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Department of Bioengineering
Newsletter
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Being a Department Chair can set you on a slippery slope, and little initiatives can transform over time into opportunities you never anticipated. In my first years as Chair of Bioengineering I met many students who were interested and passionate about making an impact on healthcare delivery in the developing world. Northeastern is a global university with increasing international visibility and programs. Putting together an international program for BioE students seemed a natural fit to the University’s strategic goals. But where do you begin? By chance I knew the Chair of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Ghana (he spent a few years at Northeastern) and I gave him a call. Over the next few months, we spent a lot of time talking about how Northeastern and the University of Ghana could partner. But we could not converge on a clear strategy. I decided the best way to make progress was to visit Ghana myself. In early summer, 2019, I travelled to Ghana with Professor Marc Fuller. Marc gave a workshop at the University of Ghana where we discovered that the Biomedical Engineering students there were getting a wonderful education. But they expressed great frustration at the poor prospects for getting a job that would use their training. As it happened, we managed to get an audience with the Minister of Health on that trip. At one point during our visit with the Minister, he said, "Ghana has more engineers than we need." Well, I couldn’t let that pass and I responded that "Ghana doesn’t have a surplus of engineers, [in fact], you have a shortage of opportunities." That one brief exchange set me on a path to find ways to increase opportunities for bioengineers in West Africa. My plan is to coordinate with Universities in Ghana to bring students and faculty from Northeastern together with those from Ghana, perhaps in a Bioinnovation Center in Accra. We are now putting together plans to do just that. If we succeed, it will have huge benefits for students and faculty from both Northeastern and Ghana. How will it work? Stay tuned… it's a slippery slope!
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Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering |
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About: The College of Engineering at Northeastern University invites applications and nominations for the position of Chair of the Bioengineering Department. The Chair will provide vision to direct the hiring of faculty, the nurturing of research foci, and the development of educational curricula.
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“The interface of engineering and medicine as embodied in bioengineering will be one of the most exciting endeavors and greatest adventures of the 21st century.”
- Lee Makowski, PhD
Current Chair of Bioengineering
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Assistant/Associate/Full Professor - College of Engineering - Biological Systems and Solutions |
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About: As part of a strategic initiative, coordinated across the university under the broad theme of Biological Systems and Solutions, Northeastern University seeks faculty candidates for tenured or tenure-track appointments at the assistant, associate, or full professor levels. Appointments will be primarily or fully in the College of Engineering within the Departments of Bioengineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. This position has potential for both joint cross-department appointments and joint cross-college appointments in the College of Science, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, College of Arts, Media and Design, or the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Positions will primarily be on the Boston campus but may be available at any of our 14 campus locations. The University and the College of Engineering are in the midst of a significant, multi-year expansion in size and scope, including faculty, facilities, and programs within several disciplines and across disciplinary boundaries.
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Looking for an MS or PhD program? |
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Bioengineering an Impact with "Give a Hand" |
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Growing up in Mexico City, Isabela Castillo intended on medical school. She says, “I thought I would stay in Mexico and live there my whole life.” Plans changed when she pursued a personal project requirement in 10th grade at her school in Mexico. She decided to 3D print a hand. After downloading the files from the internet, her prototype worked. She reached out to a medical non-profit to help a girl who needed a prosthetic hand. “They liked my work, so I started printing and manufacturing hands for them.”
Castillo started the club Give a Hand at her high school, but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. However, the project inspired her to reevaluate her college plans. She says, “I decided to apply to the U.S. schools a few months before the deadline. I realized that my work with medical devices could have a wider impact than a doctor. Give a Hand is why I chose an engineering school. I love the physical manufacturing of bioengineering.”
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Bajpayee Awarded R21 Grant to Develop Therapies for Treating Lower Back Pain |
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BioE Associate Professor Ambika Bajpayee, in collaboration with Nadeen Chahine from Columbia University Health Sciences, was awarded a $222K R21 grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases for “Sustained Delivery of RhoA activator for Treatment of Intervertebral Disc Degeneration.”
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Abstract: Discogenic back pain, is a leading cause of disability, and involves degenerative changes of the intervertebral disc (IVD). Since only a small subset of patients responds favorably to conventional treatments which address the symptoms but not the disease, there is a need for new therapies to treat disc degeneration (DD). The avascular nature and the dense matrix of the IVD makes it challenging for systemically administered drugs to reach their target cells inside the nucleus pulposus (NP). While local intra-discal injection of therapeutic drugs directly into the NP is a clinically relevant delivery approach, it suffers from low persistence and rapid diffusion from the injection site resulting in short lived benefits, off target effects and potentially, systemic toxicity.
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BioE Alum Wins 2022 Innovator |
Bioengineering alumna Samantha Johnson, E’21, ME’21, was the first place winner of the 2022 Innovator Awards given out by Northeastern’s Women Who Empower in the young alumnae graduate category, which she will use to develop a robotic arm that can sign in ASL.
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Samantha Johnson, bioengineer and founder of Tatum Robotics, vividly remembers meeting a DeafBlind person for the first time.
She was in her sophomore year at Northeastern University, taking an American Sign Language class, which required her to learn more about the local Deaf community by attending local Deaf events. At one of the events, she met a DeafBlind woman.
“I thought it was truly like magic how they could somehow understand [what was being communicated] purely into their hands,” Johnson says.
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New Faculty Spotlight
Miten Jain joins the Bioengineering department in July 2022 as an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in Physics.
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New Faculty Spotlight
Esin Sozer joins the Bioengineering department in July 2022 as an Assistant Teaching Professor.
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Using Impact Engine Funds to Capture Real-Time ICU Data |
BioE/Khoury/Bouve Professor Rai Winslow is leading the project HEART (Healthcare Enabled by AI in Real-Time), from Northeastern’s Impact Engine program, which uses machine learning to collect data from ICU patients to predict any complications.
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Bedside monitors in cardiac intensive care units measure everything from patients’ blood pressure and blood oxygen levels to their heart rate and rhythm.
The numerical and waveform measurements provide valuable information for doctors and nurses monitoring patients for immediate signs of distress. But once that information flashes across a screen, it is gone forever.
What if the data could be captured and crunched in real time?
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PhD Spotlight: Yasmeen Farra, PhD'22 - Bioengineering |
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Originally from Austin, Texas, Yasmeen Farra, advised by Chiara Bellini, associate professor of bioengineering, began her PhD at Northeastern in 2017 after graduating from Trinity University with a bachelor’s degree in engineering science. Her research focuses on vascular mechanics—specifically, how chronic disease associated with e-cigarette “vaping” or cigarette smoking influences the structural integrity and functional health of large arteries.
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BioE Students Granted Provisional Patent for a Breast Implant Design that Mimics Natural Bodies |
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Breast implants in the 21st century provoke images of popular culture beauty icons, but their importance surpasses societal status throughout the worlds of biomedical engineering and plastic surgery. Last Spring, an NU Bioengineering student group realized a gap in the market of breast implants. They worked together to create an implant that mimics natural bodies and recently received a provisional patent for the design.
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Christina Wheeler, Department of Bioengineering MS Candidate |
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Interested in learning more? Contact us! |
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Northeastern University Department of Bioengineering | bioe.northeastern.edu |
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