By Leslie Friday, BU Today

By many accounts, manufacturing is making a comeback in the United States. US manufacturers have added 500,000 new workers since the end of 2009, energy costs have dropped, and labor costs in competing countries such as China and India have been inching upward. President Barack Obama has been pushing to expand advanced manufacturing, most recently in his 2013 State of the Union address.

When those jobs materialize, BU College of Engineering graduates may well be among the first hired, thanks to Kenneth Lutchen, a professor of biomedical engineering and ENG dean, and to a $18.8 million in-kind gift of product design and lifecycle management software from PTC® that is currently used by about 27,000 manufacturers worldwide. Under Lutchen’s leadership, the college is transforming its curriculum so that all students, regardless of major, will graduate with a thorough understanding of how to develop new products, from concept and design through manufacturing and delivery. That knowledge will be nurtured in the new Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), a 20,000-square-foot teaching and design studio equipped with the latest industry technology that will be housed in the former Guitar Center space at 750 Commonwealth Ave. While other schools have efforts to prepare engineering students for advanced manufacturing, says Lutchen, the ENG program is unique in how it will transform the entire engineering curriculum, enabled by modern technology and software infrastructure and through a partnership with regional industries.

“Not only is the concept exciting, but it’s going to create a new kind of engineer that really is excited and knows what’s involved in product creation,” Lutchen says. “This facility is meant to expose students to how you go from an idea to a manufacturing-ready and deployable product that you can make money with—and all the steps in between.”

Funded through the University, ENG alumni, and regional industry, EPIC will open around the middle of the fall semester. It will house a computer-aided design studio, demonstration areas, fabrication facilities, materials testing, and project management software. The facility will have a flexible design and offer students supply chain management software, 3-D printers, robotics, and laser processing.

“Wherever possible, things are going to be put on wheels,” says Gerald Fine, EPIC director and an ENG professor of the practice in the mechanical engineering department. “We’ll continually be looking to update and replace old equipment over the course of the life of the center.”

And while EPIC will be one of many learning spaces for engineering students, its opening signals a sea change for the college’s undergraduates. Previously, only mechanical engineering students learned design, and many got little hands-on experience until their senior project. Starting with a small pilot program next spring, all sophomores will be able to take an engineering design course, and all students will have access to EPIC’s labs. Students will be trained in and use PTC Creo®, the company’s award-winning CAD software, and PTC Windchill® product lifecycle management software, which will integrate real-world processes, data, and business systems into the classroom.

“Engineering design is not simply the mechanical engineering pursuit that it has been in the past,” says Fine. “It’s an integral part of the education process for all engineers.”

The knowledge gained at EPIC is particularly valuable to a new generation of students who want to create products with a socially responsible eye. Lutchen, who has trademarked the phrase, calls them “societal engineers.” He says these up-and-comers must have a strong foundation in math and science and must be innovators, strong communicators, globally aware, and business-savvy.

“The societal engineer is someone who has a passion to embed all of those attributes with an engineering background to come out the other side as someone who holistically wants to improve society,” he says.

“A vast majority of our engineering students prefer to remain in New England after they graduate,” Fine says. “We think that we’re doing both our students and these companies a great service, and we’ve had a great response from area industries.”

“When I first heard from Dean Lutchen about the idea of EPIC, I was thrilled,” says Michael Campbell (ENG’94), executive vice president of PTC’s CAD segment, who will serve on EPIC’s advisory board. “I always felt that my engineering education lacked that real-world perspective, that real-world exposure to the challenges, processes, and complexities of collaboration and the sophistication of tools. Now we have a chance to share all of that with students.”

By Mark Dwortzan

A College of Engineering and School of Management team took first prize in the energy efficiency category of the annual MIT Clean Energy Prize on May 6, one of six premiere regional clean energy student business plan competitions in the U.S.

A collaboration between students and faculty from ENG and SMG, the team, Aeolus Building Efficiency, won $20,000 for its business plan and presentation for a full-service company that utilizes software to optimize airflow and reduce energy consumption in large office heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) systems. The technology could be a game-changer for today’s commercial buildings, which account for 18 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions and 36 percent of national electric utility demand.

