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Faculty Notes
Honorary Doctorate Assistant Professor Luca Carloni of the Department of Computer Science received the prestigious Sloan Fellowship. Only 16 young computer scientists in the United States and Canada were honored with the fellowship this year. Professor Carloni's research is centered on the development of system-level design technologies to assist engineers in assembling high-performance integrated circuits and building distributed embedded systems. Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Kevin Costa and his doctoral student, Eun Jung (Alice) Lee, have developed the first functional 3D engineered simplified heart chambers that exhibit key characteristics of the heart's pumping action. Unlike traditional engineered cardiac tissue patches, these hollow spherical cardiac organoids offer the unique ability to regulate wall stress, which is a key factor influencing normal and pathological cardiac function, and to measure the resulting pressure-volume relationships that cardiologists use to define the pumping capacity of the heart. By providing a controllable biomimetic cardiac environment, research using cardiac organoids can help to elucidate the mechanisms involved in complex processes such as stem cell differentiation, facilitating the translation of such therapies to clinical practice, and may eventually reduce the need to use experimental animals for such studies. Upmanu Lall, Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, will lead the Columbia Water Center, a new program of the Earth Institute, which recently received a landmark three-year, $6 million grant from the PepsiCo Foundation to research and develop water sustainability initiatives in four countries facing a potentially acute water crisis. His team of distinguished university partners will explore comprehensive solutions to a range of water-related challenges in the targeted countries—India, Mali, Brazil and China. Associate Professor Andreas Hielscher of the Department of Biomedical Engineering has received a grant from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health to build an optical tomographic imaging system. The grant will fund research to develop image reconstruction algorithms and instrumentation for tomographic imaging of green fluorescent proteins (GFP) in small animals. The approximately $1.5 million grant is for four years. Developing an optical tomography system for in vivo GFP imaging will have a significant impact on many areas of biomedical research. Helen H. Lu, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Biomaterials and Interface Tissue Engineering Laboratory, has been awarded a $125,000 grant by the National Football League Charities in the hope that her work will provide better long-term results in ACL reconstruction. The anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, is located in the center of the knee joint connecting two bones to control rotation and prevent hyperextension of the knee. When the ACL is injured, it must be surgically reconstructed, generally by using tendons from another part of the body. The tendon is then grafted into each of the bone tunnels. Dr. Lu's research is in the area of the interface between the soft tissue, the tendon, and the hard tissue, the bone. In collaboration with biologists, biomedical engineers and orthopaedic surgeons at Columbia and elsewhere, her work is expanding the understanding of the soft tissue-to-bone interface area. She also has been recognized with the 2008 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials and will attend the World Biomaterials Congress in Amsterdam in May, 2008.This award is given annually to an individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievements in the field of biomaterials research within ten years following his/her terminal degree or formal training. Associate Professor Vishal Misra of Computer Science received the IBM Faculty Award for 2007. His proposal seeks to develop and analyze Adaptive Sharing Mechanisms (ASMs) in which the mechanism used to share resources adapts dynamically to both the set of available resources and the current needs of the consumers, such that the system is truly autonomic.
