Professor Thomas Webster Elected to College of Fellows of AIMBE

Thomas Webster, associate professor at the School of Engineering and the Department of Orthopaedics at Brown University, has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Located in Washington D.C., AIMBE is the leading advocacy group for medical and biological engineering and is comprised of some of the most important leaders in science and engineering, the top 2% of medical and biological engineers.

The College of Fellows of AIMBE is comprised of an exemplary group of approximately 900 medical and biological engineers. Founded in 1991, AIMBE has earned a reputation as a prestigious public policy leader on issues impacting the medical and biological community and is regarded as the preeminent voice in the field.

Webster received his bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and his master’s degree and and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professor Webster directs the Nanomedicine Laboratory which designs, synthesizes, and evaluates nanophase materials for various implant applications. Nanophase materials are central to the field of nanotechnology and are materials with one dimension less than 100 nm. Materials investigates to date include nanophase ceramics, metals, polymers, carbon fibers, and composites. Organ systems evaluated to date include orthopedic, cartilage, vascular, bladder, and the central and peripheral nervous systems.

His lab group has generated four books, 33 book chapters, 85 invited presentations (including tutorials), 215 literature articles and/or conference proceeding, and 245 conference presentations. Professor Webster has been awarded 11 full patents plus four provisional patents in his 11 years in academics (five years at Brown and six years at Purdue). His technology has resulted in one start-up company. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Nanomedicine and is on the editorial board of ten other journals. He has organized over 25 symposia at academic conferences. Dr. Webster was the 2002 recipient of the Biomedical Engineering Society Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award, the 2004 recipient of the Outstanding Young Investigator Award for the Schools of Engineering at Purdue University, the 2004 finalist for the Young Investigator Award of the American Society for Nanomedicine, and the 2005 recipient of the Wallace Coulter Foundation Early Career Award.

Anastassia Astafieva ’12 and Karine Ip Kiun Chong ’12 Win Halpin Prize

Thanks to the generosity of Doris M. and Norman T. Halpin, the Brown University School of Engineering Executive Committee provides research awards for exceptional undergraduates. Projects are awarded based on how well they demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary thought in engineering science and design. This year's winners of the Halpin Prize for Interdisciplinary Senior Capstone Projects are Anastassia Astafieva ’12 (advisors Christian Franck and Domenico Pacifici) and Karine Ip Kiun Chong ’12 (advisor Shreyhas Mandre). Each winner will receive a $750 student prize and a $2500 research fund.

From Ana’s Nomination:

Right from the start, Ana showed a strong interest in the interdisciplinary nature of a biomedical engineering design project that lies at the intersection of electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. After several discussions and conversations with Professor Pacifici and Professor Franck, Ana began the groundwork on her project to measure hydrogel and tissue scaffold deformations under spatially controlled applied electromechanical forces. Her project builds upon concepts from chemistry, cell biology, materials science and mechanical and electrical engineering, and is a genuinely innovative and interdisciplinary project.

The design of her senior capstone project features an in-vitro test bench or assay to apply spatially controlled forces to tissue mimicking hydrogels and scaffolds in all three dimensions. The mechanical properties of tissues and synthetic implant materials are extremely important in achieving proper physiological homeostasis in the human body, which requires experimental techniques to quantify them. The last decade has urged the scientific community to develop in-vitro methodologies that are able to measure quantities of interest in three dimensions thus representing a more realistic in-vivo or body-like setting. While three-dimensional measurements are intrinsically more challenging that traditional two-dimensional data collection and experimental design, Ana has accepted the challenge to do just that.

She is in the process of developing an electromagnetic field assay to generate physical forces inside tissue-mimicking hydrogels. By applying a magnetic field similar to that in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to micron-sized magnetic particles inside a hydrogel, Ana will determine the three-dimensional displacements that these magnetic particles undergo. Utilizing her Newtonian mechanics and electrostatics and magnetism principles, Ana will be able to determine the mechanical properties of these gels and tissues at micron and nanometer length scales in all three dimensions. Thus, through her capstone project she will be able to deliver a powerful characterization tool to the biomedical and engineering communities to aid in the development of improved implant materials and artificial tissues.

From Karine’s Nomination:

Karine is a talented mechanical engineer interested in a variety of subjects with sound understanding of mathematics, physics and engineering. She came up with her own research program about six months ago, and has since not only demonstrated successful technical expertise in executing the research but also has managed to disseminate the results.

