Department of Bioengineering

Local high schoolers discover bioengineering at George Mason’s BioE Buzz Summer Camp

Teresa Donnellan — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 15:18:20 +0000

Local high schoolers discover bioengineering at George Mason’s BioE Buzz Summer Camp Teresa Donnellan Mon, 07/08/2024 - 11:18

A group of local rising high school juniors and seniors attended the BioE Buzz Summer Camp at ��AV in June. Organized by the Department of Bioengineering’s Internship Coordinator and Adjunct Professor Carolyn Wilson, the four-day camp introduced campers to the discipline’s applications in solving medical problems.

Research Assistant Professor David Lemonnier works with a student. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

Throughout the week, campers met graduate and undergraduate students and faculty, received tours of George Mason's state-of-the-art research facilities and the Fairfax Campus, and participated in lab activities led by faculty on such topics as molecular biology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, ultrasound technology, and community-engaged design.

Hands-on experiences allowed students to apply their knowledge and develop their interests in practical settings.

One activity, led by Associate Professor Remi Veneziano and doctoral student Dylan Scarton, introduced the campers to DNA origami through a lab that involved gel electrophoresis.

Doctoral student Zahra Taghizadeh led an activity about muscle movement. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

In addition, the students learned some basics about sterile technique and gained hands-on experience in cell culture during an activity led by doctoral student Bryce Dunn.

Another activity, led by postdoctoral researcher J. Jesus Hernandez-Perez, involved using computer simulation of neuromuscular junctions.

Shirin Movaghgharnezhad, an assistant research professor, led an activity where students could activate and record muscle movement on each other.

Doctoral student Erica King led an activity that involved using ultrasound and force plate technology to visualize muscles in the body.

Master's student Gavin Smiga leads virtual reality activity. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

Research Assistant Professor Samuel Acuna and Professor Siddhartha Sikdar led another activity in the Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions (CASBBI). In addition to introducing the students to methods that measure brain rhythms, the pair demonstrated and had the students interact with a former undergraduate team’s senior design project, a virtual reality system for physical therapy.

By participating in the BioE-Buzz Summer Camp at George Mason, campers not only improved their understanding of bioengineering and their familiarity with George Mason but also developed critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

An exceptional opportunity for high school juniors and seniors to immerse themselves in the world of bioengineering, the BioE Buzz Summer Camp is planned to recur in summer 2025.

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Bioengineering

Department of Bioengineering

Through NSF funding, graduate students and community partners find novel solutions to public health problems

Sarah Holland — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:18:40 +0000

Through NSF funding, graduate students and community partners find novel solutions to public health problems Sarah Holland Fri, 06/21/2024 - 12:18

One of the ways ��AV is All Together Different is its approach to research. Students in the Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions (CASBBI) NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program learn how to apply interdisciplinary, community-focused research to find solutions to the world’s grand challenges.

2023-24 NRT cohort members. Photo by Sarah Holland

Since the program began in 2019 with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NRT Program has bought together graduate students from engineering, data science, and social science for one-year fellowships. Students work in multidisciplinary teams of other fellows and community partners to define a problem within the community and co-develop creative solutions. Thus far, 82 graduate students have participated in the five cohorts.

“No one is doing this level of interdisciplinary convergence,” explained Samuel Acuña, research professor in the Department of Bioengineering and assistant director of CASBBI. “You'll see other programs with, say, mechanical engineers working with electrical engineers, but we have groups with computer scientists, social workers, and linguists working together. Psychologists, engineers, and neuroscientists. It’s novel.”

In the program, students are assigned to groups and matched with community partners working to solve public health problems. The groups work with these partners to establish a project that will best meet their needs: This could be anything from data collection to mobile application development to further developing the work of the previous cohort.

Some groups have even continued their work long after their time in the program concludes; iConnect, an app to connect those suffering from substance abuse to local resources and support, continues beyond the program with their community partner The Chris Atwood Foundation.

