Professor Elise Morgan

Professor Elise Morgan has been awarded a grant by the National Institutes of Health.  This grant will supplement an existing award for a project on using mechanical stimulation to promote bone and cartilage formation.  Professor Morgan’s research group uses controlled mechanical loading to modulate the natural healing process that bones undergo following a fracture.  The results are used to determine the specific mechanical stimuli that favor bone formation and also those that favor cartilage formation.  The findings from this work could lead to significant advances in researchers’ and clinicians’ ability to enhance bone healing and to promote repair of damaged joints.  In the newly awarded supplement, Morgan’s research group will using Fourier transform infrared imaging spectroscopy to obtain quantitative measurements of the composition and microstructure of the tissues that form as a result of the mechanical loading.

Funds for the supplemental award were provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Professor Xin Zhang

In addition to her earlier two winning NSF research projects, Professor Xin Zhang has recently been awarded by AFOSR to study multifunctional materials and mechanics of micro/nanosystems.  This four-year grant will allow her and her team to establish the fundamental understanding required to design and manufacture new materials and micro/nanosystems for multifunctional structures and to predict their performance and integrity based on mechanics principles.

 Also, Professor Zhang has just received her third gift fund from Schlumberger Technology Corporation, “in recognition and support of the exceptional research being performed” under her leadership.

Assistant Professor Matthias Schneider

Matthias Schneider obtained his PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Munich in 2003. He wrote his thesis in Biophysics under one of the pioneers in the field, Professor Erich Sackmann. His equivalent of Master of Science degree is also in Physics from the International Max Planck Institute and the University of Göttingen. After obtaining his PhD, he was a faculty member in the University of Augsburg where he headed the Biological Physics Group.

The research of Dr. Schneider’s group is motivated by a physical understanding of biological processes. Physical concepts (thermodynamics) as well as new nanotechnologies (surface acoustic waves) are used to unravel the fundamental principles of nerve communication and blood clotting. The goal is “to untangle the complexity of biological processes and find a unified explanation or law of seemingly independent phenomena in nature, to finally see the forest and not the trees.”

Outside the work, Dr. Schneider enjoys music, soccer, and reading old classics in Physics. He just finished Albert Einstein’s Autobiographical Notes, and highly recommends it to all.

Please join in welcoming Dr. Schneider to the faculty!

Roxanna Walker (ME '11)

The Clare Boothe Luce Foundation, the largest source of private funding for women in science, mathematics and engineering, has awarded Roxanna Walker (ME ’11) a Clare Boothe Luce fellowship. The fellowship covers full tuition for two years, plus an additional stipend to cover other academic costs.



Walker was nominated for the award by Assistant Professor Sean Andersson (ME). Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in robotics, in either roller coaster design or to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Lela Walker, a chemist and quality assurance officer at NASA-contracted Wyle Laboratories.


“For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in the mechanical and manufacturing aspects of engineering,” Walker said. “And as I’ve gotten more and more interested in robotics, I realized that this could be something I’d like to make a career out of.”



In a field where women are outnumbered by men by a ratio of almost four to one, Walker recognizes the importance of Clare Boothe Luce — the late journalist, social activist and congresswoman — and a legacy that benefits the advancement of women in science and engineering.



“Winning the fellowship was surreal,” Walker said. “It’s part of a larger effort to get women more involved in science and engineering. In a sense, it’s a lot to live up to, but I take it as motivation. It’s a challenge to see how far I can go.”

By Jason London

Professor Belta

Professor Calin Belta has had a smashing success with research funding this fall. In addition to his earlier NSF award, he is involved with two other winning research projects. First, there is the ONR funded MURI, Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, led by MIT and including UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania and Boston University. The project is called SMART, SMart Adaptive Reliable Teams for Persistent Surveillance. The research objective of SMART is to “create surveillance teams that will provide an edge to the warfighter in situation awareness, reconnaissance of hostile targets, and surveillance of opposing assets.” The BU team is led by Professor Belta, and includes Professor Cassandras as a co-PI. For more information on SMART, please visit http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/smarts/

Professor Belta’s second research project is “Role of Obesity in Infection.” This project is funded by National Institute of Health, and led by Professor Salomon Amar, an Associate Dean of Research in the BU Dental Medical School. Professor Belta is the co-PI.

Professor Xin Zhang

Professor Xin Zhang has been awarded two grants by the National Science Foundation, a Biosensing Award and a GOALI Award.

Prof Andersson

Prof Belta

Professors Sean Andersson and Calin Belta were awarded a three year grant by the National Science Foundation for their collaboration on “DynSyst_Special_Topics: A formal approach to the control of stochastic dynamic systems.”

