Research
ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ engineer Nicole Xu, an assistant professor with BME, first became fascinated with moon jellies more than a decade ago because of their extraordinary swimming abilities. Today, Xu has developed a way to harness their efficiency and ease at moving through the water in ways that could make some types of aquatic research much easier.
A ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ research team that included BME faculty members Juliet Gopinath and Shu-Wei Huang have developed a new bioimaging device that can operate with significantly lower power and in an entirely non-mechanical way. It could one day improve detecting eye and even heart conditions.
A gecko-inspired technology developed by the Shields Lab, in collaboration with doctors at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, uses a specially designed material that adheres to tumors inside the body and steadily releases chemotherapy drugs over several days—potentially allowing for fewer but longer-lasting therapies.
Nearly 80% of all stroke survivors experience walking issues and turn to ankle braces for increased support, but ankle braces are still very limited and many stroke survivors report no improvements when using them. Assistant Professor Cara Welker is leading a new, collaborative research project that aims to transform the way these assistive devices are designed.
Researchers in the Shields lab, including a BME undergraduate researcher at the ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ have created a new way to build and control tiny particles that can move and work like microscopic robots, offering a powerful tool with applications in biomedical and environmental research.
With funding designed to foster groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects for the potential for high impact, Drs. Carson Bruns (BME, ATLAS) and Grace Leslie (ATLAS) are working to develop the seamless skin integration of brain/body computer interfaces.
Left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) designed to improve blood flow throughout the body can aid nearly 26 million people globally struggling with heart failure. But these implantable devices come with risks. New research by Assistant Professor Debanjan Mukherjee suggests that studying patient blood flow patterns could help determine who’s at risk of dangerous side effects from LVADs and lead to improvements that could make them safer.
Assistant Professor Carson Bruns is leading the charge on an NSF-funded project that he and his team like to call "robochemistry." Their goal is to create robotic sidekicks that can assist chemists with burdensome or unsafe tasks that they may routinely encounter in a wet lab. But that's not all: this unique blend of bots and beakers can also inspire youth interest in science.
The Jerome Fox (BME Faculty) research team at the ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ and researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new way to identify genetic changes that help tiny oxygen-producing microbes survive in extreme environments. The findings outline a new experimental approach for learning how microbes and other types of cells, including human cells, respond and adapt to environmental stress.
Kaushik Jayaram, BME faculty member, envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or repairing components that no human could ever reach. For his efforts, Jayaram, recently received a $650,000 NSF grant and a complimentary $1.4 million grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the research wing of the U.S. Air Force.