Nanci Hellmich

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM

Martha Bushong — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:12:11 +0000

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM Martha Bushong Mon, 08/30/2021 - 14:12

In This Story

Nathalia Peixoto (on left) works with graduate students in the Neural Engineering Lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell

When Nathalia Peixoto was growing up in Brazil, she told people she wanted to be a teacher and an engineer when she grew up.

“My brother and sister made fun of me, saying that those don’t go together,” says Peixoto, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and an affiliate faculty member with the Department of Bioengineering. “My mom never finished her first year of college, so it was not clear that anyone in our family would go to college.”

But Peixoto was determined. She went to a vocational-technical school instead of a traditional high school and became a technician in electronics and robotics, working with five engineers. “When I disagreed with them, or they asked me to do things that I thought were wrong, they said, ‘Unless you have a bachelor’s degree, you can’t call any shots.’”

So Peixoto went on to get an undergraduate degree, PhD, then conduct research at the University of Bonn in Germany as well as Stanford University before coming to Mason in 2004 as a post-doc in the physics department. She joined the Volgenau School of Engineering in 2006 as an assistant professor in ECE.

Now Peixoto is living her childhood dream, combining her love for teaching and engineering while mentoring young women, like herself, who had to overcome obstacles to become engineers. “I prefer to help people who have difficulties navigating the academic world,” says Peixoto, who won Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2015.

As a supervisor for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), she meets with minority students, sharing stories of her journey, providing guidance on job searches and applying to graduate school, and tips on finding a lab to conduct research while an undergraduate.

She has worked with students she met in classes, in the hallway, through other professors, during her presentations to middle and high school students, and at Mason’s Aspiring Scientist Summer Internship Program.

Peixoto estimates she has mentored hundreds of students over the years, often supervising their research projects. Currently, she is overseeing nine independent research projects led by high school and undergraduate students, three ECE senior design team projects, as well as three research projects in her Neural Engineering Lab, which is affiliated with both the ECE and Bioengineering departments and is part of the Institute for Biohealth Innovation. 

Her high school, undergraduate, and graduate students perform team-based projects on assistive technology, wearable embedded systems, and neural implants.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that our best students bloom if you give them freedom,” Peixoto says.

For one of her funded research projects, a graduate student is creating a device that uses wireless signals to detect people’s heart rate and breath behind walls of rubble. “It could be used to detect a person who was buried because of an earthquake or in a war zone,” she says.

The U.S. Air Force is funding the project. “There’s a lot of math behind it and hardware/software development to be done to make it work, but I am hopeful it will be really useful.”

For another project, she’s working with an epidemiologist to develop a portable robot that can collect ticks, which will help for research on tick-borne diseases.

In another, she’s working with a Social Work professor at Mason on virtual-reality tools to help people who are recovering from addiction. Her expertise here is on analyzing brain signals and the physiological state of the user during exposure to triggers.

She is also a co-investigator on a prestigious Research Traineeship grant of nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation to cross-train graduate students over the next five years.

Peixoto appreciates the flexibility she has at Mason to wear many hats. “I have the perfect balance of how much I can interact with students, how much I can mentor them, and I can allow them to do whatever research they want.

“After students leave Mason, they often keep in touch and let me know how their professional and personal lives are going,” she says. “Their stories become part of mine, they always have their experiences at Mason impact them, and it is gratifying for me to see and be part of that.”

Topics

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

diversity

ASSIP

Mason statistics researchers help plan and analyze a study on COVID-19 prevalence in children in Northern Virginia

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 19:00:11 +0000

Mason statistics researchers help plan and analyze a study on COVID-19 prevalence in children in Northern Virginia Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/24/2021 - 15:00

In This Story

Jiayang Sun

Brett Hunter

Scott Bruce

Inova Children’s Hospital, the Virginia Department of Health, and the College of Engineering and Computing joined forces last summer to conduct a COVID-19 antibody study to analyze the incidence of COVID-19 in Northern Virginia’s children.

The overall antibody positive rate in children was 8.5 percent.

Mason’s Department of Statistics experts collaborated in the design of the testing protocol. They also helped analyze the data to determine how many children have had COVID-19.

