of relief but also a cheer of success—I officially knew what I was doing after graduation, and it was the best of all of my possible options!”

The Luce Scholars Program was launched by the Henry Luce Foundation to enhance the understanding of Asia among young American leaders. Luce scholars represent a wide range of fields other than Asian studies including arts, journalism, science, public health, and international relations. They receive a stipend, language training, and individu-alized professional placement in Asia. The foundation strongly considers can-didates who demonstrate potential for leadership and accomplishment.

Continued on Page 3...

JUNE 2013 VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2

Newly Named Luce Scholar Aims to Make a Mark in Global Health

Biomedical engineering senior Claire Duvallet has been named a Luce Scholar, making her the first student from SEAS to achieve the prestigious honor.

As one of just 18 students nationwide chosen for the annual fellowship, Du-vallet, 21, will travel to Asia after gradu-ation and have the opportunity to work

as a biomedical engineer in a specific focus area of her choosing. The new class of fellows was selected after an intense three-month-long process, handpicked from 17 nominating in-stitutions and a pool of 168 outstand-ing candidates.

Duvallet was on her way to a friend’s house when she got the news via a phone call; it was just three days af-ter her interview with the officials at the Henry Luce Foundation. “I had felt really, really good leaving my interview, and I knew that even if I hadn't gotten it, the whole process had been so rewarding that it would be okay,” she recalls. “Getting the Luce, however, was just that extra icing on the cake and the biggest sigh

THE FU FOUNDATION SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

BME INSIGHTS

Professor Huang Wins NSF CAREER Award

Biomedical Engineering Assistant Profes-sor Hayden Huang has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his research on three-dimensional (3D) cell mechanics. One of the NSF’s most prestigious awards that honors excep-tional junior faculty, the CAREER Award will support Huang’s work with a $425,000 five-year grant.

“I am honored to receive a CAREER Award,” says Huang. “It will enable me to establish the groundwork for critical research in cell and tissue biomechanics, as well as to devel-op imaging techniques and computational models that I hope will augment biomedical knowledge and lead to improved diagnoses or treatments. Because of the rapid development of 3D tissue-engineered constructs and the need for proper-

Continued on Page 6...

ly conditioning and characterizing cell properties, my work is intended to address a large gap in our current knowledge.”

Huang’s research focuses on cell mechanics and mechanotrans-duction—how cells convert mechanical stimuli to chemical signals and cellular changes. He studies responses of cells to different types of physical stimuli as well as factors modulating cell mechanical properties and adhesion. He notes that cell properties have been extensively examined in two dimensions (2D), with scientists discovering all kinds of useful information about how cells stick to substrates, move, establish polarity, generate traction forces, and respond via mechanotransduction. However, most cells in vivo exist in a 3D environment, where, he says, “their behavior is considerably different compared to when they are plated on a petri dish. Not only are there signifi-cant geometric differences, but there are also omnidirectional cell-cell interactions as well as cell-matrix interactions. As we

Fast, Low-cost Device Uses the Cloud to Speed Up Testing for HIV and More

PAGE 2 BME INSIGHTS

Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engi-neering at Columbia Engineering, has taken his innova-tive lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatical-ly and instantaneously with central health-care records—10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device (pictured below) was field-tested in Rwanda by a collabo-rative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

In the study published online January 18, 2013, in Clini-cal Chemistry, and in the print April 2013 issue, Sia de-scribes a major advance towards providing people in re-mote areas of the world with laboratory-quality diagnos-tic services traditionally available only in centralized health care settings.

“We’ve built a handheld mobile device that can perform laboratory-quality HIV testing, and do it in just 15 minutes and on finger-pricked whole blood,” Sia says. “And, unlike current HIV rapid tests, our device can pick up positive samples normally missed by lateral flow tests, and automatically synchronize the test results with pa-tient health records across the globe using both the cell phone and satellite networks.”

Sia collaborated with Claros Diagnostics (a company he co-founded, now called OPKO Diagnostics) to develop a pioneering strategy for an integrated microfluidic-based diagnostic device—the mChip—that can perform com-

plex laboratory assays, and do so with such simplicity that these tests can easily be carried out anywhere, in-cluding in resource-limited settings, at a very low cost. This new study builds upon his earlier scientific concepts and incorporates a number of new engineering elements that make the test automated to run with data communi-cation over both cell phone and satellite networks.

“There are a set of core functions that such a mobile de-vice has to deliver,” he says. “These include fluid pump-ing, optical detection, and real-time synchronization of diagnostic results with patient records in the cloud. We’ve been able to engineer all these functions on a handheld mobile device and all powered by a battery.”