Consisting of senior Ryan Cruz, Associate Professor Michael Gevelber and former Professor Donald Wroblewski from the Mechanical Engineering Department, and MBA candidates David Cushman, Jonathan Ellermann and Benjamin Smith from SMG, Aeolus outperformed 15 other teams from nine states, including three semifinalists representing Harvard University, MIT and the University of Chicago.

Aeolus drew on ENG members’ expertise in building energy efficiency and HVAC systems optimization, and SMG members’ business development, operations, project management and sustainability experience. The team’s presentation impressed a panel of six judges from academia, government and industry who based their assessments on environmental benefit, creativity, execution and financial strategy, market and customer knowledge, and team strength.

Benjamin Smith (GSM’13) relished the opportunity to compete against outstanding teams and technologies from some of the nation’s top academic institutions. “Not only were we able to develop a comprehensive and compelling business plan, but the competition gave us an opportunity to substantiate that plan with cleantech industry leaders,” he observed. “It was an amazing experience.”

Taking part in the competition reinforced Ryan Cruz’s (ME’13) aspiration to pursue a career in the energy efficiency field. “I was able to learn more about the business side of engineering and aspects of building energy efficiency that I would not have normally been exposed to in the classroom,” he said.

“It was a great learning experience for all the team members, and we’re proud to get BU’s name recognized at such a highly competitive event,” said Gevelber (ME, MSE, SE).  “We also had great mentoring from other BU faculty in both schools, and received support from BU’s Office of Technology Development, Institute for Technology, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) and Sustainable Neighborhood Lab.”

HVAC systems account for a large portion of energy use in mid- to large-sized buildings, and energy use and cost scales strongly with airflow. This is particularly true in older buildings designed when energy was much cheaper and HVAC systems were designed with high air flow rates. Based on concepts developed by Paul Gallagher (ME, MS’13) in his master’s thesis, Aeolus aims to commercialize its software-based service that enables room-by-room measurement and optimization of airflow rates, thereby reducing energy consumption while maintaining thermal comfort and meeting ventilation requirements.

Invented by Gevelber, Wroblewski and Gallagher and now being patented by BU, the breakthrough technology uses existing, computer-based building automation systems to reduce large building HVAC energy consumption by up to 20 percent without equipment installation, intensive manual labor or long payback periods.

“What’s amazing about our approach is that the system would take the same time to work on a building the size of Sargent College as it would for the Prudential Center,” Gevelber explained.

Formed in 2007 to help develop a new generation of energy entrepreneurs and companies and sponsored by NSTAR and the U.S. Department of Energy, the MIT Clean Energy Prize offers awards in three categories—renewable energy, infrastructure and resources, and energy efficiency.  The competition’s $20,000 Energy Efficiency Track Prize is sponsored by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which seeks to accelerate the success of clean energy technologies, companies and projects in the Commonwealth while creating high-quality jobs and long-term economic growth for the people of Massachusetts.

Treatment options for solid, cancerous tumors include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but all three involve lengthy recovery times and damage healthy tissue and the immune system. Over the past five years, Associate ProfessorTyrone Porter (ME, BME) has advanced a technique that combines nanotechnology and focused ultrasound for tumor destruction while avoiding the harmful side effects associated with conventional treatment methods.

Developed in collaboration with Nathan McDannold, research director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/ Harvard Medical School Focused Ultrasound Laboratory, the technique is to inject nontoxic liquid perfluorocarbon nanodroplets into the bloodstream where they accumulate in solid tumors over time. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) pulses are then used to vaporize the nanodroplets within the tumor. The process yields microbubbles that boost tissue absorption of ultrasound, producing sufficient heat to kill the tumors in less time than when using HIFU alone.

Using tissue-mimicking hydrogels as a model for solid tumors in an article published recently in Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound, Porter has shown that microbubble-enhanced HIFU can destroy solid tumors using 70 percent less acoustic power while reducing the ultrasound exposure time by at least 50 percent when compared to conventional HIFU.

“This results in less risk of skin burns because you’re using much less energy, dramatically cuts down the time for treating larger tumors, and makes it possible to treat tumors in organs protected by bone such as the ribcage or skull,” said Porter.

Building on these results and funded by a new four-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Porter and McDannold are now investigating whether their technique can be used to destroy tumors in the kidneys, which are partially protected by the ribcage and therefore more difficult to treat with ultrasound.