This was a public service project, says Jiayang Sun, chair of the Department of Statistics and the Bernard J. Dunn Eminent Scholar. “It is an excellent, comprehensive study that considered multiple factors to systematically assess the seroprevalence in the diverse population of the area’s children. I am pleased with the quality of data and that our statisticians were involved, early, starting in the design stage of a study versus those only after the data had been collected.”

Scott Bruce, an assistant professor of statistics, says, “The timely and valuable findings from this project are due to the outstanding partnership among the healthcare professionals, government agencies, and statistics researchers involved in this project. More efforts like this are needed to produce high-quality data and analysis that will continue to build our understanding of this disease and inform strategies for mitigating the risk of infection among children and between children and adults.”

“We considered multiple factors, including age, living conditions, types of antibody tests, the CDC’s recommendation on orthogonal testing, and the data collection sites, which are correlated with population characteristics,” says Brett Hunter, Mason’s principal investigator for this project and associate chair of the Department of Statistics.

The analysis of blood samples from more than 1,000 children, ages 0 to 19, found:

COVID-19 antibodies were found in 8.2 percent of white children, 5.2 percent of black children, 5.7 percent of Asian children, and 16.2 percent of children with multiple racial origins.
Children identified as Hispanic ethnicity had a 26.6 percent rate of antibody positivity.
The rate was 13.7 percent in young children (0-5 years), 7.5 percent in school-age (6-10 years), 5.1 percent in early adolescents (11-15 years), and 10.8 percent in older adolescents (16-19 years).
The majority (66 percent) of children who had antibodies had no history of symptoms of COVID-19 infection, which highlights the silent or asymptomatic infection in children, and the subsequent risk of transmission of infection to others.

When compared to an adult serology study in Virginia, which reported a COVID-19 antibody positivity rate of 4.4 percent, the pediatric positive rate is nearly double.

“The pediatric serology project unexpectedly found more children were seropositive than we had anticipated,” says Rebecca Levorson, division director for pediatric infectious diseases, Inova Children’s Hospital. “Most of these children did not have symptoms, which makes it difficult to know who may be infectious and who is not at a specific time.”

“Nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is children, and as they may represent a larger proportion of SARS-CoV-2 disease than we previously thought, we need to recognize that children will continue to be infected with and possibly asymptomatically spread this disease. As we continue to fight this pandemic, we need to consider ways to protect them and others by using the tools we have available to us, including masking, social distancing, and vaccination.”

The project is an example of new grants/projects that can be generated from a collaborative contract/award between the Department of Statistics and the Inova Health System. The contract is based on a parent UL1 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Transitional Sciences Award (CTSA) to develop new research to improve the health of individuals and the public.

Researchers in the statistics department also worked on several other COVID-related studies, Sun says. The researchers want to provide good data that can be used for the public good, as the theme of 2020 Joint Statistical Meetings advocated.

More information about this pediatric serology project can be found at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.28.21250466v1

Topics

Statistics

Department of Statistics

Inova

coronavirus; covid-19

CEC faculty research

Mason offers new Data Analytics Credential to prepare students for careers in big data

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:47:33 +0000

Mason offers new Data Analytics Credential to prepare students for careers in big data Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/11/2021 - 11:47

In This Story

Liza Wilson Durant

Brett Hunter

��AV is offering a new Data Analytics Credential to help undergraduates hone their skills in handling big data.

The new credential is the second one offered in partnership with the Greater Washington Partnership’s Capital CoLAB. Mason launched the Digital Technology Credential in 2019 to support additional skills in data analysis, visualization, and cybersecurity for non-engineers. More than 150 students are currently enrolled in that program.

“The new Data Analytics Credential will enable hundreds of Mason students to offer their specialized data analytics skills to employers who are seeking to meet the talent shortfall in data science and analytics,” says Liza Wilson Durant, associate dean for strategic initiatives and community engagement for the Volgenau School of Engineering.

Liza Wilson Durant says the new credential is an exciting showcase of our industry partners engaging with students from multiple disciplines. Photo by Evan Cantwell.

The credential focuses on data storage and management and will make students more marketable, including for jobs as data analysts and data scientists, says Brett Hunter, associate chair of the Department of Statistics.

The credential is designed for undergraduates in statistics, computing, information technology, and data science who want to acquire the data analytics skills needed by high-profile employers in the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond.