This new technology, which combines cell phone and satellite communication technologies with fluid miniatur-ization techniques for performing all essential ELISA functions, could lead to diagnosis and treatment for HIV-infected people who, because they cannot get to central-ized health care centers, do not get tested or treated.

“This is an important step forward for us towards making a real impact on patients,” says Jessica Justman, MD, senior technical director at ICAP and associate clinical professor of medicine in epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. “And with the real-time data upload, policymakers and epidemiologists can also moni-tor disease prevalence across geographical regions more quickly and effectively.”

Working with ICAP, OPKO, the Rwandan Ministry of Health, and Rwandan collaborators at Muhima Hospital and two health clinics—Projet San Francisco and Projet Ubuzima, Sia and his team assessed the device's ability to perform HIV testing and then synchronized results in real time with the patients’ electronic health records. They successfully tested over 200 serum, plasma, and whole blood samples, all collected in Rwanda.

The mobile device also successfully transmitted all whole-blood test results from a Rwandan clinic to a medical records database stored on the cloud. The device pro-duced results in agreement with a leading ELISA test, including detection of weakly positive samples that were missed by existing rapid tests. The device operated au-tonomously with minimal user input, produced each result in 15 minutes (compared to 3 hours with the

Professor Sias’s lab-on-a-chip

PAGE 3 VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2

benchtop ELISA), and consumed as little power as a mobile phone.

This latest study builds on previous work from the Sia Lab on building a lab-on-a-chip for personal health diagnosis. For this earlier device, Columbia University was named a Medical

Devices runner-up in The Wall Street Journal’s prestigious Technology Innovation Awards in 2011.

This research has been funded by a $2-million Saving Lives at Birth transition grant (United States Agency for Interna-tional Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Government of Norway, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Bank).

Sia’s next step will be to implement an antenatal care pan-el for diagnosing HIV and sexually transmitted diseases for pregnant women in Rwanda. He is also exploring the use of this technology for improving personal health for con-sumers in the United States.

"The ability to perform state-of-the-art diagnostics on mobile devices has the potential to revolutionize how pa-tients manage their health,” Sia says. “I’m pleased with the progress we have made so far, and we are working hard with our collaborators to bring this technology to clini-cians, patients, and consumers.

— by Holly Evarts

...Continued from page 1

Newly Named Luce Scholar Aims to make a Mark in Global Health

An avid traveler, Duvallet sought the Luce Scholarship, drawn to the opportunity to get industry experience as a biomedical engineer while being immersed in a different culture. This is exactly how she wanted to spend a year before heading back to school to pursue a PhD in biomed-ical engineering. “When I found out about the Luce,” she

says, “it just seemed like the perfect trifecta of everything I wanted for my gap year: a professional experience, that lasts one year, in an Asian country, specifically for people who know nothing about Asia. I saw that and thought, ‘Hey, that’s me!’”

Having worked in Associate Professor Samuel Sia’s labor-atory, Duvallet has developed a keen interest in technol-ogies for global health, such as point-of-care diagnostic devices. As a Luce Scholar, she hopes her placement is in a country with significant discrepancies in their health care and, ideally, working in the biomedical devices or diagnostic fields.

Duvallet grew up in Austin, TX, and is a dual citizen of both the U.S. and France. She has always loved math and science but equally has a desire to help people and “really tangibly influence the larger world around me,” she says. She’s found that she can accomplish this through biomed-ical engineering. “Biomedical engineering is an awesome combination of all of that; it’s a highly technical field, but at the end of the day, it’s also ultimately focused on help-ing people.”

When she is not hitting the books, she is hitting the dance floor. Duvallet has practiced swing dancing since her high school AP chemistry teacher started a social dance club; now she is a dancer in the Columbia Swing Club. “It’s a super great way to turn on parts of my brain that don’t always get to be used,” she says. She also plays percussion in the Columbia University Orchestra, and beginning this year, in a small chamber group.

Duvallet’s adviser, Assistant Professor Hayden Huang, calls her a highly motivated and intelligent student, “often asking questions that made it abundantly clear that she really tries to understand the material as a whole.” Huang taught Duvallet in his Fluid Biomechanics course and has been her academic adviser for the past year.

“Claire clearly has solid technical knowledge so the Luce will provide an outstanding opportunity for her to ac-quire broader experiences that cannot be obtained via coursework alone,” says Huang. “I think immersive trav-eling can show people different ways of doing things and may help people find what they are passionate about. Given her academic performance and potential for achievement, Claire definitely deserves opportunities such as the Luce Scholarship, and I wish her the best.”

