineering professors—Mike Sutton and Steve McNeill—have pioneered digital image correlation, a technique for measuring two- and three-dimensional surface strain fields. Sutton recently spent a sabbatical in CDBA in which he worked to apply the technique to biological materials.
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| Sarah Baxter |
Sarah Baxter and Xiaodong Li, both mechanical engineering professors, are collaborating with researchers in CDBA in an effort to better characterize the properties of artificial tissues that could be used as clinical tissue replacements.
Another professor in mechanical engineering, Victor Giurgiutiu, is collaborating with chemical engineering faculty member Jon Bender to investigate ways to minimize encapsulation around implantable sensors in the body. Ultimately, their research could one day lead to development of sensors capable of monitoring whole organs.
They are working with Harold Freidman in the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery, and with Tom Borg, Wayne Carver, and Tom Yost in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and Anatomy (CDBA).
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| Hanif Chaudhry |
Hanif Chaudhry, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is collaborating with Jamal Moloo, a faculty member in the School of Medicine’s Department of Internal Medicine, to test a new procedure for heart catherization that measures the amount of blockage in an artery.
The traditional method is to measure pressure before an arterial blockage, then feed the catheter wire past the blockage to measure the pressure again. This method is potentially dangerous, but the technique Chaudhry and Moloo are testing eliminates the need for pushing the catheter wire past the blockage.
“We have used the procedure on three patients, and it is giving similar results as the traditional method. We’re just looking for more patient data now to validate the methodology,” Chaudhry said.
6/04
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