Because bone would absorb some of the ultrasound, treatment time would increase. In addition, connective tissue at the bone surface could be damaged by heat from the ultrasound. By sharply reducing the power and time needed to destroy cancer tumors in the kidney and other organs protected by bone, the researchers aim to make ultrasound a viable option for treating hard-to-reach solid tumors.

“Ultrasound for destroying tumors is not widely accepted in the U.S.,” said Porter. “I’m hopeful that our work will lead to wider acceptance of using ultrasound to treat solid tumors and provide a new treatment option for inoperable cancers.”

By Mark Dwortzan

For 15 years, Professor Thomas Bifano (ME, MSE) has developed deformable mirrors that are widely used to compensate for optical aberrations in telescopes and microscopes. His “adaptive optics” technique leverages micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology—electrostatic actuators and flexible layers of silicon—to shape the mirrors precisely and thus bring images of everything from retinal cells to planets into sharper focus.

On April 9, Bifano traced the evolution of his trailblazing work on deformable mirrors at Boston University and Boston Micromachines Corporation(where he’s the founder and CTO) in the 2013 College of Engineering Distinguished Scholar Lecture, “Shaping Light with Deformable Mirrors.” Speaking from the podium of the Colloquium Room at the Boston University Photonics Center that he directs, he addressed students, faculty and researchers from throughout the BU academic community and beyond.

Bifano described a deformable mirror (DM) as an integrated system of two main parts—an array of electrostatic actuators and a compliant mirror that is connected by posts to the actuator array.

“The whole idea is that if you apply a voltage to [the electrostatic actuator], it pulls down on the posts, and that deforms the mirror,” he explained. “And voila, you have a deformable mirror.”

Bifano observed that in comparison to other DMs, these MEMS-driven mirrors are smaller in size, weight and power; easily scalable to large arrays; faster, more predictable and reliable; and much less expensive.

Developing these mirrors at both BU and Boston Micromachines has allowed him to aim his academic research at technology translation, resulting in state-of-the-art telescopes, retinal imaging systems and microscopes. During the lecture he highlighted three recent developments:

• When deployed in Chile in October on the eight-meter-diameter Gemini telescope, a next-generation adaptive optics instrument called the Gemini Planet Imager will rely on a 4000-actuator DM from Boston Micromachines to directly detect light from extrasolar planets. These observations will be the most sensitive ever made, and will allow scientists to determine if those planets possess the chemical building blocks of life.
• A prototype scanning laser ophthalmoscope from Boston Micromachines uses deformable mirrors to compensate for optical aberrations of the eye, yielding unprecedented cell-scale, in vivo images of the retina to track disease progression and evaluate the effectiveness of clinical treatments. Joslin Diabetes Center is using the instrument in clinical trials aimed at improving treatments for diabetic retinopathy, a progressive retinal disease common to people with long-term diabetes.
• Bifano is collaborating with Professor Jerome Mertz (BME) to develop DM-based microscopes that can obtain sharp images of biological structures through media that strongly scatter light, such as the brain and other organs with nearly opaque tissue.

A Quarter Century of Achievement

Bifano has served as a BU professor of mechanical engineering for 25 years, chair of the Manufacturing Engineering Department from 1999 to 2006, and chair of the University Research Council from 2008 to 2011. As director of the Photonics Center since 2006, he has led programs for education, research and development of advanced photonic device prototypes for commercial and military applications.

“As the second director of the Photonics Center, his impact has been absolutely transformational,” said Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen in introductory remarks. “It’s Tom’s leadership and vision that made the center such an enjoyable and enabling research and educational amplifier not only for engineering, but also for chemistry, physics, astronomy, and medicine. The center is now one of the most powerful magnets for excellent faculty and graduate students; it’s nothing short of the pride and joy of faculty and administrators throughout Boston University.”

A member of the U.S. Army Science Board, Bifano has served as conference technical session chair for five professional societies; member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Precision Engineering; and associate editor of International Journal of Manufacturing Science and Production andSociety of Manufacturing Engineers Journal of Manufacturing Processes. Since receiving a PhD in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University, he has authored or co-authored more than 120 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference publications.

Bifano’s ability to transition fundamental research into useful and widely used technologies is reflected in his six patents, three R&D 100 Awards and the 2009 Bepi Colombo Prize for his work in “micro-deformable mirrors for astronomical telescopes.”