Developed with the Greater Washington Partnership’s Capital CoLAB, the credential equips students across disciplines with the specialized data analytics skills that the Greater Washington Partnership employers have specified to be most important to their operations. The Capital CoLAB (Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business) is an action-oriented partnership of employers and academic institutions that executes initiatives to develop the talent needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

By enrolling in either the Digital Technology Credential or Data Analytics Credential programs, students will have direct access to opportunities and engagement with some of the largest employers in the region, including Amazon, Capital One, and Northrop Grumman.

“It is exciting to see our industry partners directly engaged with our students and reinforcing the demand for the skills they are acquiring by offering them internships and other experiential learning opportunities,” says Durant.

Many students in statistics, computational data science, computer science, and information science and technology will only need to take one to three additional undergraduate courses to earn the credential, Hunter says. They can use some of their elective courses to do that.

“The credential is not another degree, but essentially a badge you can put on your LinkedIn profile or electronic resume,” he says. “I think most statistics undergraduates will take advantage of the opportunity to communicate their skills in this new way.”

The badge associated with the Data Analytics Credential also represents an innovation for students and employers. “Micro-credentials like the Data Analytics badge reflect the ‘new currency’ in denoting skill achievement and helps our students move more easily from college to career,” says Marc Austin, Executive Director of Professional Development and Academic Ventures who leads Mason’s Continuing and Professional Development unit which administers the new digital badge.

More than 50 students have already enrolled in the new Data Analytics Credential program.

Students who are working towards earning the credential will receive several exclusive benefits from area companies, including:

Access to a student portal with paid internship and event opportunities.
Invitations to participate in annual internship fairs with employers looking to recruit students.
Access to professional development webinars and other ad-hoc opportunities.

Mason students can learn more and enroll in the new Data Analytics Credential here.

Topics

data analytics

Digital Technology Credential Program

Biostatistics

Big Data

Fairfax Police land helicopter on campus to explain the rotorcraft’s mechanics to engineering students

Martha Bushong — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:35:32 +0000

Fairfax Police land helicopter on campus to explain the rotorcraft’s mechanics to engineering students Martha Bushong Mon, 03/08/2021 - 07:35

Topics

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

aeronautics

In This Story

Gregory Washington

Kenneth Ball

Leigh McCue-Weil

Find Out About Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering students get a close-up look at the Bell 429 helicopter.

Students studying aeronautics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering got an up-close look at how a helicopter works when the Fairfax Police landed one on campus recently and explained its functionality.

Mason Engineering’s second-semester senior aeronautics class (ME 499) focuses on rotary-wing flight vehicle performance, stability/control, and unmanned aircraft systems.

To bring some of the ideas of the class to life, adjunct professor Robert Gallo asked Captain Michael Shamblin, Helicopter Division Commander of the Fairfax County Police Department, to provide a practical demonstration of vertical lift with their Bell 429 helicopter.

The helicopter landed on the lawn outside Merten Hall one afternoon in late February, and the police flight crew demonstrated how the cyclic and collective flight systems affect motion and control of the rotor blades.

Among those attending the class with the aeronautics students were: Mason president Gregory Washington, Provost and Executive Vice President Mark Ginsberg, Volgenau School of Engineering Dean Ken Ball, and Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Leigh McCue.

“YouTube videos and PowerPoints only go so far in explaining the complexities of vertical lift,” Gallo says, “so having the Fairfax Police here helped our students understand how the helicopter rotor generates lift and allows it to fly in all directions.”

Mechanical engineering senior Mason Chee agrees. “We were able to look inside at the controls that they use to pilot a helicopter, and we learned about some of the effects the helicopter encounters during its flight. You can read about the theories and watch videos about them, but nothing comes as close as seeing it live.”

Vanessa Barth, a mechanical engineering senior, adds, “They were teaching us about the mechanical components and systems that control a helicopter. It was all information we talked about in class, but to see it in person was helpful.”

Gallo says the Fairfax Police were highly engaging and did an outstanding job answering questions, not only from our students but also from the faculty and staff in attendance.

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments

Martha Bushong — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:32:56 +0000

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments Martha Bushong Fri, 02/26/2021 - 08:32

Topics

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Healthcare Technology

In This Story

Jeffrey Moran

A Mason Engineering researcher has discovered that artificial microswimmers accumulate where their speed is minimized, an idea that could have implications for improving the efficacy of targeted cancer therapy.

