Events & News

Former BEI Director, Grant McGimpsey, accepts a gift from the children of the Aberdale Foundation, a long-time supporter of the BEI. The gift will help support summer research activities of students investigating tissue regeneration processes.

Events

Neuroprosthetic 2012 Symposium

Neural Interfaces as enablers for Advanced Prosthetic Function

On February 23, 2012 WPI’s Bioengineering Institute will host the third Neuroprosthetic’s Symposium. The symposium will bring together scientists engineers and advocates focused on the ultimate development of an Advanced Neurally Integrated Prosthetic. Presentations will discuss issues concerned with biomaterials, bioelectronics and biointerfaces that are necessary to be addressed before the concept of an Advanced Prosthetic can be taken from the laboratory to the clinic. There will be contributions from the Universities of Florida, Central Florida, Utah, Kent State, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, the NIH and DARPA.

Symposium speakers include...

Hugh Herr, PhD, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT

COL Geoffrey Ling, M.D, Ph.D., Program Manager, Defense Sciences Office, DARPA

James J. Hickman, PhD, Professor, Chemistry, Biomolecular Science and Electrical Engineering, Director, Nanoscience Technology Center, University of Central Florida

Bruce Wheeler, PhD, J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida

W. Grant McGimpsey, PhD, Vice President for Research and Sponsored Programs, Professor of Chemistry, Kent State University

Gerwin Schalk, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, Biomedical Sciences , Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health

Florian Solzbacher, PhD, Director Utah Nanofabrication Laboratory, University of Utah

Kip Ludwig, PhD, Program Director, Repair and Plasticity, National Institutes of Health / National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Ted Clancy, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Neuroprosthetic 2010 Symposium

On November 3, 2010 more than 140 scientists, engineers, clinicians and advocates gathered at Worcester Polytechnic Institute for Neuroprosthetics 2010—the second annual international symposium sponsored by the Bioengineering Institute at WPI to focus on research and development of a new generation of artificial limbs that can be integrated with the body and controlled by the nervous system.

Scientific presentations on the challenges of osseointegration and soft-tissue regeneration featured speakers from the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. Provocative keynote speeches by Kendra Calhoun, president of the Amputee Coalition of America, and Col. Jennifer Menetrez, MD, director of the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, grounded the symposium with perspectives from the amputee, both civilian and military.

The symposium was organized by the Bioengineering Institute with support from the John Adams Innovation Institute, the economic development division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC).

For more information contact:

Center for Neuroprosthetics
WPI Bioengineering Institute
100 Institute Road
Worcester, MA 01609-2280
508-831-6800
Fax: 508-831-4120
bei@wpi.edu

Neuroprosthetic 2009 Symposium

On September 16th, 2009 a very important Neuroprosthetic Symposium will be held at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  This symposium is sponsored by the Center for Neuroprosthetics at WPI's Bioengineering Institute (BEI). The Center for Neuroprosthetics's mission is to successfully perform and integrate the enabling basic science and engineering necessary to achieve implantable limb prosthetics.  The goal is that for amputees, these implantable neuroprosthetics will have the functional attributes of natural limbs. To promote integrated neuroprosthetics research, this Symposium will be broad in its scope with an appeal to scientific and bioengineering issues.  The Symposium will bring together academic, industry and government research leaders to provide a forum for enhancing the integration of the applied science and engineering necessary to achieve functional implantable limb prosthetics.

WPI Biotechnology & Bioengineering Corporate Forum

March 25, 2009
Alliances and Partnerships in the Biotechnology & Bioengineering Industry

Getting from discovery to commercial product for new therapeutics or medical devices is an increasingly segmented process, with universities and companies focused on core-competencies along the development chain. As a result, the roles of service providers, alliances and partnerships continue to grow in scope and complexity in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and bioengineering industries.  Speakers from WPI and a range of companies will discuss their respective roles in the development chain and how they interact with other companies and universities.

Keynote Speaker: Kevin O’Sullivan, President, Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives.

