Spring/Summer 2014

A Department on the Rise

Largest Gift in College’s History Promotes Excellence

Jie Liang, Bioinformatician, Works the Data

Engineer + Physician = Diabetes Fighting Force

BioE Students Join the Medical Team

The New Faces of Bioengineering

The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago publishes UIC Engineering. We welcome your comments and suggestions. Please direct questions about this issue to Joel Super (jsuper@uic.edu).

1 Message from the Dean

2 A Department on the Rise

4 Jie Liang, Bioinformatician, Works the Data

6 Engineer + Physician = Diabetes Fighting Force

Alumni 8 2014 Commencement Roundup

12 BioE Students Join the Medical Team

14 The New Faces of Bioengineering

Philanthropy16 Largest Gift in College’s History Promotes Excellence

18 Around the College

20 New Hires

On the Cover:José Oberholzer, MD, and Dave Eddington, PhD, colleagues in UIC’s Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering, use microfluidics to fight diabetes.

Associate Director of Communications: Joel Super

Publications Editor: Kirsten Gorton

Photographer: Bart Harris

Graphic Designer: Edward Lawler

Copyright © 2014

Please direct address corrections or mailing requests to: Renata Szandra College of Engineering (MC 159) 851 South Morgan Street Chicago, Illinois 60607-7043 (312) 996-0520 or rszandra@uic.edu

Table of Contents

Spring/Summer 2014

1

Dear Friends and Alumni:

As some Chicago news sources noted early in the spring, this year marks the centennial anniversary of the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago”, which introduced the world to the phrase “City of the Big Shoulders.” The citizens the poet championed in the poem worked hard at tough jobs and the images he used to evoke Chicago’s energy, vitality, and economic clout were rough, raw, and industrial.

One hundred years later, the meat-packing industry (among others) is gone and the city’s business mix continues to change. In the midst of that evolution, UIC faculty, administration, and generous donors like Loan and Rick Hill (BS’74) are proposing that biotechnology should be a central part of a new vision for twenty-first century Chicago. The Hills believe so strongly in the promise of this new industry for a new age they’ve supported it with a $6.5 million gift, the largest in the College of Engineering’s history.

As Chicago continues to evolve, the city will still be full of vital, hard-working people, but this new economy will require a new kind of worker and a new category of tools, among them biotechnology tools. Even the way that these and other tools are produced is evolving: we’re particularly proud that the college will play a large role in UI LABS, a private/public consortium located here on Chicago’s Goose Island and aimed at facilitating new digital-manufacturing technology. The project recently received a $70 million federal grant.

Fundamentally, whether it is the tools themselves or the mode of manufacturing, Chicago’s successful evolution will rely on educating highly skilled citizens who can work in these new arenas or advance the research that drives innovation. The College of Engineering has, historically, done just that and will continue its leadership role in this new age. This issue of UIC Engineering celebrates in particular the bioengineering students, teachers, researchers, and donors whose hard work, vision, and generosity will help the College of Engineering be part of a revitalized “City of the Big Shoulders.”

Sincerely,

Peter Nelson Dean, College of Engineering

Message from the Dean

“As Chicago continues

to evolve, the city

will still be full of

vital, hard-working

people, but this new

economy will require

a new kind of worker

and a new category

of tools, among them

biotechnology tools.”

22

A recent research collaboration among bioengineering professor Andreas Linninger, PhD, and his graduate students; neurosurgeon Ali Alaraj, MD; and UIC computer scientists will enable surgeons to more effectively visualize cerebral blood flow.

The new tool will assist them in planning complex surgical procedures, with the goal of promoting better patient outcomes. Collaboration in this context isn’t just a synonym for “collegiality” in the university. It’s the way to medical progress.

The Linninger/Alaraj/computer scientist collaboration, which spans the College of Medicine and two departments in the College of Engineering, cogently illustrates the potential for UIC’s bioengineering enterprise both to improve lives and help Chicago evolve into a biotechnology center. As Tom Royston, head of the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering, sees things, bioengineering’s very modus operandi, which applies

A Department on the Riseby Joel Super

Tom Royston, PhD, leads UIC’s Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering. His research and teaching focus on the biomedical applications of acoustics and vibration.

3

advances in science and technology in smart ways to improve health-care diagnostics, therapies, and treatments, can be a key driver of that evolution. “And to be smart,” he said, “the process has to be collaborative: it has to involve engineers on the technology side and physicians on the treatment side.”