—by Melanie A. Farmer

Professor Samuel K. Sia

Prof. Qi Wang Joins BME Faculty

PAGE 4 BME INSIGHTS

The Department of Biomedical Engineering welcomes Dr. Qi Wang to its faculty as an assistant professor. His appointment began January 1st, 2013 and he has just completed his first semester here at Columbia University.

Dr. Wang’s Neural Engineering and Control Laboratory focuses

on developing technologies for effectively “writing” infor-mation into the brain through brain-machine interfaces (BMI), with the ultimate goal of restoring brain functions damaged through trauma or neurological diseases.

The initial step towards this goal is to control neural cir-cuitry through BMI to restore tactile sensations. To create informative tactile sensations, two major challenges must be overcome. The first is to understand how tactile infor-mation is processed in the brain. When we touch an object, forces are imposed on the skin, inducing a complicated pat-tern of skin deformation. The deformation causes mechano-receptors embedded in the skin to fire discrete electrical impulses (spikes, or action potentials). These spikes then propagate to the primary somatosensory cortex through various stages within this pathway, ultimately giving rise to touch perception. Dr. Wang’s lab utilizes an array of theo-retical and computational approaches to neuroscience, to-gether with large-scale electrophysiological recording in concert with awake-behavioral tasks to investigate neural coding in the somatosensory pathway using the rodent whisker system as a model system.

The second challenge is to effectively drive neural circuitry through high density electrode arrays. For example, it has

been shown that micro-stimulation evokes widespread downstream neuronal activation, losing its specificity. The crosstalk between individual channels of the electrode array would deteriorate the information transmitted through the

BMI. Dr. Wang’s lab uses both theoretical and experimental approaches to develop stimulation strategies for increasing in-formation transmission of the patterned micro-stimulation.

At the peripheral level, Dr. Wang’s lab is also developing tech-nology for synthesizing tactile sensa-tions through tactile displays. The sense of touch is crucial for humans to explore and manipulate the external world. However, in many applica-tions, such as in minimally invasive surgery, operators lose the tactile per-ception of an object that they manipu-late due to physical limitations. Thus, artificial tactile feedback would be of valuable assistance in these applica-tions. Dr. Wang has developed strate-gies for tactile synthesis through a pro-cess to compute spatiotemporal skin deformations and convert them into

transducer signals to elicit desired tactile sensations.

Dr. Wang holds two Ph.D. degrees; his first (1998) in Robotics and Control from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China, and his second (2007) in Computer-human interfaces from McGill University, Canada. He received postdoctoral training in neuroscience at Harvard University from 2006 to 2008, and then from 2008 to 2012 was a research faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.

Cortical responses to tactile input measured by voltage sensitive dye (VSD) imaging.

Brain activity is optimally decoded by using Bayesian inference techniques.

A compact tactile dis-play with high spatio-temporal resolution to render engineered tactile sensations.

Dr. Wang has received numerous awards including the Best Paper Award at the 14th IEEE Symposium on Haptic Interfac-es for Virtual Environment and Tele-operator Systems. He is a co-founder of, and has served as the vice president of Tac-tile Labs Inc., a startup company which is commercializing the technology that he invented.

Senior Design Day 2013

PAGE 5 VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2

Senior BME students unveiled their capstone design projects at a presentation and poster session at the annual BME Senior Design Day, held May 7, in Davis Auditorium, CEPSR.

Each year, BME students embark on the development of a solution to a biomedical problem take by taking on all phases of device innovation in the two semester BME Senior Design course. Starting with defining a biomedical problem, the students are then responsible for identifying the commercial

landscape and competing products, selecting pro-spective solutions that best fit customer needs and constraints, and formulating a business strategy. The second semester is primarily devoted to prototyping the proposed solutions and performing verifica-tion and validation activ-

ities to prove that their design satisfies the biomedical need. Students end their final semester with a demonstration of their prototype device and are judged by a panel of faculty and invited guests from industry.

This year’s designs included:

Improving outcomes of infant lumbar puncture proce-dures

Laparoscopic assist device to clear the viewing filed dur-ing surgeries

Monitoring of bed-ridden patients to prevent pressure injuries

Device to monitor and enhance posture in persons wearing back braces

Noninvasive seizure detection system for sleeping pa-tients

O2-air entrainment and ventilation system for low re-source countries

Smartphone-based monitoring and guidance of rehab exercises

A device to rapidly detect foodborne allergens Prevention of malaria proliferation in persons displaced

by humanitarian crises Combatting vaccine loss during cold chain transporta-

tion

Walter H. Coulter Birthday Celebration This year, Walter H. Coulter, co-founder of the Coulter Corpora-tion, would have been 100 years old. To honor the event, the De-partment of Biomedical Engi-neering hosted a birthday cele-bration, along with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, which

recently established the Columbia-Coulter Translational Re-search Partnership. This highly coveted partnership aims to accelerate innovations toward clinical use and patient care.