Jeff Moran, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Volgenau School of Engineering, and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle studied self-propelled half-platinum/half-gold rods that “swim” in water using hydrogen peroxide as a fuel. The more peroxide there is, the faster the swimming; without peroxide in pure water, the rods don’t swim.

In this work, they set out to understand what happens when these artificial microswimmers are placed in a fluid reservoir containing a gradient of hydrogen peroxide––lots of peroxide on one side, not much on the other side.

They found that, predictably, the microswimmers swam faster in regions with high peroxide concentration, says Moran, whose research was published in the new issue of Scientific Reports.

As others had observed, the direction of swimming varied randomly in time as the swimmers explored their surroundings. In contrast, in the low-concentration regions, the rods slowed down and accumulated in these regions over the course of a few minutes.

The results suggest a simple strategy to make microswimmers passively accumulate in specific regions, an idea that might have useful, practical applications, he says.

Swimming at the microscopic scale is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology, Moran says. “Lots of cells and microorganisms, such as bacteria, can autonomously swim toward higher or lower concentrations of chemicals that benefit or harm the cell, respectively.”

This behavior is called chemotaxis, and it’s both common and important, he says. “For example, your immune cells use chemotaxis to detect and swim toward sites of injury, so they can initiate tissue repair.”

Moran and colleagues, like others in the field, have long been curious whether artificial microswimmers can mimic cells by performing chemotaxis, continuously swimming toward higher chemical concentrations. Some had claimed that the platinum/gold rods, in particular, could swim autonomously toward peroxide-rich regions.

“We were skeptical of these claims since the rods aren’t alive, and therefore they don’t have the sensing and response capabilities that are necessary for cells to execute this behavior,” he says.

“Instead, we found the opposite: the rods built up in the lower concentration regions. This is the opposite of what one would expect from chemotaxis,” Moran says.

The researchers conducted computer simulations that predicted this and validated them with experiments, he says.

“We propose a simple explanation for this behavior: Wherever they are, the rods move in randomly varying directions, exploring their surroundings. When they get to a low-fuel region, they can’t explore as vigorously. In a sense, they get trapped in their comfort zones,” Moran says.

“Conversely, in the high-peroxide regions, they move at higher speeds and, because their direction is constantly changing, escape from these regions more often. Over time, the net result is that rods accumulate in low-concentration regions,” he says. “They don’t have any intelligence. They end up where their mobility is the lowest.”

Moran says this research is promising from a technical standpoint because it suggests a new strategy to make chemicals accumulate in a highly acidic area.

“Due to their abnormal metabolic processes, cancer cells cause their immediate surroundings to become acidic. These are the cells that need the most drugs because the acidic environment is known to promote metastasis and confer resistance to drugs. Thus, the cells in these regions are a major target of many cancer therapies.”

Moran and colleagues are now designing microswimmers that move slowly in acidic regions and fast in neutral or basic regions. Through the mechanism they discovered here, they hypothesize that acid-dependent swimmers will accumulate and release their cargo preferentially where their speeds are minimized, namely the most acidic and hypoxic regions of the tumor, where the most problematic cells reside.

There is much more research to be conducted, but “these rods may have the ability to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the cancer cells that need them the most,” Moran says.

“To be clear, our study doesn’t prove that chemotaxis is impossible in artificial microswimmers, period; just that these particular microswimmers don’t undergo chemotaxis.

“Instead, we’ve identified an elegantly simple method of causing unguided microswimmers to accumulate and deliver drugs to the most problematic cancer cells, which could have implications for the treatment of many cancers, as well as other diseases like fibrosis. We’re excited to see where this goes.”

Computer science expert using natural language processing to improve equality in language technologies

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 14:24:56 +0000

Computer science expert using natural language processing to improve equality in language technologies Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/17/2021 - 09:24

Computer science researcher Antonis Anastasopoulos uses his love for computer science, language, and linguistics to improve equality in language technologies.

When people ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant a question, they expect the programs to understand them, but that is not always the case, he says.

Antonis Anastaspopoulos, photo provided.

A person’s language, accent, dialect, and even gender can have an impact, preventing the system from interpreting them correctly, says Anastasopoulos, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and an expert in natural language processing, which is how computers attempt to process and understand human languages.

“The systems don’t work equally well for everyone,” says Anastasopoulos, who speaks Greek (his native language), English, German, Swedish, Italian, and some Spanish.