The research by Professor Linninger and his graduate students, along with Dr. Alaraj, exemplifies Professor Royston’s principle that bioengineering can use technology in smart ways to improve patient care and thereby address unmet clinical needs.

Linninger, Alaraj, and their teams used data gathered from separate sources—a patient’s magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and digital subtraction angi-ography tests—to create a three-dimen-sional walk-in model of the human brain. The model data were displayed in UIC’s CAVE2TM, an eight-foot high installation of seventy-two stereoscopic liquid crystal display panels that encircle the viewer 320 degrees and create a 3D environment. 

Immersion into the virtual reality walk-in brain model allows students and medi-cal staff to display massive data sets, including detailed anatomical aspects that range from large cerebral arteries down to individual capillaries. It also enables the instant display and interaction with never before realized data on cerebral blood flow, including microcirculation computed with massively parallel simulations executed at the Blacklight supercomputer facilities in Pittsburgh. The UIC researchers envision a day when “mini CAVEs” will be located in individual surgical facilities, so that the exceptional computational and visualization tools based on this technology can be de-ployed to further improve surgical planning.

Like Professors Linninger and Alaraj with their computer science colleagues, other UIC bioengineering faculty are engaged in just such smart ways every day, do-ing collaborative research into regenera-tive medicine, transplant medicine, drug

delivery, neural controls and rehabilitation, computational systems biology, genomics, proteomics, bio-modeling, and advanced imaging.

Undoubtedly, the intellectual and insti-tutional ground at UIC is well prepared for continuing to move the department forward and increase its regional influence, noted Professor Royston. Founded in 1965, UIC’s bioengineering program is one of the oldest in the nation, one that eventu-ally evolved into a department within the College of Engineering.

Aiming to further reduce barriers and facilitate collaboration between engineers and physicians so that biomedical re-search, technology, and education could be enhanced, academic leaders at UIC began planning in 2008 for the Department of Bioengineering to reside jointly within the Colleges of Engineering and Medicine. The transition began in August 2011. The repositioning embraces a model shared by some of the premier bioengineering programs in the country, including those at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins Uni-versity, and Georgia Tech/Emory University. As the Linninger/Alaraj collaboration and many others demonstrate, the new model is working.

To help take this newly positioned department to the next level of excellence, Provost Lon Kaufman, the College of Engineering, the College of Medicine, and Mitra Dutta, the vice chancellor for research, committed $3.25 million in seed funding to the department over the course of fiscal years 2012–2016 for new faculty start-up expenses and upgrades to teaching and research facilities. The department’s annual base operating budget is also increasing from $2.05 million in fiscal year 2011 to $3.1 million by fiscal year 2016.

“These investments are critical to support our planned six new tenured/tenure-track faculty lines and the additional staff needed to achieve the department’s research and teaching goals,” said Royston. This insti-

tutional financial investment, along with an additional 6,000 square feet of new labora-tory space, has enabled the six new faculty hires and the existing fourteen core full-time faculty to pursue the research needed to elevate the department’s reputation.

Internal support was enormously enhanced through a recent $6.5 million endowment from alumnus Rick Hill (BS ’74) and his wife Loan. [see page 16 for the Hill’s story] The largest gift in the college’s history, it will provide critical support for continuing to build the intellectual infra-structure needed to lay the foundation for a thriving Chicago biotechnology industry. “Having funds in perpetuity brings both prestige and stability to the department,” said Royston. “Otherwise, all research is grant-based and we’re limited in our ability to recruit top-notch faculty in this extremely competitive market. The Hill gift gives us an unprecedented chance to up our game.”

Along with the twenty current bioengi-neering core faculty members, more than seventy adjunct faculty members from departments throughout UIC’s Colleges of Applied Health Sciences, Dentistry, Engineering, Liberal Arts & Sciences, Medicine, and Pharmacy are working with the bioengineering department. The Hill endowment will enable the department to continue expanding the faculty by estab-lishing endowed positions in emerging areas that will build on current departmen-tal strengths. New positions will, in turn, leverage strengths found at UIC and in the region to address unmet clinical needs.