Walter Coulter is the inventor of the Coulter Principle, which is used to automatically count and size particles such as blood cells and viruses. Mr. Coulter was committed to im-

proving health care and to this end, in addition to his many medical diagnostic products, established the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to fund medical research and engineering.

The Coulter Foundation presented two student “Spirit of Wallace Coul-ter” awards at this event, to students who best reflect Wallace H. Coul-ter’s commitment to biomedical innovation for the benefit of humani-ty. The recipients were undergradu-ates Annabelle Anandappa and Gar-rett Ruggieri, in a tie, and graduate student, Matthew Bouchard.

Prof. Andrew Laine, Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Sue Van, President, Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, in front of Coulter medallion.

Design team Laparoclean won the design competition. Left to Right: Jonathan Bernhard (teaching assistant), Kimberly Lynch, Aaron Kyle (course instructor), Kapil Wattamwar, Keith Yeager (course co-instructor), Kevin Ma, Viktor Gamarnik (teaching assistant), Debattama Sen.

Students presenting methods of safe collection of cerebrospinal fluid in infants

PAGE 6 BME INSIGHTS

Huang nsf Career Award

make advances in disease and tissue engineering research, it is imperative that we establish cellular behavior and proper-ties, under such conditions, in detail.”

But imaging and otherwise probing cells that are embedded within other cells and/or matrices is difficult to do. The difficulty occurs, in part, because light carrying important information can be distorted or attenuated when imaging through multiple cell layers or gels, and, in part, because embedded cells are generally inaccessible to conventional instruments such as atomic force microscopes. Huang plans to develop transformative techniques to get more infor-mation from 3D cellular environments by designing and

deploying custom imaging setups, coupled with computational models to help interpret the results.

“Because 3D is a growing area of cell-based research,” he says, “and because there are few tools for examining biomechanics and mechanotransduction in 3D ex-perimentation, I hope that my research will help advance the field of biomechanics, and con-tribute to tissue engineering and imaging. My eventual goal is to establish a vastly improved and

more realistic model of multicellular behavior and to better

...Continued from Page 1 understand cell regulation and physiology.”

Huang hopes to be able to answer questions like how cells change their architecture when stretched and how cells com-municate and adapt under different environments. Answering these questions will be useful for understanding disease mod-els and for improving the condition of tissue-engineered con-structs.

“Preliminary work demonstrates that cell behavior in layered arrangements is already more complex than conventional 2D plating can predict,” Huang adds. “So it’s clear that we need to deploy more advanced methods to study cells in 3D. The idea is to precisely characterize cell properties under realistic but controlled conditions, where we can vary the extracellular matrix constituents, the mechanical stresses acting on the cells, and the degree of cell-cell interactions. This CAREER award provides a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the potential of this field.”

As part of his CAREER award, Huang is also planning to ex-pand his lab’s educational outreach by engaging undergradu-ates in lab research and creating short videos with a focus on biomedical engineering topics and techniques. “These are in-tended to be short and focus on select topics, like the ‘Minute Physics’ videos, that we’ll make available on YouTube or simi-lar video sites,” he adds. “We hope they’ll appeal to a wide audience and draw more young people into science and re-search.”

—by Holly Evarts

Magnetic micromanipu-lator used to measure cell stiffness and adhesive-ness.

Professors Laine and Guo Begin Terms at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Two faculty members from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Prof. Ed Guo and Prof. Andrew Laine, have recently begun their terms of service at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Prof. Guo is serving as an International Liason committee member, and Prof. Laine is serv-ing on the Board of Directors as Chair of the Council of Societies.

AIMBE is the largest professional organization in the field of bioengineering and biomedical engineering in medicine, representing 50,000 individuals and the top 2% of medical and biological engineers. According to AIMBE, its mission state-ment is: "To be the authoritative voice and advocate for the value of medical and

biological engineering to society. It is an organization of leaders in medical and biological engineering, consisting of academic, industrial, professional society councils and elected fellows."

As Chair of the Council of Societies, Andrew Laine will serve to coordinate and enhance interaction among 16 scientific organi-zations in medical and biological engineering. Ed Guo, in his role as International Liaison, will serve as the U.S. representative to the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Andrew Laine Ed Guo