News and Events

News

Another new faculty member joins the Center
Dr. Sridhar Sunderam joined the Center as an Assistant Professor. Prof. Sunderam came to UK from The Pennsylvania State University, where he was a Research Associate. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Kansas, Dr. Sunderam spent six years in the private sector as a research and development engineer. His interests focus on computational neural engineering, signal analysis for epilepsy, and state-space models of behavior.

CBME findings about secondhand smoke receive international attention
Men and women respond differently to breathing second hand tobacco smoke, according to a group of investigators from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, a Versailles, KY biomedical engineering company, customKYnetics, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Joyce Evans, Abhijit Patwardhan, Ashwin Jayanthi, Charles Knapp, Roger Jenkins, Ralph Ilgner, and Eric Hartman recently reported results of a study in which they exposed healthy, nonsmoking adults to four different aerosols (one sham, water vapor, and three particulates, tobacco smoke, cooking oil fumes and wood smoke) while recording cardiovascular and respiratory measures. Significant findings from the study included increased indexes of sympathetic drive to blood vessels in both men and women in response to each of the three particulates. In response to second hand tobacco smoke, indexes of sympathetic drive in the breathing frequency region were increased more in men than in women and more than these same men’s response to the other particulates or to sham exposure. Finally, responses to these fairly low level exposures were detected in a very short time interval (10 min of sustained exposure). Greater details of this study are given in a press release from the American Physiological Society issued as this work was presented at the 2009 meeting of Experimental Biology in New Orleans. This story was picked up by Reuters, CBS radio news, Science News, Men’s Health, Yahoo, US News and World Report, ScienceDaily, Defeat Diabetes Association, etc.

Center for Biomedical Engineering and Spanish university announce cooperative agreement
The University of Kentucky (UK) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona, Spain, have signed a cooperative agreement to promote education and academic exchanges between the two universities.  UPC is a public institution dedicated to education and research in architecture, science, and engineering.  UPC is a leader in the internationalization of technical education.  The importance of engaging international partners in U. S. science and engineering education in order to develop a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering workforce has been recognized by agencies such as the National Science Foundation.  The agreement encourages direct contact and research cooperation between faculty members and research units of the two institutions, including exchange of faculty for research, lectures, and discussions, and exchange of students for study and research.

Under the umbrella of this general agreement Dr. David Puleo, Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBME) at UK, and Dr. Pere Caminal, Director of the Biomedical Engineering Research Centre (CREB) at UPC, have announced a separate agreement to promote joint research in the field of Computational Physiology through exchanges of faculty and students.  CBME (http://www.cbme.uky.edu) is a multidisciplinary graduate center which is the focus of biomedical engineering research and teaching at UK.  Computational Physiology is one of several foci of the Center.  CREB (http://www.creb.upc.es/index.php?lang=en_EN) is a multidisciplinary research center that is affiliated with the Departments of Automatic Control and Electrical Engineering at UPC.  It has a strong focus on applied research and technology transfer.  CREB is highly regarded for its programs in biomedical signal processing and biomedical instrumentation.  Under the agreement, CBME and CREB pledge to work together to obtain funding to support joint research activities and the exchange of faculty and scholars, to extend typical academic privileges to visiting researchers, and to freely share data acquired through joint efforts.  The coordinators for this agreement are Prof. Eugene Bruce from CBME and Prof. Miquel Angel Mananas from CREB.

The first exchange student, Hector Hernandez, is a Ph. D. student at CREB; Hector began a research project at CBME in January, 2009, working in the laboratory of Prof. Bruce.  He will apply novel methods of biomedical signal processing to electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in order to better understand why elderly people awake frequently during the night.

Joyce Evans gives invited presentation in Austria
Joyce Evans, a member of CBME’s scientific staff, was invited to present during the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Trilateral Symposium, sponsored by the Institute of Physiology, Medical University of Graz, Austria. This symposium, held in honor of Dr. Helmut Hinghofer-Szalkay, highlighted Dr. Hinghofer’s distinguished scientific career by bringing many of his long-term collaborators to Graz for two days of intense scientific interaction. One of those collaborative efforts, funded by KY NASA EPSCoR (CF Knapp, PI), includes investigation of human cardiovascular responses to artificial gravity training, which has been the focus of the collaboration between Dr. Hinghofer’s laboratory and the cardiovascular team from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Eugene Bruced awarded NIH grant
Dr. Eugene Bruce, Professor in the Center for Biomedical Engineering, was recently awarded a two year grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project entitled, "Dynamics of Sleep Fragmentation in the Elderly". The abstract follows.

Older subjects experience decreased sleep efficiency, increased numbers of arousals and awakenings, and sleep fragmentation, which may play a pivotal role in both the daytime sleepiness and the age-associated decline in neurocognitive function in the elderly. This project develops and tests an integrative hypothesis that relates arousals to the occurrence of transient electroencephalograph (EEG) events indicative of subthreshold arousals and sleep consolidations.   We propose that, in a given sleep state, fluctuations of EEG entropy with time (which reflect short-lived events in the EEG such as microarousals and bursts of delta waves) are not entirely random; rather, they also reflect the slow decay of the effects of prior events that perturbed the depth of sleep.  We also propose that the time course of decay of the effects of past sleep-disturbing events is slower in elderly than in middle-aged subjects; this factor contributes to the increased number of arousals in the elderly by prolonging the period of increased susceptibility to a subsequent sleep disturbance.  By applying this integrative framework to both middle-aged (40-49 yrs) and elderly (70-79 yrs) Caucasian and African-American men and women, we expect to generate novel insights into the causes of sleep fragmentation in the elderly.

Nirmal Ravi receives President's Award for Diversity
M.D./Ph.D. student Nirmal Ravi was selected to receive the University of Kentucky President's Award for Diversity. The announcement can be read here. In addition to his winning video about life as an international student in the U.S., Nirmal Ravi serves as "student representative for International Affairs to work with the Internationalization Task Force to expand student enrollment. Mr. Ravi’s activities and studies reflect his dedication and commitment to inclusion and diversity for all population groups."

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.