Surgeons, bioengineers, computer scien-tists: it’s collaboration among UIC experts like them that provides the fertile environ-ment necessary to connect the latest technological advances to some of the most challenging medical conditions. And UIC’s reenvisioned Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering is the nexus for those collaborations. Together, the work accomplished can both improve the quality of life and enhance the city’s evolution into the bioengineering center of the future. :

44

Bioinformatics is not a crystal ball—it’s science—but it does predict medical outcomes, build theoretical

models, and suggest research directions using the seemingly magical computational abilities of modern computers. Because it’s science, there’s no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, either—there are extensively trained people like UIC’s Jie Liang, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Bioengineering.

One high-throughput gene test can produce between 10,000 and 30,000 measurement points. Using a computer to analyze this enor-mous amount of data is the only way to handle it. To make use of the data, bioinformaticians need to create a mathematical model to identify possible intervention points to develop, say, a treatment strat-egy or a drug. No smoke and mir-rors here—interpretation requires concrete and thorough training.

Professor Liang has that training. He grew up in Chongqing, China, son of a surgeon and a professor of biochemistry and completed his undergraduate work in biophysics

at Fundan University in Shang-hai before coming to the United States to complete a doctorate in biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). To feed his growing inter-est in bioinformatics, he decided also to complete a master’s degree in computer science at UIUC.

As Professor Liang’s multiple de-grees illustrate, bioinformatics is an inherently interdisciplinary field, combining the two great engines of scientific and technological change during the last half-century: molecular biology and computer science. Within the discipline, there are many subdisciplines, where computer science, statistics, math-ematics, and engineering are all deployed to better understand bio-logical processes. Integrating re-search from the different disciplines is an ongoing challenge and will be for a long time, he believes. “You have to make a commitment to learning the other’s language and think similarly and try to understand the problems,” he said. “You have to work together to get the right data to build the right model and

to make the right predictions—but it’s very fruitful when you do that.”

One of Professor Liang’s collaborations, for example, is with Linda Kenny, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology in UIC’s College of Medicine, who studies bacteria that is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotic treatment. His work in his “dry” lab for this project involves developing software code and theoretical models based on data from Professor Kenny’s lab, in order to make computational predictions that are, in turn, tested in a “wet” lab—i.e., with actual biological cells. Together, they have made progress in understanding how protein pores in these bacteria that control drug processes work. “I got interested in this kind of work when I was doing my first post doctoral research and realized how much you can do with computer modeling and how satisfying it is because you gain so much fundamental understanding,” he said.

As an essential part of research like Professor Kenny’s, bioinformatics ultimately holds great potential to

Jie Liang, Bioinformatician, Works the Data by Joel Super

55

Professor Jie Liang (center), his research associate, and his graduate students take a break from their computer screens. (L to R) Gamze Gürsoy; research associate Dennis Gessmann, PhD; Ke Tang; Jieling Zhao; Anna Terebus; Yun Xu, PhD; Wie Tian; and Meishan Lin.

affect patient care, Professor Liang believes, because the conver-gence of sophisticated inventions for biological measurement and the explosion in computing power make possible new insights into important diseases. For instance, he noted, “It was inconceivable twenty years ago that you could get your own genome mapped; that would be a $1 billion enter-prise. Now we’re talking about $1,000, and imagine what you can learn from it—all the bioinfor-matics and future predictions!”

Despite the great promise in diag-nostics and treatment, two issues in his field concern him. The first is the general overall research funding environment in the United States, which, he says, is very tough due to cutbacks in federal support. Without funds for basic research, progress in the field as a whole stalls. Historically, Professor Liang’s major funding has come from the National Science Founda-tion and the National Institutes of Health, and he has routinely written successfull grant proposals. He is grateful, too, for recent fund-ing from the Chicago Biomedical

Consortium, a private foundation. And the support from his Richard and Loan Hill professorship is in-valuable for his research, he noted. With it, he can bring speakers and collaborators to campus and travel to conferences himself. Creating and attending events for the ex-change of ideas is critical, because where fields are highly specialized, he said, “Your colleagues are in other places. Learning from them and disseminating your research results so they can give you feed-back happens a lot in personal interactions at conferences.”