He is one of several co-principal investigators who received a new National Science Foundation-Amazon grant for their research, “Quantifying and Mitigating Disparities in Language Technologies.”

In the fall, Anastasopoulos also won a Google 2020 Award for Inclusion Research for a project on how accent and dialect impact language technologies.

For the NSF grant, he and experts from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington are studying areas where there is bias in language technologies and measuring the discrepancies. Then they will attempt to mitigate the inequalities.

“We want to measure the extent to which the diversity of language affects the utility that speakers get from language technologies,” Anastasopoulos says. “We will focus on automatic translation and speech recognition since they are perhaps the most commonly used language technologies throughout the world.”

His research will apply to all languages. It’s important to look deeply into languages for differences because languages are flexible and diverse, he says. “There are many regional variations that are different from the standard.”

He also recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to build optical character recognition tools to convert scanned images of text to a machine-readable format for endangered languages.

“We are working on training machine-learning models to process images and texts in the books and documents of indigenous languages from central and South America so that these works can be made accessible to everyone,” he says. “We are building technologies to study those languages computationally.”

Anastasopoulos is also part of a prestigious group of machine-translation researchers, including experts from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, who are creating automatic tools that translate COVID-19-related content for communities where people don’t speak the languages most often used by large health organizations, including the World Health Organization.

“We are working closely with Translators without Borders. So far, we have produced terminologies for more than 200 languages and a large dataset for 35 languages, some of them extremely under-served by the current solution.”

Topics

computer science

computing

natural language processing

Statistics seniors receive award at American Statistical Association national data challenge

Martha Bushong — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 12:09:10 +0000

Statistics seniors receive award at American Statistical Association national data challenge Martha Bushong Thu, 01/21/2021 - 07:09

Topics

Volgenau School of Engineering

Four seniors majoring in statistics––Emily Litzenberg, Kate Lang, Nate Mulugeta, and Shannon Connor––received an honorable mention for the best use of external data at the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) Fall Data Challenge 2020.

For the national competition, called Get Out the Vote, teams of high school and undergraduate students submitted their recommendations on how to increase voter turnout using voting behavior data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. High school and undergraduate students were judged separately.

Mason’s team looked at the data from 2000 to 2016 to see if there was an increase in registered voters who didn’t vote because they didn’t like either candidate in the presidential race. “We found there was a rise in people who didn’t vote over the years because of dislike for the candidates,” Connor says.

The group was then tasked with coming up with a way to improve voter turnout, and they suggested ranked-choice voting in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots, she says.

Connor says the project gave the students a chance to work closely on a statistical analysis. “I learned a lot about how to go from start to finish with a statistical group project.”

Elizabeth Johnson, an associate professor of statistics and the group’s sponsor, says, “This national competition allows students to work in teams to investigate current issues using real data, They experience the whole research process of creating a research question before collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data. I am very proud of their accomplishment in a very competitive field."

Four senior students from the Department of Statistics received an honorable mention for the best use of external data at the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) Fall Data Challenge 2020. Pictured from the left are Shannon Connor, Nate Mulugeta, and Emily Litzenberg. Kate Lang is not pictured.

Photo credit:

Photos provided

Advisor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering wins academic advising award

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:12:31 +0000

Advisor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering wins academic advising award Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/11/2021 - 11:12

One of the rewards of being an academic advisor is helping students through difficult times and then watching them flourish afterward, says Smriti Kansal Patwardhan, an academic advisor and coordinator for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

For instance, when an international student came to talk to Patwardhan a few years ago, she was homesick, hadn’t connected with anyone, and felt all alone, says Patwardhan, MS Electrical Engineering ’04. “Engineering is hard enough, and she was trying to manage all these emotions on top of her studies.”

She found the young woman a study group and a student organization with members from her home country. “I helped her adjust through that first year, and she blossomed and graduated with honors.”

Patwardhan is known among Mason Engineering students and faculty for her willingness to go the extra mile in all aspects of her job, and for those efforts, she was awarded the 2020 Jade Barricelli Spirit of Academic Advising Excellence Award, a peer-nominated academic advising award.

In 2016, she was named the V. Ann Lewis Academic Advisor of the Year, an award given to an advisor nominated by students.

Patwardhan didn’t plan on becoming an advisor. In fact, she didn’t have an advisor when she was an undergraduate earning a bachelor of engineering in electronics in India.