“To have, say, a computer science student work with the community and think about people and problems in a way they wouldn’t otherwise, that’s the type of experience that they can draw on for years and years to come,” Acuña said. “The fellowship helps them think more deliberately about how they approach their research through a toolbox of techniques. So, when they’re done, they can approach any issue or problem they might be assigned from this perspective.”

Community-centered and human-centered research is a big draw for some NRT fellows. Morgan Lamarre, BA Dance ’22, BS Bioengineering ’24, master’s student in bioengineering and a member of the 2024-25 cohort, said, “Many of us hope that our careers are in community-facing work, so to have these skills and experience in engaging with the community will be really helpful. And these methods are different from what we see in our classrooms and labs.”

“As engineers, we’re often given a problem to solve how we want and how we think is best without input from the community, and there’s a bit of mistrust between the overall community and the scientific community as a result,” said Kirubel Tadesse, BS Bioengineering ’24, current master’s student in data analytics engineering and incoming cohort member. “But through this method, we’re actively engaging with the community and stakeholders to ensure that our designs are meeting their specific needs. We’re bridging that gap.”

2023-24 Team FIRE (First-responers, Innovation, Research, and Exploration) presents their research at NRT orientation. Photo by Sarah Holland

“It’s a completely new way for us to approach our work,” said Brady Stinson-Smith, master’s student in bioengineering, and fellow member of the incoming cohort. “We can be so siloed in our fields, but this program helps us make the connections between not only the community, but also with researchers in other fields like sociology, psychology, and social work who can help us think better and differently about our approaches and solutions.”

This is the philosophy upon which the NRT program is built. “No one field is enough to solve these problems,” said Acuña. “The leaders of tomorrow need to know how to navigate across multiple disciplines and groups of stakeholders in order to create impactful change.”

“We all come from different approaches,” said Yosef Shaul, PhD student in kinesiology and 2023-24 cohort member. Shaul was a member of team VIRTUE (Violence Intervention and Resolution through Unifying Efforts), focused on addressing barriers to domestic violence prevention and management in Northern Virginia. “Everyone brings their own advantages and attributes. It makes the whole greater.”

Now that he has completed the fellowship, Shaul plans to adjust his research process for his PhD to incorporate more community-centered practices. “My outcomes,” he said, “will now better meet community needs.”

See how CASBBI works to change the world

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Department of Bioengineering

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Data Analytics Engineering

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Strategic Direction

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water

Teresa Donnellan — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 19:03:14 +0000

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water Teresa Donnellan Thu, 01/25/2024 - 14:03

The most elegant solutions are sometimes the simplest, like using one waste product to eliminate another. By combining spent coffee grounds with iron oxide (aka rust), Mason engineers have created CoffeeBots, which can bind to several different pollutants in seawater before being removed via magnets.

From left to right: Jeff Moran, Amit Kumar Singh, and Tarini Basireddy pose with CoffeeBot samples.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

High school lab assistant Tarini Basireddy, post-doc Amit Kumar Singh, and assistant professor Jeff Moran recently published their findings in Nanoscale demonstrating how their invention, which they call “CoffeeBots,” can effectively remove three types of pollutants from seawater: oil, microplastics, and methylene blue.

Singh proposed creating CoffeeBots as a way for Basireddy to gain hands-on experience without having to interact with the many dangerous chemicals in Moran’s laboratory, which focuses mainly on developing artificial, self-propelled microparticles for different medical and environmental applications.

“Tarini and Amit developed a simple strategy to coat spent coffee grounds, which I brought from home after brewing my morning coffee, with iron oxide nanoparticles,” said Moran.

Coffee grounds have a porous, irregular surface, so they have ample surface area to which pollutants can bind, even with much smaller iron oxide nanoparticles attached, he explained. Moreover, because iron oxide is magnetic, a simple handheld magnet can both drive CoffeeBots through polluted water and remove them once they have absorbed the pollutants. Basireddy used Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy to confirm that the iron oxide nanoparticles had bonded to the coffee grounds.