In addition to maintaining funding levels, the other essential for con-tinued progress in bioinformatics, Professor Liang believes, is educa-tion. Our society must commit to training students, starting in prima-ry school, so they are excited about this type of work and have the ex-pertise and intellectual capabilities to tackle very complicated prob-lems. Not everyone needs to have a doctorate and a master’s degree to contribute, he notes. There are different levels of work, and we can learn a lot from bioinformaticians

analyzing data with the existing tools. At UIC, though, he said, the goal is to prepare graduate stu-dents to be leaders in bioinformat-ics, going beyond applications and coming up with their own solutions. “Physical facilities are important, of course, but without the right people it’s fatal. Having good people is the determining factor for a good research program,” he said.

Professor Liang is a bit of the man behind the curtain in one regard: he is doing his best to educate the bioinformatics workforce of the future. He has acted as thesis advisor to thirteen successful doctoral students and is currently working with an additional seven. And there isn’t a shortage of work for them to do to address the many health-related issues people today want confronted and where bioinformatics can be useful. A note of awe in his voice, Professor Liang said about the future, “There’s just so much data to analyze and so many things to discover.” :

6

The grim picture for chronic diabetes patients commonly includes kidney failure, adult blindness, and limb amputation. Fortunately, there are many good people on the case. Among them, a bioengineer

from Schaumburg, Illinois, and a surgeon from Geneva, Switzerland, have combined forces because they believe that, together, they can help paint a happier picture for diabetics in the future.

UIC bioengineering faculty members Dave Eddington, PhD, and José Oberholzer, MD, are collaborating on a process to isolate islet (insulin-producing) cells from the pancreas so that the cells can be transplanted into patients whose own islet cell clusters have been “switched off” and can no longer produce the insulin that’s critical to regulating blood sugar.

Professor Eddington is the guy from Schaumburg, via a doctorate from University of Wisconsin–Madison and postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as associate professor of bioengineering and director of graduate studies for the Richard and Loan Hill Department of

Bioengineering, specializing in finding new applications for microfluidics, a field dealing with the behavior, control, and manipulation of fluids at a submillimeter scale.

Dr. Oberholzer is the guy from Geneva, born in Morocco to a Spanish mother and Swiss father, educated in Switzerland and at the University of Edmonton, where he completed postdoctoral studies. He is a surgeon and scientist who serves as the director of the Islet and Pancreas Transplant Program and the chief of the Division of Transplantation at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and holds a part-time appointment in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering.

Oberholzer is passionate about finding a cure for diabetes, which currently affects some twenty million people. “Diabetes never goes away; it is a constant burden and, though diabetics are positive about managing their disease, until they’re off insulin they don’t realize how lousy they were always feeling,” said Dr. Oberholzer. “To tell a patient ‘You no longer have to take insulin’ is hugely rewarding.”

Engineer + Physician = Diabetes Fighting Forceby Joel Super

6

7

He sees great promise in islet transplantation, a process where, under local anesthesia, islet cells purified from a donated pancreas are placed in the portal vein of the patient’s liver. The liver is the most important organ for controlling blood sugar, and the islet cells stay there, doing their critical work. “In some patients,” said Oberholzer, “one transplant cures; in others, it takes two or three tries. But 60 percent of patients are off insulin after five years.”

Microfluidic Devices in the Battle Against DiabetesDr. Oberholzer’s expertise meets Professor Eddington’s, so to speak, on some very small microfluidic devices, which Eddington and his doctoral students design and produce in Eddington’s lab. Because the mixing and diffusion of molecules has to work only in a very small place, these microfluidic devices allow the testing of islet cells as if in the body, in real time under a microscope.

This device to help ascertain the suitability of islet cells for transplantation is the most complicated device his lab produces, said Eddington. It is made based on the microelectronics semiconductor fabrication process but produces a tiny three-layer mold made out of light-sensitive epoxy. The mold is then filled with a silicon rubber and is peeled off to produce a microfluidic device that can be stuck to a glass slide and used for Dr. Oberholzer’s islet research.

Because diffusion occurs at the microscale in a matter of seconds to minutes, they can do lots of interesting things with these devices, Eddington noted, such as showing that islet cells behave differently under low oxygen conditions than at higher ones. “We used that to show that when you cycle the oxygen you can precondition islet cells to the hypoxic insult produced at transplantation.”

The cumulative knowledge gained from Oberholzer’s experiments using Eddington’s device shows significant potential for improving the transplant physician’s ability to predict patient outcomes. While there

are currently good ways of determining patient tissue matches, there is no good test to determine the quality of the islet cells themselves—how well they are functioning or whether insulin secretion is adequate. Oberholzer’s lab is using the device to collect data that will then feed into a statistical analysis of the outcomes. It will take hundreds of patients and years to do, but that, at its core, Eddington and Oberholzer agree, is what defines basic science.

