News

November 2009 --
We are pleased to report that Shawn Carey, 1st year PhD student in the lab of Cynthia Reinhart-King, has been selected as the student representative to the national BMES Board. He was selected on the basis of his impressive involvement in BMES to date and his interest in increasing student involvement in BMES at a national level. He will serve a two-year term as a Board member.

November 2009 -- The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is awarding the Department of Biomedical Engineering a grant through its Med into Grad Initiative, which "encourages graduate schools to integrate medical knowledge and an understanding of clinical practice into their biomedical Ph.D. curricula".

November 2009 -- Department of Biomedical Engineering Assistant Professor Claudia Fischbach-Teschl is working with Abe Stroock and Jeff Varner, Assistant Professors of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Associate Professor Vivek Mittal, of cardiothoracic surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, to investigate the conditions necessary for tumor angiogenesis.

October 2009 -- The new Center on the Microenvironment and Metastasis on the Cornell campus has been funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The center will focus on three key Department of Biomedical Engineering projects.

August 2009 -- We are very pleased to announce that Associate Professor Larry Bonassar will receive this year's Fiona Ip Li ('78) and Donald Li ('75) Teaching Award from the College of Engineering. 

August 2009 -- A National Science Foundation grant is allowing science teachers from rural school districts to assist Cornell biomedical engineering graduate students with a research project this summer.

August 2009 -- Jonathan Butcher has been selected to receive the BMES 2009 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award.

July 2009 -- Joseph Califano, PhD student in the laboratory of Cynthia Reinhart-King, received a 2009 BMES Extended Abstract Award, to be presented at the annual BMES fall meeting.

July 2009 -- Dr. Nozomi Nishimura was interviewed by WSTM, the Central New York NBC affiliate, about her current research on Alzheimer’s disease and her mentoring of younger scientists.

July 2009 -- The National Science Foundation announced that Assistant Professor Chris Schaffer will receive a 2009 CAREER award for his proposal, "Optics in Biological Research, Education, and Outreach."

July 2009 -- The portable ultrasound device created by PhD student George Lewis and Professor William Olbricht is featured on the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering web site.

July 2009 -- MEng student, Rafael D. Gonzalez-Cruz has been selected to receive the 2009-2010 Teresa Lazaro Memorial Master of Engineering Fellowship. 

June 2009 -- Dr. Nozomi Nishimura, a postdoc in the Schaffer lab, received a L’Oréal USA Fellowship for Women in Science for ongoing work on the link between Alzheimer’s disease and small strokes.

May 2009 -- Jordan Atlas, PhD student of Professor Michael Shuler, is featured in the 2008-2009 Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Annual for his research in ways to improve computer simulations of biological models.

April 2009 -- Clarissa Lui is the 2008 recipient of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility's (CNF) Nellie Yeh-Poh Lin Whetten Memorial Award. This award honors the memory of Nellie who worked at the CNF for three years prior to her death, and is given to an outstanding female graduate student working at the CNF who displays the same enthusiasm and commitment to professionalism. Clarissa's advisor is Carl Batt.

April 2009 -- The Department of Biomedical Engineering is honored to have Richard Newman '68 ME as a visiting lecturer. He lectures in BME 5500, Product Engineering and Design and BME 5910, Design Project. Recently, the Cornell Engineering Magazine featured an article about how his passion to fix and build things as a young boy led him to be a successful medical device inventor.

April 2009 -- Senior Lecturer, Shivaun Archer, was named as the recipient of the College of Engineering 2009 Zellman Warhaff Commitment to Diversity Award for outstanding faculty involvement in diversity issues. 

April 2009 -- John Nguyen has been awarded a SPIE Scholarship in Optical Science and Engineering.

April 2009 -- Casey Kraning, Siddarth Pathi, Erica Pratt and Brooke Smith, PhD candidates in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships.

April 2009 -- BME Assistant Professor Chris Schaffer has been awarded the 2009 Biomedical Engineering Teaching Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. 

March 2009 -- Department of Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. student, George Lewis, and his partner, Bryant Guffey, a masters student in business administration, founded BioSol to explore potential ultrasound markets. 

February 2009 -- The research work of Assistant Professor Cynthia Reinhart-King and her team of students and postdocs was featured in the February 27, 2009 issue of the Cornell Chronicle. Her team is exploring how vessel stiffness changes the cells in the blood vessel and how that may contribute to atherosclerosis.

February 2009 -- Professor Mike King's paper, P-Selectin-Coated Microtube for Enrichment of CD34+ Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cells from Human Bone Marrow, was awarded the Outstanding Contribution for a Publication in the International Journal, Clinical Chemistry. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Srinivasa Narasipura.

February 2009 -- Claudia Fischbach's research in the role of protein in tumor growth was featured in the February 13, 2009 issue of the Cornell Chronicle.

February 2009 -- Congratulations to Professor Larry Bonassar, Associate Chair of BME, and Dr. Adele Boskey, a field member of BME (Hospital for Special Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College), for their election as Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

January 2009 -- Good Morning Twin Tiers and Twin Tiers Tonight aired a story on January 6, 2009, about the portable ultrasound device created by George Lewis.

