Biomedicine

CISE awarded $8.8M to develop the next-generation robotics and autonomous systems workforce

The Boston University Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) received an $8.8 million award to fund a new center called the BU Robotics and Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (BU-RASTIC). The award, including $4.4M from the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) and $4.4M matching funds from Boston University, will serve to […]

Computational Miniature Mesoscope for Cortex-wide, Cellular resolution Ca2+ Imaging in Freely Behaving Mice

Scale is a fundamental obstacle in linking neural activity to behavior. While perception and cognition arise from interactions between diverse brain areas separated by long distances, neural codes and computations are implemented at the scale of individual neurons. An integrative understanding of brain dynamics thus requires cellular-resolution measurements across sensory, motor, and executive areas spanning […]

Local neuronal drive and neuromodulatory control of activity in the pial neurovascular circuit

We seek to understand the nature of the pial neurovascular circuit, whose dynamics is characterized by ultralow frequency oscillations near 0.1Hz that parcellate into separate coherent regions across cortex. We will use this knowledge to form a mathematical relation between the hemodynamic patterns observed in optical and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments and the underlying […]

The Sensor You Swallow

Thanks to the work of Assistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) and her colleagues at MIT, Crohn’s and other bowel disease sufferers might someday skip the arduous annual endoscopy and instead swallow a pill-sized device that would literally shed light on what’s going on inside the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. MIT researchers previously developed a 1.5-inch capsule that contained […]

Synthetic gene sensors and effectors to redirect organoid development

Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived organoids hold great promise for tissue engineering and personalized drug screening, but obtaining the desired multicellular organization and function from these systems is usually performed in an ad hoc fashion without forward design specification. Recently, we reported successful liver bud formation containing stromal cells, vascular tube-like structures and hematopoiesis-like […]

Gut Health Project Nets Professor Yazicigil Multi-Disciplinary Grant

CISE faculty affiliate Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) is leveraging her skill with hardware design and IoT security in a new direction, for the benefit of human health. Working in collaboration with Professor Tim Lu, of MIT’s EECS & Biological Engineering departments, Professor Yazicigil is developing a new miniaturized bio-electronic device which would make it possible to […]

Collaborative Research: A Workshop on Pre-emergence and the Predictions of Rare Events in Multiscale, Complex, Dynamical Systems

Although pandemics have threatened human civilization since ancient times, how to predict and prevent them remains one of the most pressing challenges, calling out for innovative insights and practices. Pandemics emerge through incidental ‘perfect storms’: molecular changes in pathogens, gradual trends in climate, subtle shifts in ecological interactions among potential hosts, and even individual behavioral […]