After graduation, she worked as an engineer in India then came to Mason to earn her master’s degree. She started to pursue a PhD while working as a research faculty member, but after her first child was born in 2006, she decided to take a break from work.

Then in 2012, the ECE department asked her to come back as an advisor. “It was all a new experience for me. I had no clue of what to do and what not to do,” she says.

She got input and guidance from faculty and peers and quickly excelled in her new role.

Now she conducts the orientations of all the new ECE students, hosts prospective student visits for the department, and advises several groups including Honors College students, those in special international programs, and anyone who can’t find a faculty advisor.

She works closely with the department’s faculty who are advising other ECE students. “All 600 undergraduate students can come to me whenever they want.”

In addition, Patwardhan reviews course evaluations, works on the department’s undergraduate curriculum committee, helps with class scheduling, and coordinates the publication of the department’s newsletter.

Her technical knowledge often comes in handy. “My engineering background helps. I tell students, ‘I am an engineer. Don’t take these courses together, because I know this will make it too hard for you to be successful.’ And they listen to me.

“When people bring in transfer credits, I know what makes sense to count and what doesn’t make sense.”

The hardest part of her job is not being able to help everyone and making tough decisions. There are so many challenges our students go through––health problems, financial problems, family problems. I want to do everything I possibly can to make school easier for my students.”

Monson Hayes, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says, “She is a remarkable advisor who is committed to being the most effective advisor that she can be. Her approach to advising is one of compassion and understanding, and she is keenly aware of the struggles and difficulties a student may face, both academically and personally. She is a great listener. She is never judgmental, and she is an extremely effective communicator.”

ECE Associate Chair Pelin Kurtay, agrees, “Smriti is an indispensable asset to our faculty advisors and plays a tremendous role in the success of our students. Her knowledge about policies and university resources, coupled with her background in engineering, means she can quickly provide students with access to the support they need, bring a swift resolution to their issues, and provide a personalized plan that best meets their individual needs.”

Patwardhan is passionate about her job. “I love it,” she says. “I am an engineer helping future engineers.”

Topics

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Academic Advising

Volgenau School of Engineering

Faculty and Staff News

Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees

Melanie Balog — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:06:27 +0000

Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees Melanie Balog Tue, 11/10/2020 - 18:06

Siddhartha Sikdar. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

Bioengineering professor Siddhartha Sikdar is using technology to help individuals with limb loss better control their prostheses.

His team is investigating a new way to operate prostheses using ultrasound waves to sense muscle activity.

“Our goal is to help amputees go about their daily lives with improved function,” says Siddhartha Sikdar, who is director of the Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions (CASBBI).

Approximately 50,000 individuals are living with upper limb loss in the United States. A large proportion (35 to 45 percent) of people with upper extremity amputations discontinue the use of their prosthesis, mainly due to limited functionality and usability, Sikdar said, and there is a significant unmet need to develop better technological solutions to improve function.

His research group was recently awarded a Bioengineering Research Partnership grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop this technology for commercial use and perform clinical trials.

They are collaborating with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to test this technology in a military population using another new grant from the Department of Defense. They also have a grant from the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund to explore prosthetic training applications using a wearable ultrasound system.

The team is completing additional preliminary studies in amputee subjects using a benchtop system. In the meantime, they are in the process of miniaturizing the ultrasound instrumentation to incorporate it inside a prosthetic socket and developing and testing embedded algorithms for interpreting the ultrasound signals for controlling the prosthetic hands.

The next steps are to perform laboratory tests of an integrated system with people with amputations and perform safety evaluations in preparation for seeking FDA approval.

The successful completion of this research will lead to the first human evaluation of an integrated prototype that uses low-power portable imaging sensors and real-time image analysis to sense residual muscle activity for prosthetic control, he says.

“In the long term, we anticipate that the improvements in functionality and intuitiveness of control will increase acceptance by amputees,” Sikdar says.

Mason Engineering alum transforms craft distillery to make hand sanitizer

Nanci Hellmich — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 11:50:05 +0000

Mason Engineering alum transforms craft distillery to make hand sanitizer Nanci Hellmich Thu, 04/23/2020 - 07:50

Body

Topics

coronavirus; COVID-19; hand sanitizer; craft distilleries; distilling

coronavirus; COVID-19; News; Editorial

Alumni

Community Partners