Karine’s project is about bio-inspired desalination. The largest source of fresh water on this planet comes from natural desalination of ocean water through rain. Artificial desalination using various technologies also provides a small portion of the fresh water humans use. Karine asked herself, how do we create rain in a small container in our living room, and came up with quite interesting ideas. Her first idea was the observation that plants are very efficient at evaporating water from the soil. Is it possible to design an engineering process that mimics plants in transporting and evaporating water? Karine's second idea for condensing the water was to mimic Namibian fog-harvesting beetles. Tiny bumps on the backs of these fog-harvesting beetles have a special surface chemistry that facilitates the condensation of water, and moreover forms structures that channels the condensed water straight to the beetle’s mouth. Karine brought both these ideas to her advisor as a proposal for her 2011 summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA). Karine’s proposal secured the summer UTRA and she demonstrated her technical expertise during the summer research. She carried out a computational simulation of a toy mathematical model to demonstrate the principle reason behind the efficient evaporation through plant leaves. This result has increased her confidence in the research program and she has now designed a set of microfluidic devices to test her result experimentally. These devices mimic the properties of the leaves, especially the distribution of stomata on a leaf surface, to assist evaporation.

Karine actively participates in the scientific community and disseminates her research discoveries. She presented a poster on this in the Undergraduate Summer Research Symposium at Brown, and is scheduled to present a poster at the New England Workshop on Mechanics of Materials and Structures. She acquired a partial travel grant from the American Physical Society to present a poster of her results at the annual meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics in Baltimore in November. The prize funds for the project will be used to experimentally test the principle Karine has discovered. The experiment essentially consists of subjecting the microfluidic devices Karine designed to air flow in a small wind tunnel and measuring the evaporation rate through each. Her prediction is that the evaporation rate will increase with the air flow but reach a state of marginal returns as the air speed is increased beyond a critical value, and this critical value is different for each of Karine’s devices. The results from these experiments can be directly compared with evaporation from leaves to check if the leaves are optimized for particular wind speeds.

Fifth Annual SWE Extreme Gingerbread House Competition

The Brown University Society for Women Engineers will be sponsoring its fifth annual "Extreme Gingerbread House Competition" on Friday, December 2, from 5:00 - 7:00 in the lobby of the Barus and Holley building on 184 Hope Street.

Twenty-two teams of 3-5 students and professors will be allowed to pre-register for the competition. Any additional teams that express interest will be placed on a waitlist in the event that a team does not arrive. If the team has not arrived within five minutes of the beginning of the event, their spot will be given to a team on the waitlist or a team that has shown up at the event without registering.

Each team will be supplied with two boxes of graham crackers, two Ziploc bags of royal icing, and a tray on which to construct their house. Additionally, all teams will be provided with an empty sandwich size Ziploc bag for taking the communal supplies. Foods such as candy canes, M&Ms, teddy grahams, shredded coconut, etc., will be kept on a central table. At the start of the one hour time slot of building, one member of each team will be allowed to take the empty Ziploc bag to the communal table and fill the bag with whatever supplies they feel are most valuable for their team’s house. All food items will be provided by SWE at the event; teams are NOT allowed to bring any of their own food.

The teams will have one hour to construct their houses out of the provided food. Houses should be designed to follow the criteria listed below:
- The house must fit on the provided tray and not cover the drilled-in holes.
- House dimensions must exceed 6”x6”x6”.
- The house must be hollow.
- The maximum wall thickness is 1”.
- The house must be glued/pasted to the tray; the house may not slide around the tray.
- The house should be designed to withstand earthquakes.

Teams are allowed to bring any tools that they think will be helpful such as knives, drills, etc. Teams are responsible for bringing the necessary power connections/extension cords. If you plan on using tools, please ensure you know how to use them safely and plan on bring the necessary personal protective equipment, such as safety glasses. No chemicals can be used during the manufacturing of the house; the house and all its contents must remain edible at all times.

After exactly one hour, the teams will be forced to stop construction on their houses. The houses will initially be judged before a panel of three faculty judges on (1) Attractiveness of the House [1-10 points] (2) Novel use of Building Materials [1-5 points] (3) Use of Available Space (ie decorations other than the house) [1-5 points]. Additionally, judges will have the option to select one “wildcard” house after viewing all the completed houses. Judges will award a bonus of three points to the house if they feel that one house was exceptional in a way that was not represented in the other scores; this is optional and at the judges discretion. The sum of these components will be used as the team’s aesthetic score.

The second portion of judging will be on the ability of the house to withstand a simulated earthquake. The tray will be attached to a shake table and cycled through a regimen moving from a low frequency to a high frequency. After every 15 seconds, the frequency will increase. Time will start when the shake table is turned on, and will be stopped when part of the house falls off the main structure; this includes decorations attached to the house, but not “environmental decorations” that are simply on the tray. The final call on whether a house has "failed" will be at the judges' discretion. Houses will not be judged until tables and floors are clean.

After all the houses have been tested, the maximum amount of time on the shake table to make a gingerbread house break will be used to calculate the scores, as shown below:

          GroupTime
----------------------- x 50 = Total
Maximum Group Time

Total group scores will be calculated by combining the aesthetic score (out of 25 points) and the stability score (out of 50 points) for a total score out of 75 points. The team with the most points will be considered the winner. The team with the second highest number of points will be given second place and so forth. The top three teams will be awarded a prize.

When registering, each team will be asked to pay a registration fee of $6.00 to enter the event.