Initiated in 2008, the annual Distinguished Scholar Lecture Series honors a senior faculty member engaged in outstanding, high-impact research at the College of Engineering. The previous four recipients are Professors  H. Steven Colburn (BME), Theodore Moustakas (ECE), Irving Bigio (BME), John Baillieul (ME) and Malvin Teich (ECE).

As dancers, this couple is no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The leader’s moves are clunky, his partner’s so tentative that she’s constantly behind a beat. But be kind: they’re beginners at salsa, and they’re bedeviled by something Fred and Ginger never faced.

They’re robots.

H. Kayhan Ozcimder (ENG’11,’15), a dancer with the Boston troupe Collage, has had the inelegant experience of dancing with one of these machines, which resemble a vacuum cleaner minus the hose. Ozcimder dreams of a more agile automaton someday, but for now he’s pleased to have helped program these salsa-bots, proving that “it’s possible to do an art form in a robotic platform.”

Ozcimder is a graduate student in John Baillieul’s Intelligent Mechatronics Lab, whose mission, says the College of Engineering mechanical engineering professor, is to give machines the ability to respond to their environment. The researchers began by mapping the coordinates of actual salsa dancers and programming the robots with four basic beginner moves (relying on his dancer’s knowledge, Ozcimder suggested salsa as a simple starting point for the mechanized dance amateurs). The robots, which are outfitted with motion sensors, read each other’s moves and respond according to the programming.

Ozcimder thinks motion-reading robots might someday serve as useful tools for judging dance competitions (possibly bouncing Kirstie Alley even sooner from Dancing with the Stars), but Baillieul is hunting bigger game. He’s not out to help “some high school guy who had trouble getting a date, so you get a robot. The ultimate goal is to understand human reaction to gestures and how machines may react to gestures.” That could enable robots to team with, and perhaps take over from, humans in hazardous jobs, from treacherous rescues to repairs in lethal environments (think the workers who plunged into the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after the 2011 Japanese tsunami).

The intelligent mechatronics lab is littered with things from dancing robots to flight vehicles. The work builds on an established fact of 21st-century life: computing machines will do more of the work. “Everyday objects like automobiles have gone from almost entirely mechanically engineered things to being machines that are basically controlled at every level by computers,” notes Baillieul. “A typical automobile now has 100 or more microprocessors in it.”

The challenge is to build machines that can perform tasks with some autonomy and respond in fluid situations they might not have been precisely programmed for, an instance where man still has it all over machines. Whereas human reaction is the child of several parents—instinct, surely, but also the ability to learn from experience and sometimes override instinct—robots are not yet agile enough to ignore their “instinct” (programming). The solution, says Baillieul, is to give the machines sufficiently “massive experiential data sets” that they can react to numerous situations.

One avenue the lab is exploring is humans’ use of nonverbal cues to communicate. Good dancers move seamlessly together, responding to each other’s touch and motions; amateurs without experience reading each other’s cues often come off looking stilted. Nonverbal cues can also be used to send misinformation; bats, for example, camouflage their motions so that they can sneak up on insect prey, a fake-out familiar to anyone who’s tried to swat a pesky fly. Hence the lab’s work with getting robots to use sensors to read each other’s metal-body language, aimed at “how you might program flying vehicles or mobile robots to do the right thing, in terms of communicating or not communicating through their motions,” Baillieul says.

Dance companies like Ozcimder’s can rest easy; even he doesn’t foresee automating human dancers out of a job. Robots may be geniuses at detecting footwork, body angles, and other technical metrics that go into a performance, but they can’t judge the intangible artistic panache that might please an audience, like dancers’ facial expressions.

Ozcimder has bad news for our mechanized friends: intangibles make up half the judging criteria at a typical salsa competition.

Watch the video.

By Mark Dwortzan

Recognizing the value of experiential learning opportunities in keeping engineering undergraduates engaged and in preparing them to transform concepts into innovative products and technologies that move society forward, the College of Engineering has begun construction of the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC). Slated for launch in the coming academic year, EPIC will serve as a resource to significantly increase the amount of design work in the undergraduate curriculum through stand-alone courses, enhancements to existing courses and opportunities to collaborate with fellow students, faculty and working engineers from a variety of disciplines.