“Tarini’s extensive research experience and skillset were crucial to the success of this project," Moran noted. She’s way ahead of where I was at her age.”

While using coffee grounds to clean up oil spills is not entirely new, this team is the first to show that moving CoffeeBots outperform stationary ones at removing pollutants, since moving CoffeeBots encounter pollutant molecules more often than stationary coffee grounds do. Making the coffee grounds magnetic has another benefit: Once the CoffeeBots are recovered, they can be reused several times with little loss in water-cleaning efficacy.

Methylene blue

The team demonstrates that
CoffeeBots are drawn to magnets.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

The team assessed how CoffeeBots fare in seawater polluted with methylene blue, a dye commonly used in textile production. In addition to being a carcinogen, Basireddy explained, methylene blue can cause serious health problems: “It can cause skin irritation, if there's too much in the water; it can cause a lot of digestive problems; it can cause nausea, fever, lots of symptoms.” She added that it can negatively impact marine life as well.

The team found CoffeeBots can be an effective solution for cleaning methylene blue from seawater, especially when they are first also loaded with ascorbic acid, which helps break down the dye and render it nontoxic. Basireddy noted the potential simplicity of a CoffeeBots-based solution to methylene blue pollution, saying, “It's cool because the countries that are big textile producers also happen to be the countries that are big in coffee production.” The team cited Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam as countries that produce both dyed textiles and coffee and struggle with water pollution.

Oil and microplastics

The final pollutant tested is perhaps the most exciting, as it’s been a burgeoning topic of concern in recent years: microplastics. In water, microplastics cling to coffee grounds for the same reason that oil does: each substance is hydrophobic.

“One reason why microplastics and nanoplastics are such a tricky environmental problem is that they're so small, and that makes it difficult to locate them just to remove them,” said Moran. “By driving the CoffeeBots through the water, the hydrophobic interactions cause the microplastic particles to build up and accumulate on the surface of the coffee grounds.”

Singh noted that, while other (perhaps more expensive) techniques exist for remediating oil spills and removing chemical pollutants from water, developing a technique to make microplastic removal more efficient is an exciting new development.

Further plans

The team has applied for a patent to protect the technology and are excited to determine the full capabilities of CoffeeBots. They are optimistic because CoffeeBots are potentially a simple, inexpensive solution to water pollution.

While Basireddy has moved on to her freshman year at Johns Hopkins University, Singh and Moran look forward to finding further applications for CoffeeBots and possibly improving their technology. For example, Singh hopes to find a way to make CoffeeBots move when activated by sunlight, which would enable them to propel themselves through the water without the need for an external magnet. In addition, the team plans to explore the full range of pollutants that can be removed by CoffeeBots and characterize the efficacy of different coffee types.

Get a more detailed look at the team's experiments by reading their paper in Nanoscale, “Eliminating waste with waste: transforming spent coffee grounds into microrobots for water treatment,” which includes several videos of CoffeeBots in action, such as the one below. In addition, Singh created a video to promote CoffeeBots on YouTube.

In This Story

Jeffrey Moran

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Remembering Michael Buschmann

John Hollis — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 17:32:04 +0000

Remembering Michael Buschmann John Hollis Mon, 03/07/2022 - 12:32

Michael Buschmann was an Eminent Scholar and chair of the Bioengineering Department within the College of Engineering and Computing. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

��AV’s Michael Buschmann is being remembered by friends and colleagues as a brilliant mind and translational researcher with a gentle spirit and a burning love for jazz.

Buschmann, who died at his home last week, had been an Eminent Scholar and the chair of the Bioengineering Department within Mason’s College of Engineering and Computing since his arrival at Mason in 2017.

“In 2017, the department was only in its fifth year of existence,” recalled Ken Ball, the dean of the College of Engineering and Computing. “While it got off to a successful start, it was a young department that needed a strong and well-respected leader to take it to the next level and to build its research program commensurate with that of an R1 research university. Mike did exactly what we had hoped—he established a strong research culture while building a high level of collaboration and collegiality within the department, with students and teaching at the forefront.”

