News9 Features Building of Prosthetic Hands for OU Boeing Engineering Days

OU Biomedical Engineering was featured on News9 for their efforts as part of the OU Boeing Engineering Days - a day where high school students learn more about engineering disciplines. Saturday's focus, presented by Dr. Rachel Childers, focused on building prosthetic hands. 

View News9 video.

SBME Graduate Student Paper Selected as Finalist at International IEEE Conference

Yafen Chen, a first-year graduate student in SBME has been selected as a finalist in the Student Paper Competition of the Annual Conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Medicine and Biology Society, the largest international organization of biomedical engineers.

Out of 180 student paper entries, Chen's submission was selected as one of ten finalists. She will present her work at the international conference in July at Jeju Island, Korea, where she will compete for three final awards.

Chen's paper focuses on integrating brain imaging with a treatment device of stimulation. Her research is being conducted in collaboration with Yoon-Hee Cha from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, as well as SBME Associate Professor Lei Ding. Han Yuan, an assistant professor in the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, is her Ph.D. advisor.

Graduate Students Shine Bright at Inaugural Symposium

Three graduate students from the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering shone bright at the inaugural 2017 University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Biomedical Engineering Symposium held March 24. The students, all in pursuit of their doctoral degrees, presented posters on their respective research projects. They placed as follows (pictured above from left):

1st place – Jakob TownsendPoster title: “Bone regeneration in critical size calvarial defects utilizing natural materials and growth factors in vivo”

2nd place – Pratik SamantPoster title: "Nanoscale Photoacoustic Tomography for Single Cell Imaging"

3rd place – Salma Mahzoon
Poster title: “Synthetic Peptide Effects on Chondrogenic Differentiation of Stem Cells”

Detamore Named Outstanding Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering Journal

Michael Detamore, director and professor of the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, was named the 2016 Outstanding Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering journal during the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in October.

The Annals of Biomedical Engineering is the official journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society and is an interdisciplinary, international publication which presents original and review articles in the major fields of bioengineering and biomedical engineering.

OU Researchers Discover New, Non-invasive Cancer Treatment

OKC Fox 25 News: Video and story posted Sunday, Oct. 30

Professors at the University of Oklahoma discover way to treat any kind of cancer with no expected side effects.

The treatment process would be non-invasive and only take three minutes, Dr. Roger Harrison said.
Learn more:
http://okcfox.com/news/local/ou-researchers-discover-new-non-invasion-cancer-treatment

2016 OU Neuro News

The University of Oklahoma, as one of three key institutes, has been awarded $6M over the next four years by the National Science Foundation to build research infrastructure in the areas of brain science and neural engineering within the State of Oklahoma, as well as with other collaborative institutes from Rhode Island and Kentucky. The project is titled as “Innovative, Broadly Accessible Tools for Brain Imaging, Decoding, and Modulation.” It involves three states: Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Kentucky, and seven institutes: University of Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and Laureate Institute for Brain Research, University of Rhode Island, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University/Rhode Island Hospital, University of Kentucky, Kentucky State University. The participants will form an interdisciplinary consortium to 1) develop innovative and broadly accessible brain imaging tools and modulation technologies for acquiring fundamental knowledge about how the nervous system functions in healthy and diseased conditions; and 2) develop a diverse workforce in the STEM areas, with particular emphasis on junior faculty, to create and implement these technologies and tools.

The investigators will accelerate development of new portable multimodal brain imaging systems and brain stimulation systems. The technology seeks to realize the potential for combining these systems into hybrid devices that can take advantage of the strengths of each single modality to obtain a more comprehensive picture of brain activity and behavior, and to develop effective treatments for neurological and cognitive impairment. The Rhode Island team focuses on hardware development while both Oklahoma and Kentucky teams develop computational algorithms and implement applications that could benefit from the integrated systems developed through the project. The methods are relevant to basic and clinical studies, with applications in cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuroscience and cognitive psychology. The research will allow the invention and commercialization of low-cost, portable brain imaging and stimulation devices as well as algorithms that will increase accessibility of these technologies to a greater segment of the healthy and patient population. The project also includes multiple components to develop a diverse workforce in the STEM areas, and presents a strategy to engage each important phase of the education and career process, spanning from K-12, undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, to junior faculty.

In Oklahoma, Dr. Lei Ding from the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering is the PI leading the research and infrastructure development activity among University of Oklahoma at Norman Campus (focusing on algorithm and technology development and application to cognitive development), University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center at Oklahoma City (focusing on application to cognitive impairment), and Laureate Institute for Brain Research at Tulsa (focusing on brain stimulation). These three institutes will form the firm collaborative infrastructure for the brain research involving multiple disciplines (engineering, psychology, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery), as well as to interact with other institutes from Rhode Island and Kentucky. In the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Joseph Havlicek (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dr. David Liu (Psychology), and Dr. Han Yuan (Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering) are participating investigators of the project.

The goal of building research infrastructure in the area of brain science is part of the national effort on advancing technology innovations in understanding the human brain as called in the White House BRAIN Initiative. It is also built upon the establishment of the new Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering in OU College of Engineering with one of its three major thrust research areas as neural engineering. This NSF project will enable the further development of brain research in Oklahoma, enhance the relationship of multiple research institutes in the State, and strengthen national collaborations through consortium in competing more federal funding in areas of relevant topics.

OUBC Ph.D. Student Receives Post-Doctoral Fellowship

John Krais, who received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at OU in December of 2015 working with Dr. Roger Harrison, is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. He is working with Dr. Neil Johnson in the Developmental Therapeutics Program on the study of DNA repair mechanisms and clinically relevant mutations that affect those pathways, with a specific focus on BRCA1 mutations. His aim is to study the impact of the mutant proteins within the cancer cell, investigate mechanisms of acquired resistance to current therapies, and identify potential small molecule therapeutics targeted to DNA repair pathways.