MediCircle, a venture by BME concentrator Eliza Sternlicht '22 and Applied Math and Econ concentrator Jack Schaeffer '22, is a finalist in the 2021 Brown Venture Prize competition. MediCircle addresses health disparities through pharmaceutical redistribution. They collect, recertify, and disseminate unused, viable oral chemotherapeutics that are otherwise wasted.
A new technique developed by Brown University researchers reveals the forces involved at the cellular level during biological tissue formation and growth processes. The technique could be useful in better understanding how these processes work, and in studying how they may respond to environmental toxins or drug therapies.
Professor Kimani Toussaint has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Representing a select group of the top two percent of medical and biological engineering professionals, the College of Fellows is comprised of outstanding bioengineers in academia, industry and government. Toussaint was elected for his outstanding contributions to biomedical engineering using both novel photonic materials and optical imaging systems.
Two PhD students and three master's students defended their theses this winter. Their graduate degrees will be conferred in February. Congratulations to the new graduates!
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.
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.
The Cancer Center at Brown University funded Michelle Dawson's pilot project entitled Clinical Relevance of Polyploidal Giant Cancer Cells and Biomarker Identification.
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.
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.