Buschmann came to Mason with his wife, Caroline Hoemann, a bioengineering professor in the College of Engineering and Computing, after having spent the previous 20 years at École Polytechnique in Montreal.

Sanjeev Setia, former chair of the Department of Computer Science and now the interim divisional dean of the School of Computing within the college, knew Buschmann well and praised his collaborative efforts with his Mason colleagues. He cited Buschmann’s entrepreneurial nature as the driving force behind his strong record of translational research.

“In the five or so years since he joined Mason as chair of Bioengineering, the department has become one of the strongest research departments in the College of Engineering and Computing,” Setia said. “This is a department that is ready to make the jump to the next level in national reputation, and Mike’s leadership was a big reason for this.”

But it was more than his impressive academic credentials that quickly endeared Buschmann to Setia—it was also their shared love of modern jazz.

“Mike and I were very good friends,” Setia said.

They frequently attended live jazz concerts together, along with Caroline Hoemann and other colleagues from the college.

But it was his passion for research that drove Buschmann most.

Most recently, he had formed the start-up AexeRNA Therapeutics Inc., in partnership with the university’s Office of Technology Transfer. He and his team had licensed the commercial rights of four patent applications to the company. The technology would make mRNA vaccines less costly, with fewer side effects and more readily available worldwide.

“Mike was a true intellectual,” said Ball, who also remembered Buschmann for being an outstanding mentor for many junior faculty and students alike. “There are many very intelligent people in academia, but Mike had a brilliant mind. He was able to see connections between different research topics and results that were not apparent to almost every other researcher.”

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College of Engineering and Computing

Department of Bioengineering

School of Computing

Bioengineers and biologists team up to battle cancer cells

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 18:41:07 +0000

Bioengineers and biologists team up to battle cancer cells Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/21/2021 - 14:41

In This Story

Remi Veneziano

Bioengineers—like Remi Veneziano—find solutions to some of the world’s grand problems. But sometimes, it takes collaboration with scientists to find out the questions that need to be answered to properly apply and maximize these engineering solutions.

Veneziano, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Computing, is partnering with Amanda Haymond, a research assistant professor in the School of Systems Biology, to apply DNA nanotechnology to create a drug that boosts the immune response to fight breast cancer.

Amanda Haymond is a research assistant professor in the School of Systems Biology in the College of Science.

Their work entitled “New Hybrid Molecular Modalities Comprised of DNA-Origami and Interfering Peptides as Inhibitors of Protein-Protein Interactions” received a grant of nearly $530,000 from the National Institutes of Health’s Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies program, which funds explicitly creative technologies for cancer detection or treatment. “There are two big things we are trying to do with this work, one is to answer a biological question, and the other is to provide a proof of concept for a new drug modality,” says Haymond.

On the biology side, Veneziano and Haymond are looking to target a specific protein’s complex. When a body is infected with cancer, a protein called IL-33 will signal the immune system to flood the cancerous area with immune cells to combat cancer and stop further damage. “However, in a chronic inflammatory cancer context, the flood of IL-33 can recruit a number of other cell types, including MDSCs, that are activated by binding to IL-33 and tamp down on the immune response,” says Haymond.

The influx of suppressive immune cells can be detrimental as the body stops fighting the cancer. In addition, the protein structure created from the interaction of IL-33 and MDSCs is quite large, which makes it difficult to target with conventional small molecule drugs. This is where Veneziano’s work in DNA nanotechnology comes in.

“With the technology we are developing, instead of testing multiple drug combinations for efficiency, we can take into consideration the structural parameters of the protein we are trying to target, and use DNA nanotechnology to build rigid nanoscale objects that would have the same dimensions and organization as the protein to target multiple sites of the protein simultaneously,” says Veneziano.

Remi Veneziano is using his DNA nanotechnology to test a new drug modality to fight breast cancer.