“By doing this in an interdisciplinary way, we’ll have an opportunity to show our budding engineers how design is a common discipline that affects all fields,” said Thomas D.C. Little, associate dean for Educational Initiatives.

Occupying the former Guitar Center space on the first floor of 750 Commonwealth Avenue and a small portion of an adjacent commercial parking garage, EPIC will also provide an environment where both undergraduate and graduate students can develop the knowledge and skills needed in tomorrow’s manufacturing enterprises.

The center will include flexible, high-tech teaching spaces, demonstration areas, laboratories, design spaces and fabrication facilities—all in a reconfigurable layout. Students will have access to advanced machining tools, laser processing equipment, rapid 3-D printers, intelligent robotics and state-of-the-art software. Once EPIC goes live, they’ll learn how to create innovative new products in an integrated, holistic way that encompasses design, prototyping, fabrication, manufacturing and lifecycle management.

“We approach the construction of this facility with a belief that the reason students want to become engineers is that they like to build new things,” said EPIC Director and Professor of Practice Gerald Fine (ME, MSE). “We also believe that engineering design is an important part of engineering education and should be woven into the curriculum starting in the freshman year.”

EPIC’s work will be complemented by BU’s Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation, which advances technological solutions for a wide range of industries. By training students to work with engineers, scientists and faculty on high-impact projects, EPIC will leverage CMI’s resources, including internship opportunities, to give students a running start when they join the workforce.

By Rich Barlow, BU Today

Anthony Barksdale

Anthony Barksdale was a generous soul who hosted two international students, one his roommate, at their first Thanksgiving last fall. He was also a gentle prankster. Just days before his untimely death Saturday, he elevated one roommate’s bed.

“He was kind enough to fix it after the joke was over,” says Fred Schmidt (SMG’16).

A wake for Barksdale (ENG’16) will be held this Friday, followed on Saturday by a memorial service at 9 a.m. in his hometown of Amherst, N.H. (details below). He died after attending an unregistered off-campus party thrown by Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, which has beensuspended by the University and its national organization for reports of underage drinking and intoxication at the party. Barksdale had recently joined the fraternity.

As grieving family and friends prepared to say good-bye in his hometown, memorials of various forms sprouted around campus. Schmidt, a good friend who lived next door to Barksdale in the Towers, on Bay State Road, says a memorial board has been put up in the residence’s common room. Among the remembrances posted:

“There was nobody more genuine, you will truly be missed.”

“The soul of Towers 3 West.”

“It seems like just the other day we were tackling kids at the esplanade during the snowbrawl.”

“Your smile always made our day, we will miss you.”

His generosity stood out for Lauren Tzirides (CAS’16). “I remember passing him in the Towers lobby as I was about to brave the cold without a jacket, and he took his own off his back and gave it to me to wear.” His trademark approach to making people feel good, she says, was massive and liberally offered hugs: “He had loads of hugs in those arms.”

Marissa Petersile (ENG’15) transferred to the College of Engineering from the College of Arts & Sciences after her freshman year. “He took to calling me ‘Sophomore’ every time he saw me,” she says, because she was the only sophomore in a class she took with Barksdale. “He did this even as of last week, even though by now it had just become a joke.” (She reciprocated by keeping his name listed in her cell phone as Tony Freshman.)

She recalls a tenacious friend who, needing her help with schoolwork but not knowing her room, scoped out her entire dormitory before finding the door with her name tag. A dedicated student, he was a rare freshman attending a recent event showcasing mechanical engineering research, says Petersile.

While sharing her memories, she also shared a wish directed at her friend: “I wish I could have known you more, Tony, but I promise, you’ll shine on.”

“He was the most sincere, gentle, caring, and friendliest person that you could ever hope to meet,” recalls fellow Towers dweller Ty Sweeney (CAS’16). “The halls of 3 West are much quieter without him; he was the soul of our community.”

Instructors recall his sharp mind. Sheryl Grace taught Barksdale in her Introduction to Wind Energy class. “The blade he designed for our simple wind turbine tabletop test outperformed all of the others,” the College of Engineering associate professor remembers. “This was a truly chance occurrence, because of the approach taken in the class to the design of the blades, but it was a great outcome and gave everyone pause for thought. I remember him simply smiling at the outcome.”