The research objective of this award is to establish a theoretical framework for stochastic, complex systems such that given a specification, Professors Andersson and Belta can analyze the system to determine the probability that the specification will be achieved and automatically find an input law to maximize this probability. The research approach progresses from the adaptation of existing probabilistic specification languages into a form suitable for a general class of hybrid systems, to the creation of tools for the automatic synthesis of control strategies to satisfy a given probabilistic specification, and finally to an implementation of those tools for the automatic deployment of mobile robots.

In formal analysis, finite models of computer programs or digital circuits are checked against temporal logic properties such as safety (i.e., something bad never happens), liveness (i.e., something good eventually happens), or richer specifications. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the dual problem of formal synthesis, where the focus is to construct a control for a continuous system that is safe and correct by design. These efforts have centered on non-stochastic systems. Real-world systems, however, invariably evolve under stochastic inputs and all sensors are subject to noise.

If successful, the results of this research will result in general-use computational tools for the analysis and control of stochastic systems with continuous dynamics. Applications of such techniques are wide-spread, ranging from engineered systems such as power grids, autonomous robots for personal and military use, and biomedical devices, to natural systems such as genetic networks up to entire eco-systems. The research is closely coupled to an educational and outreach plan, including curriculum development at the undergraduate level, involvement of both undergraduate and high school students in the research, and participation of the PIs in outreach events such as the Upward Bound program at Boston University. 

Professor Tyrone Porter

Professor Tyrone Porter received a Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) award from the National Science Foundation in support of his project “The role of vaporized perfluorocarbon nanoemulsions in enhanced ultrasound induced lesion formation for cancer therapy.” BRIDGE grants are intended “to increase the diversity of researchers in engineering disciplines to initiate research programs early in their careers, including those from underrepresented groups, engineers at minority serving institutions, and persons with disabilities.”

Intellectual Merit:
Focused ultrasound (FUS) is a noninvasive medical procedure for the treatment of localized solid tumors. FUS can heat tissue rapidly, which leads to coagulative necrosis. The volume of coagulated tissue is known as a lesion, and FUS therapy can destroy solid tumors with millimeter precision. However, the treatment of most clinically relevant solid tumors requires placement of multiple lesions, which can take hours instead of minutes to achieve. It is well documented that bubbles accelerate FUS-mediated lesion formation and increase the lesion volume. As a result, the time and acoustic energy required for effective treatment of solid tumors can be significantly reduced. One challenge to using bubbles is that uncontrolled bubble formation and activity can lead to unpredictable heating and lesion formation. We have developed a phase-shift nanoemulsion (PSNE) to nucleate bubbles with a high degree of spatial and temporal control. The rate of lesion formation as well as the lesion volume depends upon the size and density of the bubble field. By understanding the relationship between the PSNE concentration, applied acoustic pressure, activity of the bubble field, and lesion formation, we can design a system to more efficiently treat cancer with focused ultrasound.
The objectives of the proposed research are to 1) elucidate the relationship between PSNE density, acoustic pressure, and the evolution of bubble clouds, and 2) investigate the relationship between the size and activity of the cavitation field and the spatial evolution of lesions. In vitro studies will be performed with polyacrylamide gels mixed with albumin and populated with PSNE. The gels are optically transparent, thus allowing for observation and measurement of the spatial evolution of bubble fields and lesions. Optic and acoustic techniques will be used to monitor for PSNE vaporization in polyacrylamide gel phantoms and measure the size of the resultant bubble field. Experimental results will be compared with predictions of lesion formation provided by theoretical models of bubble-enhanced heating in viscous Newtonian media. The knowledge gained from the proposed research will improve our understanding of the manner in which cavitating bubbles redistribute acoustic energy and enhance heat deposition during ultrasound hyperthermia.

Broad Impact
A graduate course on the fundamental principles and applications of medical acoustics will be developed. The course will cover acoustic wave propagation and absorption in viscoelastic media, and bioeffects associated with acoustic cavitation, including enhanced heat deposition in tissue and permeabilization of cell membranes for
drug and gene delivery. One graduate student will receive training on the synthesis of nanoemulsions and acoustic techniques and numerical methods for investigating the role of cavitating bubbles in ultrasound-mediated hyperthermia. Additionally, research opportunities will be made available for underrepresented minority undergraduate students during the summer months. Finally, outreach efforts will be made to expose underrepresented minority students from local high schools to fundamental acoustics, energy conversion, phase transitions, and basic engineering design. This will be achieved in two stages: (1) lectures and hands-on demonstrations will be developed to describe basic acoustics and optics, and (2) students will construct and test the acoustic properties of a custom-designed ultrasound contrast agent.