Therefore, the drugs they are developing will act as adaptors that will prevent the proteins from interacting together. Veneziano’s nanotechnology research makes it possible to precisely target multiple sites on these proteins concurrently to increase the success of their drug. So, instead of using three separate drugs that possibly won’t work in tandem properly to prevent this immune response, Haymond and Veneziano are developing a new drug modality that is exactly designed with the target in mind.

Veneziano is hopeful that this process could be completely automated, making it easier to target certain proteins to combat different types of cancer and diseases. This expansion will require even more collaboration between scientists and engineers in the future, Haymond and Veneziano say.

“This work can’t be done by bioengineers or biologists independently. It takes synergy between the two of us, and Mason and its institutes promote these types of collaborations,” says Veneziano.

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Bioengineering

biology

School of Systems Biology

Department of Bioengineering

Breast Cancer

cancer research

CEC faculty research

Bioengineering student balances athletics and academic success

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 17:49:22 +0000

Bioengineering student balances athletics and academic success Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/11/2021 - 12:49

Bioengineering junior and student-athlete Laura Hodge saw ��AV as a place for opportunities, and while she admits it sometimes can be hard to juggle her obligations, she believes she made the right choice.

Laura Hodge is a bioengineering student and member of Mason's swimming and diving team. Photo provided.

A Blacksburg, Virginia native, Hodge is a swimmer on Mason’s swimming and diving team and an aspiring bioengineer. For her, Mason checked all the boxes for what she was looking for in a university.

“What drew me to Mason was the opportunity to be a part of different communities like the Honor’s College, the swim team, and the athletics department. I also knew that after graduating from Mason, the number of opportunities in the area would be tremendous,” says Hodge.

She hasn’t been disappointed. “My favorite part of Mason is all of the friendships and connections I’ve made. I’ve gotten the chance to meet amazing people who have inspired me.”

Bioengineering professors and classmates have opened her eyes to new areas of research. Many engaging professors in the Honors College have pushed her to succeed. And as a member of the swim team, she has gotten to meet like-minded athletes and fellow engineering majors.

Hodge hopes to be an inspiration for others. She is a student-athlete mentor, working with freshman and sophomore student-athletes to lead them through the college transition and teach them time management.

Her motivation has led her to academic success. For the past two years, Hodge has been awarded the Peter N. Stearns Provost Scholar Athlete award, which means she has maintained a 3.75 cumulative GPA.

“It can be overwhelming at times if you let it. Planning is key to keeping on top of things, and the strict schedules for swim keep me in check,” she says. This is what she advises her mentees to do to ensure academic success—make a schedule, stick to it, and keep looking forward.

COVID-19 has modified a lot of aspects of Hodge’s life. Canceled meets have changed her swimming season, and the safety precautions across campus have meant that almost all of her classes are virtual. But Hodge doesn’t let that get to her. “It was a change, for sure, but I think everyone has settled into a new routine. The whole world had to adjust, so I saw this as a lesson to learn.”

Hodge’s biggest piece of advice to incoming Mason students is this: “Find your communities early. It can be hard to get involved later, especially as an engineering major because your classes get harder.,” she says.

“And you never know what could happen.”

Topics

Bioengineering

Department of Bioengineering

Student Athlete

Mason Swimming and Diving

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.

Psychology PhD student wins fourth annual Three Minute Thesis competition

Colleen Rich — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 09:00:21 +0000

Psychology PhD student wins fourth annual Three Minute Thesis competition Colleen Rich Mon, 06/15/2020 - 05:00

Department of Bioengineering

Local high schoolers discover bioengineering at George Mason’s BioE Buzz Summer Camp

Join the Mason Nation

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Through NSF funding, graduate students and community partners find novel solutions to public health problems

See how CASBBI works to change the world

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Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water

Methylene blue

Oil and microplastics

Further plans

In This Story

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Remembering Michael Buschmann

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Bioengineers and biologists team up to battle cancer cells

In This Story

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Bioengineering student balances athletics and academic success

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Using ultrasound technology to improve the lives of amputees

Psychology PhD student wins fourth annual Three Minute Thesis competition