January 2009 -- The Acoustical Society of America awarded George Lewis first place for best student paper in engineering acoustics at the Miami, Florida, meeting in November 2008.

December 2008 -- George K. Lewis, a third-year Ph.D. student working with Professor William Olbricht, developed an inexpensive portable ultrasound device to help treat conditions such as, prostate tumors and kidney stones. 

December 2008 -- Larry Bonassar and his group are engaging in collaborative research with Dr. Roger Hartl and a group of neurosurgeons from New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. They are working on developing a bioengineered disc suitable for implantation in humans.

December 2008 -- Professor Mike King has been featured in the December 12, 2008 issue of the Cornell Chronicle for his work with developing what he calls a lethal "lint brush" which captures and kills cancer cells in the bloodstream.

November 2008 -- John Nguyen, a graduate student in Prof. Christopher Schaffer's lab, won an Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the Optical Society of America’s Annual Meeting.

October 2008 --

July 2008 -- Professor Chris Schaffer, Biomedical Engineering, has been selected as one of the College of Engineering's outstanding teachers and will be recognized this fall as the winner of the John Swanson '61 ME in honor of his mother, Dorothy G. Swanson Excellence in Teaching Award. This is the highest award for teaching in the college.

April 2008 -- Jennifer Shum, a graduating senior in Prof. Chris Schaffer's research group, was awarded the Whitaker International Fellow Grant to do research at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.

April 2008 -- The University of Notre Dame is giving Mike an honorary degree at their commencement on May 18 as a distinguished alumnus for his innovative, groundbreaking research in the biochemical engineering field which has led to unprecedented advancements in the modeling of cells and the development and efficacy of medicine, and for remaining a committed teacher of young students entering the field.

February 2008 -- The BME Department is very pleased to announce the promotion of Dr. David A. Putnam to Associate Professor with tenure effective February 1, 2008.

November 2007 -- Marjolein van der Meulen was elected as a fellow of AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological
Engineering).

August 2007 -- We have just been notified that Dr. David Putnam has been awarded the Ralph S. Watts '72 teaching award from the College of Engineering. This is the second time Dave has received a College of Engineering teaching award. He may be the only Assistant Professor to have received the award twice.

June 2007 -- Peter Doerschuk and Larry Bonassar have both been approved for appointment with tenure by the Board of Trustees.

Congratulations to both Peter and Larry! Tenure is extremely well deserved in both cases; their contributions to Cornell and BME have been critical to our success.

May 2007 -- Professor David Putnam was selected by the Controlled Research Society for their Young Investigator Award. This award is the highest honor a young investigator in this area of research can receive. Dave will receive the award July 10, 2007 at the CRS annual meeting. Dave has made outstanding contributions to both BME and CBE at Cornell. This honor is extremely well deserved.

April 2007 -- Yi Wang was elected to the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2007 for “Significant contributions to the development of high-resolution cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging”.

April 2007 -- On January 1 Peter Doerschuk began a five-year term as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transcations on Image Processing which is a leading journal in the area of signal-processing aspects of image processing, imaging systems, and image scanning, display, and printing. The focus of his editorial activities is medical and biological imagine manuscripts.

March 2007 -- Assistant professor, David Putnam, has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal titled, “CAREER: An Interdisciplinary Research and Education Program for Predictive Biomaterial Design”. This award is one of the most competitive and prestigious offered by the NSF and provides significant support for young faculty as they develop their research and teaching programs. Professor Putnam’s proposed research program focuses on quantifying the design parameters for a new class of bioadhesives, and his teaching program focuses on developing new ways to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives into curricula at the K12, undergraduate and graduate levels.

March 2007 -- Michael Shuler, the James M. and Marsha McCormick Chair of Biomedical Engineering, was recently named as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow for his work on bioprocess engineering, particularly Taxol production from plant cell culture, in vitro toxicology, single-cell models and heterologous protein production. 

March 2007 -- Congratulations to Larry Bonassar who was awarded the Commitment to Diversity Award from the College of Engineering.

January 2007 -- A paper published in Pharmaceutical Research and authored by Amy Richards-Grayson, Anne Doody and David Putnam of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was ranked one of the Top 100 most downloaded manuscripts in the field of RNA-interference for 2006. The manuscript titled, “Biophysical and Structural Characterization of Polyethylenimine-Mediated siRNA Delivery in Vitro” focuses on defining the structure/function relationships that correlate polymer composition and architecture to nucleic acid delivery. siRNA is a potentially new therapeutic drug class, and the Putnam research group focuses on developing safe and effective means by which to deliver them to predetermined target cells.

December 2006 -- Professor Lee will be presenting a paper “Engineered Protein Hypersecretion via mRNA and Protein Expression Profiling at SBE’s 1st International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering.

October 2006 -- Lung cancer can be detected at its very earliest stage in 85 percent of patients using annual low-dose CT screening, and when followed by prompt surgical removal the 10-year survival rate is 92 percent. These results, to be reported in the October 26 New England Journal of Medicine, would dramatically decrease the number of deaths from lung cancer – the number one cause of cancer deaths among both men and women in the U.S.