Chris Wiggins Van C. Mow, Stanley Dicker Professor of Biomedical Engineering and department chair, is one of three U.S. professors named to the Advisory Board of the newly established Med-X Research Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The Med-X Research Institute was formed as a result of the merger of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai Second Medical University and their 12 affiliated hospitals. SJTU, one of the top five universities in China, is more than 100 years old and has educated some of China's top scholars and leaders, including former President Jiang Zemin. The Institute is a strategic initiative of SJTU to create world-class research at the University. It will support multi-disciplinary research in emerging medical and technological fields as well as modern instrumentation, equipment and systems and expects to attract outstanding students. Peter Schlosser, Vinton Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering has been named director of The Columbia Climate Center, part of the Earth Institute. This is Columbia's first center focused on bringing together the scientists, engineers, public health experts, foreign policy specialists and others who are working on the pressing challenges of climate change. Professor Henning Schulzrinne of Computer Science was honored with the lifetime innovation award during the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems' 25th anniversary celebration. He was cited as a pioneer in the development of Voice over IP technology that is supplanting circuit-switched voice, which has been the basis of phone service since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. He is a co-inventor of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), which form the basis of VOIP, and additional standards for multimedia transport over the Internet. In addition, Professor Schulzrinne was selected as an IEEE Communications Society distinguished lecturer. Samuel Sia, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award for $400,000 to study “Soft 3D MEMS—advanced biomaterials devices.” His research aims to develop a fundamentally new approach for building biocompatible microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Sia will use soft biomaterials such as hydrogels, for which host compatibility has been widely studied, to build MEMS components for use in implantable devices. Implantable devices have a wide range of potential medical uses (such as glucose sensors), but one of the most persistent challenges has been to make conventional MEMS biocompatible without compromising their function. Sia's approach will attempt to link closer together the fields of tissue engineering and MEMS devices. Professor Salvatore Stolfo of Computer Science has been invited to participate in the “Committee on Information Assurance for Network-Centric Naval Forces” organized by the Naval Studies Board (NSB) of the National Academies of the National Research Council. The study will review the Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy responsibilities for information assurance, review recent information assurance-related studies, and examine their research, development, and acquisition process for information assurance. It also will recommend approaches for, among other things, managing cyber attack risks to network-centric naval forces that address the consequences of possible cyber attacks, the likelihoods of these attacks actually occurring, and the uncertainties surrounding assumptions about these risks. Latha Venkataraman, assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award for $600,000 to study “Electronic and Mechanical Properties of Single Metal-Molecule-Metal Junctions.” Her focus will be to reveal and understand properties of single molecules attached to metal electrodes while educating students about the interplay of physics, chemistry and engineering at the nanoscale. Her group will build a high-resolution conducting atomic force microscope to simultaneously measure the rate at which electrons are transferred across a single molecule junction, as well as the forces required to break the junction apart. Measurements of different molecular systems will lead to an understanding, at the single molecule level, of the mechanical forces required to break bonds as well as their electronic properties, a prerequisite to developing electronic circuitry at the molecular scale. Under the direction of Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, professor of Biomedical Engineering, 26 investigators from 6 Columbia University Morningside departments will benefit from a $1 million grant awarded by New York State's Stem Cell Board. This grant will establish a new Stem Cell Functional Imaging Core in the SEAS Department of Biomedical Engineering. The grant will be used exclusively to purchase equipment, including a two-photon/confocal micro-scopy system, an in vivo imaging system, microplate reader and automated histology facility, to create a state-of-the-art functional imaging laboratory within the Department of Biomedical Engineering. At the same time, the Comparative Proteomics Center will be expanded with the addition of a new high-resolution mass spectrometer. “Our goal is to move stem cell research from the ‘flat biology’ of Petri dishes to controllable 3-dimensional models, and to study in real time and with high fidelity the interacting factors mediating self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells,” Vunjak-Novakovic said. “I expect that, with these additional resources, we will have the capacity to develop entirely new research paradigms, new imaging strategies, and new approaches to engineer human tissues that simply do not exist for stem cell research at this time.”
Elizabeth Hillman Chee Wei Wong, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award for $400,000 to study “Nonlinear and nonclassical optics in ultrahigh-Q/V mesoscopic cavities.” Studies in nanostructured photonic crystal cavities afford strong light localization together with long photon lifetimes. These allow fascinating studies on nonlinear optics, such as photon-level all-optical logic and frequency conversion, on the CMOS chip-scale. Moreover, these sub-wavelength structures also allow the interaction with colloidal nanocrystals, such as toward weak and strong exciton-polariton coupling, for fundamental studies in quantum electrodynamics. Professor Yechiam Yemini of Computer Science was honored with the lifetime entrepreneurial award during the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems' 25th anniversary celebration. According to the citation, “Yechiam Yemini is that rare individual who embodies excellence in research, innovation and entrepreneurship. He was already a successful entrepreneur before he joined CATT. He then started System Management Arts, or SMARTS, a company with over 150 employees that developed network management solutions. This company was acquired by EMC Corporation. He is now working on yet another start up called Arootz. In all his ventures he brings technological innovation and an unerring vision of the market.”
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