2nd Annual Symposium on Regenerative Biosciences & Engineering

October 8, 2008

Regenerative medicine involves the use of cells and scaffolds to produce replacement parts for the human body.  This symposium will feature world renowned experts in the field of regenerative medicine, many of whom collaborate with faculty members at WPI.

Biofuels and Plant-Produced Products – Sponsored by the WPI Bioengineering Institute and the WPI’s Department of Biology and Biotechnology

October 27, 2008

To establish energy independence and insure domestic security, the United States must wean itself from petroleum-based products. Prior to World War II, plants and microorganisms provided all the materials needed for fuels and other general and specialty chemicals. It is time to return to the future and again focus on plant and microbe-based production of these chemicals to help meet our energy needs, and to create new pharmaceuticals and other chemical building blocks essential for a healthy society and environment. This Symposium will highlight new opportunities that have developed from collaborations recently initiated between the Arkansas Biosciences Institute where problems at the interface of agriculture and human health are being addressed, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute where engineering has merged with biology to solve industrial problems related to plant-produced products and biofuels.

WPI Biotechnology & Bioengineering Corporate Forum

March 26, 2008

Panel Session: The Challenges of Life Science Start-up Companies

The speakers in this session will describe the challenges that their young companies have encountered in the early phases of their development, how they have addressed these challenges, how the academic world has helped and how they see their company and their sector developing over the next several years.

Panel Session: New Product Development in Established Life Science Companies

The speakers in this session will describe the challenges they encounter in new product development in their established companies, how they address these challenges, how the academic world has helped, and how they see their company and sector developing over the next several years.

Symposium on Physiological Monitoring

February 21, 2008 

Nanotechnology and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have facilitated the fabrication of minimally invasive and unobtrusive devices for physiological monitoring. In this symposium, research and development of devices with applicability in three areas will be examined; biomarker monitoring for diagnosis and drug compliance, blood glucose monitoring for diabetes management and monitoring of physical parameters such as temperature, pressure and bioelectrical signals.

Seminars

Life Science Poster Session and CEO Networking Reception

Tuesday, September 9, 2008
5:00 - 6:00 pm
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Salisbury Labs

Plese join us for the first annual WPI Venture Forum Life Science poster session and CEO networking reception sponsored by the WPI Bioengineering Institute.  Learn about the great products and technologies being developed and commercialized in Central Mass.

Functional Analysis of Surface Roughness

Christopher A. Brown, PhD, PE, FASME
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Director, Surface Metrology Laboratory
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Monday, September 15, 2008
3:00 - 4:30 pm
Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park
Seminar Room (1002)

Presentation Abstract

Opportunities to improve product performance by better design of surface roughness, or texture, often have been constrained by the use of inadequate and inappropriate measurement and characterization methods.  The most widely used methods still primarily statistical and operate within many of the technical constraints of the 1930s.  The functional approach for analysis and characterization also relies on statistics, but attempts to answer the question: what would we need to know about the surface roughness to understand how it will behave and how to make it.

Since the 1980 when I was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and at Atlas Copco’s research center I have been developing better methods for characterizing surface textures.  These methods enable the discrimination of a wide variety of surfaces by differences in their textures, which are caused by environment, composition, and processing (Scott et al. 2005, Narayan et al 2006, Jordan and Brown 2006). The essence of the methods is to directly characterize geometrical features, such as available area, which should have an impact on performance.  The characterization must be as a function of scale of observation, since, on a rough surface, where the geometry has chaotic components, the characterization of geometric features tends to change with scale.  These methods exploit the observation that rough surface textures tend to be geometrically fractal in nature, which means that the apparent area increases with decreasing scale. 

These methods have allowed me to develop and test a discrete bonding model for quantifying the relation between surface textures and adhesion in thermal spray (Brown and Siegmann 2001), which has recently been applied to bacteria (Emerson et al. 2006). 

This presentation will review some of my basic and my recent work in surface metrology, showing how to discover scales of interaction with surface textures by using scale-based discrimination and correlation with scale-sensitive fractal analyses. 

News 

 

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Last modified: January 19, 2012 10:38:46