October 2006 -- The objective of this proposed clinical summer immersion program is to provide substantial clinical
experiences for biomedical engineering graduate students to help shape their understanding and appreciation of challenges in medicine.

October 2006 -- Assistant Professor, David Putnam, has been invited to join Bausch & Lomb’s Vision Care Scientific Advisory Board.

September 2006 -- Human tissue engineering to repair damage to cartilage, or meniscus, in the knee is a technology that Cornell master of engineering student Andrea Ippolito hopes to contribute someday to the biomedical engineering field.

August 2006 -- We are very pleased to report that Claudia Fischbach has accepted our offer. She will begin as an Assistant Professor January 2007. Claudia adds expertise in tissue engineering and models of cancer development and progression.

Prof. Shuler had a phone call late last week from Jonathan Butcher accepting our offer. Jonathan's start date is July 1, 2007, but we discussed a possible delay until January 2008 based on completion of the new building.

Jonathan adds expertise on the effects of mechanics on the cell biology of heart valves, creating living tissue replacements for valvular disease, and in vivo and ex vivo models of heart development. Please welcome Jonathan to Cornell.

July 2006 -- Imagine a device that could deliver perfectly targeted chemotherapy drugs to the area of the brain affected by a brain tumor, or a form of systemically injected gene therapy that could be used to treat Alzheimer's disease or autism. Consider a less invasive way of treating a brain aneurism. Or think of an implanted device that could detect the origin of an epileptic seizure.

These were just a few of the ideas on the table when Weill Cornell Medical College neurosurgeons traveled from New York City to Ithaca to meet with their colleagues in Cornell's Department of Biomedical Engineering on July 20 and 21.

July 2006 -- On Thursday and Friday, July 20 and 21, 10 of the 13 faculty members in the Department of Neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical College are visiting Ithaca to forge a new collaboration with Cornell's Department of Biomedical Engineering.

July 2006 -- Chris B. Schaffer, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received a New Scholars in Aging Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

June 2006 -- Dr. Jin has told us that he will be accepting our offer with the intention of joining us July 2006. 

May 2006 -- David Lipson has been elevated to the grade of Senior Member of The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). 

February 2006 -- Message from the Director of Biomedical Engineering:

February 2006 -- Assoc. Prof. Marjolein van der Meulen, MAE, is featured in a new book, launched at the National Press Club yesterday, titled "Changing our World: True Stories of Women Engineers.

February 2006 -- David Putnam, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been awarded a DuPont Science & Engineering Award.

January 2006 -- Dr. David J. Skorton will hold faculty appointments in BME in Ithaca and at the Cornell Weill Medical College in New York City.

January 2006 -- David Putnam, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been awarded a DuPont Science & Engineering Award.

November 2005 -- Another award was given to develop an annual two-month clinical research training course at Weill Medical College (WCMC) for Ithaca campus biomedical engineering (BME) PhD students.

October 2005 -- David Putnam, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been appointed to a three-year term to the Editorial Advisory Board for Pharmaceutical Research, one of the leading pharmaceutical journals.

October 2005 -- Professor Larry Bonassar has agreed to become our Associate Chair. Larry's experience with cross-campus research makes him the ideal person for this position.

September 2005 -- The Department of Biomedical Engineering is happy to welcome three engineers to its faculty.

September 2005 -- The Society of Biological engineering has named Michael L. Shuler, Chair of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University as the first recipient of the James E. Bailey Award for Outstanding Contributions in Biological Engineering.

September 2005 -- Congratulations to Shivaun Archer, BMEP Instructional Lab Manager, on receiving the Sonny Yau '72 Excellence in Teaching Award.

August 2005 -- Chris Schaffer will be joining the Biomedical Engineering faculty in January, 2006, and will launch a research program focused on the use of advanced optical techniques for observation and manipulation of in vivo biological systems.

July 2005 -- Professor Warren Zipfel has accepted our offer and will begin July 1, 2005 as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

July 2005 -- Professor Cynthia Reinhart-King has officially accepted our offer for a faculty position at Cornell as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering.

May 2005 -- Assistant Professor David Putnam of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering has been named a recipient of a prestigious $240,000 Early Career Translational Research Award from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation.

May 2005 -- (LA JOLLA, Calif., May 10, 2005) ­ Craig A. Wheeler, president, Chiron BioPharmaceuticals, was elected to the board of directors of California Healthcare Institute (CHI).

March 2005 -- Robert S. Langer, the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, has been named Institute Professor, the highest honor which was awarded by the MIT faculty and administration.

February 2005 -- BME department will contribute to understanding and improving human health.

February 2005 -- A lot of people walking around today area already carrying the fruits of inventions created by Cornell Faculty and Alumni, according to Dr. Michael Shuler.

October 2004 -- I am pleased to report that Dr. David Lipson has accepted a position with us as Senior Lecturer beginning November 1, 2004.

July 2004 -- Dr. David Putnam receives the College of Engineering's Excellence in Teaching Award

April 2004 -- Asst. Prof. Abe Stroock wins ONR award

March 2004 -- Applications for new Biomedical Engineering M.Eng. are being accepted

November 2003 -- Cornell Biophysics Colloquia