The islet cell testing that Oberholzer can now perform with a microfluidic device designed in Eddington’s lab specifically illustrates the general promise for the healing collaborations possible in bioengineering. Eddington notes that his collaboration with Oberholzer, like most of his work with others, addressed an unmet experimental need that his lab could specifically solve using a microfluidic device to do something new and interesting that had not been done before or could not be done in any other way.

It’s one application of the potential superiority of microfluidic devices to obtain better data and generally improve diagnostics over older analysis methods when working with very small samples from biopsies, blood tests, or any bodily fluid. “Potentially better data if you do it right,” emphasized Eddington, who believes there is also great commercial potential for microfluidics in medical diagnostics. Oberholzer’s islet cell research, he noted, is a sort of diagnostics for the clinic, adding that their collaboration defines for him the essence of his own work: “For me, engineering means creating to unveil new insights and to heal.”

The Business of ResearchThe device Oberholzer needed—and Eddington created with his team—has great scientific potential but little commercial potential. Even though the device can facilitate research that will have life-saving effects in the long run, there are only a handful of transplant labs that can use it. Both men agree that it is only in university

labs where advances like these can happen, since industry primarily focuses on profit-making products rather than basic research. Having said that, both also agree that, essentially, they run little “businesses” in the pursuit of publishable knowledge that ultimately can improve health. Eddington currently directs the work of five doctoral candidates while Oberholzer oversees ten students, six of them pursuing doctoral degrees. All Oberholzer’s students are bioengineers, most are working on microfluidics, and some are planning to attend medical school.

As with any business, capital is key, although unlike most businesses, an academic lab’s entire budget gets spent on research and development. And capital, Eddington and Oberholzer agree, has never been as challenging to obtain as it is today. But they have successfully secured grant funding (nearly $2.5 million over five years) through the National Institutes of Health for their joint microfluidics work, where they are coprinciple investigators. Each also received grants from other public and private funders for this and related work. Perhaps most high-profile, Oberholzer has raised money through his leadership of a running team called Cellmates on the Run. Their goal in 2014 is to raise $500,000 for the Chicago Diabetes Project, a world-wide group of scientists, researchers, physicians, and surgeons working to make islet cell transplantation a viable diabetes treatment option.

Struggles against complex diseases clearly involve lots of people in many roles. As a diabetes fighting force, Eddington and Oberholzer seem eminently suited to the parts they’re playing. :

“For me, engineering

means creating to unveil

new insights and to heal.”

Dave Eddington, PhD

8

The orchestra played; parents, spouses, and the children of graduates cheered; and the floor marshals kept everything orderly as the college held its 47th annual commencement ceremony on May 10 in the UIC Pavilion. Adding to the impressive pool of more than

23,000 engineering alumni, Dean Peter Nelson and associate dean for the Graduate College Jonathan Art presented degrees in six departments to 362 baccalaureate, 250 master’s, and 45 doctoral graduates. The event featured a commencement address from Christopher Burke, president of Christopher B. Burke Engineering, Ltd. and UIC professor of practice, and a speech to the class from Nedda Djavid (BS ’14). The dean also honored dedicated faculty with an award presentation to professors Nantaporn Ratisoontorn, PhD (UIC Silver Circle Award) and Vahe Caliskan, PhD (Harold A. Simon Award) for their excellence in teaching. :

Alumni

8

99

Christopher Burke, PhD

1010

1111

Chancellor Paula Allen-Meares, PhD

12

Nobody is surprised to see white-coated young residents and interns shadowing physicians during their hospital patient rounds. It’s an essential part of medical

education. But who expects engineers in the entourage?

Starting soon at University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System, some patients can, indeed, expect to see senior bioengineering majors “rounding” with physicians. The students will be studying medical product design. Although they probably won’t be in white coats, they will, like the residents and interns, be gaining important patient-centered and physician-informed experience, thanks to a nearly $220,000, five-year National Institutes of Health grant.

