School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
January/February 2011

White House honors professor for work on artficial vision

President Obama has awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers to Eugenio Culurciello, associate professor of electrical engineering. The awards represent the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers early in their careers. Culurciello, who joined the Yale faculty in 2004 after completing a doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins University, was recognized for his work on biomedical instrumentation for use in cellular biology and recording brain activity, as well as the development of bio-inspired synthetic vision systems. Unlike most of the award recipients, who are just starting out in their careers, Culurciello has already achieved concrete results after working for the past three years with the Office of Naval Research, which nominated him for the award.

Bar code for Alzheimer’s disease

Assistant professor of biomedical engineering Rong Fan recently received a New Investigator Award from the Alzheimer’s Association for “Assessing Heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Integrated Microchips.” Fan, who has been developing diagnostic nanotechnologies for the past few years, will extend the novel bar code chips he developed for cancer research to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The most common form of dementia, AD afflicts as many as 5.3 million Americans. There is no cure, treatment is limited, and its causes are not well understood. However, Fan believes that recent studies indicating that AD is not only a neurological disease, but also an inflammatory disease may be important for advancing diagnostics and even providing personalized treatment.

Fan plans to develop a microchip platform to analyze AD-associated signaling molecules drawn from a small amount of cerebrospinal fluid, separate and purify the samples, and create bar code displays to measure the proteins that are disease indicators. Made of only plastics and glass, Fan’s microchips are disposable, portable, and inexpensive, and thus represent a practical tool for large-scale clinical trials and point-of-care uses. Fan’s work will focus first on fabricating the microchip and establishing a protein panel appropriate for examining the signaling network in the AD microenvironment. Once this is done, Fan will begin analyzing patient samples, in collaboration with Yale–New Haven Hospital, to obtain data on disease diversity, which may ultimately be used for detection and stratification of AD in a clinical setting.

Engineering magazine available online

The second edition of Yale Engineering came out in late November and is available in digital format on the SEAS website. This year’s interactive, digital-format magazine features the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s extensive contribution to the field of medical imaging, while also highlighting several of the research advancements Yale engineering has made over the past year.