Brown’s Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor of Applied Mathematics and Engineering George Karniadakis will receive the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.
A new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, provides evidence that neurons in the middle frontal gyrus — a part of the brain’s frontal lobe — may play a role in planning body movements, but only when those movements are in response to auditory stimuli. The findings represent what could be a previously unknown function for this part of the brain and could provide a new target for researchers developing assistive devices for both movement and hearing disorders.
Anita Shukla, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University, has been awarded a Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust Transformational Award, a $1 million grant over two years. The award is intended to provide the bridge to the technology transfer process for moving an exciting health care innovation to the next step in commercial development.
A research collaboration including three Brown University professors has been working toward a comprehensive understanding of traumatic brain injury — linking the damage occurring at the cellular level in the brain with the forces and motions involved in blows to the head. The collaboration, called PANTHER, Diane Hoffman-Kim is working to take single-cell research to the level of cell clusters. She works with mini-brains, 3D cultures of brain cells that mimic the basic functions of actual brains. Using mini-brains, the researchers are hoping to learn more about the chemical signals exchanged between cells in response to trauma.
The Cancer Center at Brown University funded Michelle Dawson's pilot project entitled Clinical Relevance of Polyploidal Giant Cancer Cells and Biomarker Identification.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted marketing authorization—under the De Novo premarket review pathway—for an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) implant, intended to serve as an alternative to ACL reconstruction to treat ACL tears. Professor Braden Fleming and his collaborators developed the Bridge-Enhanced ACL Repair (BEAR) Implant.
BME students Sarah Branse '21, Daniella Sawka '22, Phillip Schmitt '22, Eliza Sternlicht '22, and Joseph Urban '21 were inducted into Tau Beta Pi. They join Evan Dastin-Van Rijn ’21, Braxton Morrison ’21, and Paul Secchia ’21, inducted last year.
The subset of cancer cells that the group studied, called Polyploidal Giant Cancer Cells, is one that has often been ignored because of variation from most other cancer cells. But there are “a lot of really important qualities that make them important to study and understand on a level of developing new treatment strategies to target invasive cancer cells,” said Michelle Dawson.
Boustany and Westres originally planned to work on developing a saliva-based diagnostic technique in the Tripathi lab. But due to the pandemic, the student researchers, who are studying remotely, pivoted to virtual projects, including a survey to identify students’ preferences for the frequency of testing, types of tests — saliva-based or nasal-based — and the testing process.
Brown’s Kimani Toussaint, professor and senior associate dean of the School of Engineering, was recently named to Science magazine’s Board of Reviewing Editors (BoRE). The board members offer expert advice to senior editors at Science, and Toussaint was pegged for his expertise in bio imaging and nanophotonics.