Events & News

Events

 Neuroprosthetic 2010 Symposium

WPI is now planning for Neuroprosthetics 2010 and organizing an expanded advisory board to help work on next year's symposium and to explore other means to continue advancing the field.

If you are interesting in participating in the planning process for 2010, or want to offer other ideas or thoughts, please 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: November 19, 2009 13:46:44