For another assignment, he compared U.S., Chinese, and Irish policies towards wind energy. “The eclectic selection of comparison countries, and the strong argument he was able to make because he selected these two foreign countries, made an impression on me,” Grace says.

Barksdale had a work-study job helping to set up demonstrations in the CAS physics department. “We all remember him as upbeat, cheerful, and always interested in talking more about physics,” says Manher Jariwala, a master lecturer.

Mac Schwager, an ENG assistant professor of mechanical engineering, had Barksdale in his freshman advising group, helping acclimate engineering majors to their studies. He had a handful of one-on-one sessions with him, and he recalls an “upbeat and friendly guy” and “lively participant” in group meetings. “He liked to make people laugh, and he liked to be in the middle of whatever was going on,” Schwager says. “At the same time, I never had the feeling that he was being rowdy or disrespectful.” He says Barksdale was especially interested in computer engineering and aeronautical design, the latter not surprising for a young man who was a pilot and flew Cessna planes.

Also an avid snowmobiler and four-wheeler, Barksdale was a 2012 graduate of Souhegan High School in Amherst, where he played football and varsity basketball, earning the Coach’s Award senior year. He was the recipient of a U.S. Marine Corps Scholastic Excellence Award and a Humanities Award.

He is survived by his father, Anthony W. Barksdale I of Nashua, N.H.; his mother and stepfather, Melanie (Faye) and Randy Ricard of Mont Vernon, N.H.; a sister, Alisa Faye of Mont Vernon; his grandparents, Karen Faye of Hampton, N.H., Freda Barksdale of Nashua, N.H., and Donald and Marion Ricard of Waterbury, Vt.; and aunts, uncles, and cousins.

A wake for Anthony Barksdale will be held Friday, March 8, from 3 to 8 p.m., at the Smith & Heald Funeral Home, 63 Elm St., Milford, N.H. A memorial celebration will take place at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 9, at Souhegan High School, 412 Boston Post Rd., Amherst, N.H. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Animal Rescue League of New Hampshire, 545 New Hampshire 101, Bedford, NH 03110. The University is providing bus transportation to Saturday’s service; find information here.

By Amy Laskowski

For 100 years, doctors have treated some broken bones by tugging on them. It’s true.

Millions of people break bones every year—in this country alone, there are close toeight million fractures annually —and of these, 5 percent to 10 percent fail to heal. The medical bills for bone repair clock in at an estimated $70 billion.

Fortunately, bones can regenerate, and orthopedic surgeons can enhance this regeneration with a process called distraction osteogenesis. First, the bone is surgically broken, pins are inserted above and below the bone incision, and then a metal device is attached to the pins. The device slowly cranks the bone apart by only millimeters a day, and over time, new bone grows from both ends of the fracture, filling the gap.

While the procedure can increase a person’s height (think Ethan Hawke’s character in the film Gattaca), it can serve many other purposes, including lengthening a single bone that is abnormally short because of a childhood injury and lengthening and reshaping bones to help correct congenital deformities. The success of distraction osteogenesis in these cases has also led doctors to use it to treat a bone fracture that has not healed well.

One of the more interesting things about distraction osteogenesis is that despite decades of observation doctors and researchers still don’t know exactly how it works. Elise Morgan a College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering and of biomedical engineering, hopes to find out, and she is honing in on the conundrum in a series of related research projects.

The director of ENG’s Orthopaedic and Developmental Biomechanics Laboratory, she believes that a better understanding of the bone regenerative process could lead to noninvasive ways to examine fractures and less invasive ways to treat them. It could also help orthopedic surgeons select treatment parameters based on the type of bone, the type of patient, and the device that is used.

“Our tissues and cells are very responsive to the mechanical forces that they experience,” says Morgan, who was awarded the 2013 Kappa Delta Young Investigator Award by the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons and named a 2012 College of Engineering Distinguished Faculty Fellow. “So the stresses we put on our bones as we sit, walk, and jump are sensed by our tissues and have an effect on how they behave and ultimately heal. Understanding this process is critical in understanding why some bone injuries heal, and some don’t.”

