News and Events

News

Nirmal Ravi wins national video contest
Nirmal Ravi's video about life as an Indian student in the U.S won a national video contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce in collaboration with the U.S. Electronic Education Fairs for China and India. Nirmal is an M.D./Ph.D. student working toward a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering. The video was selected for a "multimedia campaign that promotes the breadth and depth of U.S. higher education opportunities to Indian and Chinese students, their parents and advisors." The press release can be seen here and Nirmal's award-winning video here.

Puleo elected AIMBE Fellow
David Puleo, Professor and Director of CBME, has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering was founded in 1991 to establish a clear and comprehensive identity for the fields of medical and biological engineering. The College of Fellows consists of approximately 1,000 outstanding bioengineers in academia, industry, and government who make up about 2% of the total number of individuals active in medical and biological engineering. These leaders in the field have distinguished themselves through their contributions in research, industrial practice, and/or education. Fellows are involved in planning AIMBE's annual event, other professional activities within AIMBE, and also to advancing bioengineering as a career option to younger students and youths around the world.

Other UK CBME faculty who have been inducted as AIMBE Fellows include Professors Eugene Bruce, Charles Knapp, and Steven Lai-Fook.

New faculty in the Center
Drs. Hainsworth Shin and Guoqiang Yu joined the Center as Assistant Professors. Dr. Shin came to UK following his graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. His interests focus on cell mechanotransduction as it applies to inflammation and vascular biology. Dr. Yu received his doctorate from Tianjin University and then was a postdoctoral fellow and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research involves near-Infrared diffuse optical spectroscopy/tomography for measurement of blood flow and oxygenation. Both will be moving to Lexington during the fall semester.

Patwardhan's paper selected for accompanying editorial
In the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology, Abhijit Patwardhan, an Associate Professor, and Runze Wu, a Ph.D. Graduate Student working with him, reported findings that provided a definitive answer to one of the long running controversies about mechanisms of electrical function of the heart and sudden cardiac death. The importance and significance of these findings was highlighted by an accompanying editorial which focused on their ground breaking work. Patwardhan and Wu used a novel methodology, previously developed in Patwardhan's laboratory at the University of Kentucky, to show, for the first time, that a cellular property of the heart, the restitution of repolarization, is not necessary for electrical alternans to exist. Electrical alternans manifest themselves as a characteristic change in the ECG known as T wave alternans. These T wave alternans are considered to be the most promising indicator predictive of disturbances to the rhythms of the heart which can lead to sudden cardiac death. Proposed as a mechanism several decades ago, restitution of repolarization has been considered to be responsible for genesis of alternans and subsequently of lethal arrhythmia and has recently generated much research interest and controversy. The study by Wu and Patwardhan provided a conclusive explanation for the controversy by showing that although restitution is important, it is a contributing but not a necessary factor.

This is the second time within less than two years that research from Patwardhan's laboratory in the Center for Biomedical Engineering has received editorial recognition. In April of 2004, Wu and Patwardhan reported the discovery of a previously unknown property of heart cells. In a paper published in Circulation Research, they showed that the time it takes for cells of the heart to electrically recover from one contraction to the next is different when the heart is slowing down than when the heart rate is increasing. This study re-defined the role that this fundamental electrical property plays in degeneration of the rhythmic function of the heart into lethal arrhythmia. The importance of these findings was once again highlighted and selected as the focus of an editorial. That editorial, published in Circulation Research, stated that these findings were of more than academic interest as they may very well help in the development of new treatments for these disorders of the heart.

Patwardhan selected as AHA committee chair
Dr. Abhijit Patwardhan has been invited by the American Heart Association to serve as chairperson of a National Bioengineering and Biotechnology grant review committee for year 2008. This committee reviews grants submitted from all over the country to the American Heart Association that have a Bioengineering and Biotechnology focus on cardiovascular and stroke related diseases and disorders.

Events

The schedule for our current seminar series can be found here.