Composed mostly of minerals and protein—mainly collagen—bone has a complicated structure that is sometimes likened to a coral reef, because of its porous structure, strength, and ability to regenerate. This regenerative capacity is something that bone cells share with liver cells. Better ways to harness this regenerative capacity are sorely needed: bone is the second most frequently transplanted tissue, after blood.

Just as weight lifting strengthens muscles because of the trauma to the muscle fibers, a force applied to a bone can change its structure. A biomedical theory known as Wolff’s law asserts that in response to increasing applied force—called loading—bone will remodel itself to support and accommodate that loading.

Although distraction osteogenesis is widely used, the procedure has a 30 percent complication rate. Doctors and researchers can measure how many millimeters the bone has been stretched, but they don’t know much about how that stretching ends up loading the fragile new tissues growing with the gap or ends up affecting how stiff and strong those tissues become.

To tackle these unknowns, Morgan has collaborated for various studies withThomas Einhorn, a School of Medicine professor of orthopedic surgery, biochemistry, and biomedical engineering and chair of orthopedic surgery and chief of orthopedic surgery at Boston Medical Center, and Louis Gerstenfeld, a School of Dental Medicine research professor of biochemistry, as well as with students in Morgan’s lab.

No one-size-fits-all procedure

Previous studies had looked only at how much the gap in between the two pieces of bone was lengthened and tried to correlate that amount to how stiff and strong the lengthened bone became. Other studies tried to determine what kind of loading microenvironment in the gap would aid the healing, but used only computer simulations that hadn’t yet been proven to give accurate results. The problem, Morgan decided, was that there were no measurements of the loading microenvironment and therefore no way of relating this microenvironment to how much bone regeneration occurred. In short, there was not yet a reliable way to predict what the healing process would be like.

Researchers in Morgan’s lab “broke,” or cut, bones and twice a day they lengthened that gap between the severed bone pieces, monitoring changes with CT scans. They measured the strains, or deformations, caused by the lengthening, and what they found supported earlier suspicions that not all of the tissues in the gap experience the same amount of strain. They also found evidence that bone cells’ behavior is influenced by the type of loading microenvironment: whether the new bone tissue is stretched or sheared. Morgan compared mild amounts of lengthening to larger amounts, and found no simple relationship when it came to healing. Consequently, she says, there is no one-size-fits-all procedure for distraction osteogenesis to guarantee that a bone will heal successfully.

Next the researchers compared the mechanical environment in distraction osteogenesis to that in the much less favorable result of pseudarthrosis, or false joint. A pseudarthrosis can form at the site of a bone fracture when that fracture doesn’t heal.

Instead of pulling the bone cleanly apart as is done in distraction osteogenesis, the researchers applied a bending motion, which resulted in formation of a pseudarthrosis. The two motions, they learned, created very different mechanical environments, which likely explained why the amount of healing was so different. The comparison also served to provide more evidence that whether and how much new bone tissue is stretched or sheared during healing has a major influence on how much more bone subsequently forms.

Finally, Morgan worked with Mark Grinstaff, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of chemistry and an ENG professor of biomedical engineering, to develop a method using CT scans that can reveal the formation of cartilage in fractures. Most bone fractures heal by forming cartilage and then bone, so knowing that cartilage has formed early on in a fracture is an indication that the healing is going well.

“Whereas previously we wouldn’t know how the healing is progressing until someone’s bone is about halfway to being healed, this new CT scan could let us come in a quarter way through to see if the healing is progressing normally,” Morgan says. “No cartilage means you probably won’t get adequate formation of bone and won’t have a well-healed fracture. Doctors could intervene much earlier.”

She is still studying what goes on at the bone’s molecular level, and what kind of molecular mechanisms are activated by the mechanical environments that produce bone or cartilage. “We’re interested in how a certain type of mechanical loading—for instance, the stretching that is applied in distraction osteogenesis—might put into motion some of those molecular mechanisms that then are responsible for the healing process,” says Morgan, who is also looking at the mechanisms at a genetic level. She believes she has identified some proteins that are active in bone healing and plans to work to find the mechanical microenvironments that can trigger them.

“When a bone fails, that has a big impact on someone’s quality of life,” Morgan says. “The mechanical engineering concepts we use define how much strength and stiffness this bone has regained and whether that regaining is enough to restore quality of life. As doctors and scientists, it’s our job to study how we can get bones to heal faster and with fewer implications.”