Miiri Kotche, clinical associate professor in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering, wrote the grant to create Bioengineering Clinical Immersion, a six-week summer course. Her coprinciple investigators are Tom Royston, PhD, and John Hetling PhD, both colleagues in the bioengineering department. The novel course is designed to provide students hands-on experience in the clinical environment where medical devices are used; help them develop the communication skills essential to effective design; and observe real-time therapeutic treatment before they undertake the Interdisciplinary Medical Product Design (IMPD) course, a two-semester capstone project for all senior bioengineering students.

“Engineers need to understand the full context of a medical device’s use to produce the best design,” Kotche said. “Seeing the user’s needs and challenges in a clinical situation, getting their feedback, seeing for yourself what might be useful—this opportunity is an excellent way to do that. In the short run, the class will get students up to speed for the IMPD course, making it a richer experience for them. For the long run, the learning objective is to impart to students a methodical approach to assessing patient and user needs from a human-centered design perspective.”

Up to ten students can participate in the program, which is designed as a paid research internship. Groups of two to three students, guided by a clinical mentor, will gain real-world experience by doing two different hospital clinic rotations, each lasting three weeks. Initially, the host clinics

will include hematology/oncology, transplant surgery, anesthesiology, ophthalmology, and orthopaedics. Contact with UIC College of Medicine faculty members, medical students, and other clinicians in this environment will provide students with input as they identify and prioritize both clinician and patient needs.

Coprinciple investigator John Hetling noted that the extended exposure to physicians, residents, and medical students during the course provides an indispensable experiential learning opportunity for students doing medical product design. “It’s great first-hand exposure to see how the HIPPA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] training they’re required to undergo relates to patients’ privacy rights and requirements in a work and research environment. What that does for their ability to articulate issues and incorporate them into their own design work will be immeasurable,” he said.

Concurrent with their clinical rotations, students will attend weekly two-hour lecture/discussion sections to work with Kotche and Susan Sterling, an expert in design research, to help frame their clinical experiences and identify user needs. They’ll conclude with a final presentation to their clinical mentors. Class time will be spent discussing:

• How to conduct responsible research (including the ethics of human subject research)

• Human-centered design research

• Contextual inquiry and interviewing stakeholders

• Analyzing and synthesizing research

• Prioritizing user needs

Kotche completed her master’s degree in engineering at UIC and worked for eight years in product design, three of those at Abbott Labs in several divisions doing medical product research and design, before returning to UIC to complete her doctorate. Today, she is delighted to be able to combine her education and her industry experience for the benefit of tomorrow’s medical-device developers and the patients they’ll benefit. “This is my dream job,” she said. :

BioE Students Join the Medical Teamby Joel Super

12

1313

Miiri Kotche, PhD, is making the clinic part of the classroom for UIC bioengineering students studying medical product design. The experience is part of a new six-week summer immersion course she designed that will be funded by a five-year NIH grant.

1414

W hat do a former Naval of-ficer, an Ivy League alumnus, and a Cuban émigré have

in common? All three are UIC-trained bioengineers. How do they differ? One is an undergraduate, one a master’s degree candidate, and one a recently minted PhD. Whether their work involves developing a synthetic cornea or building a therapeutic robotic hand, though, the impetus for their efforts are the same: each aims to advance human health by applying engineering principles to modern medical issues.

Denisse Perez, Undergraduate StudentDenisse Perez (BS ’14) figured out early on what her interests were. She recalls grow-ing up playing with action figures alongside her older brother and sees it foreshadow-ing where she is today. “If a toy broke we didn’t throw it away; when the arm fell off we’d fashion a joint out of ceramic play-dough to hold it back up. I think that’s where my interest in bioengineering all began,” she said.

As a child, Perez moved from Cuba to Mexico to the United States as her father’s

career at Motorola advanced. Although both of her parents are electrical engineers, she never felt pressured to follow in their footsteps. “They were very good examples, but I knew if I didn’t choose engineering it would be okay as long as I maintained the same work ethic they have.”

Entering the bioengineering program at UIC as a freshman, she quickly realized how vital a healthy work ethic would be. “It was hard, but that didn’t seem like a good reason to quit,” she said. “And I found that a class was enjoyable because it was difficult.”

Perez spent last summer interning at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago pro-gramming a therapeutic robotic hand for stroke rehabilitation. “I’ve always dreamt about the idea of working with robots and people. It’s why I’m really interested in the possibility of augmenting human perfor-mance with robotics and using the nervous system in an artificial way,” she said.

Most recently, Perez and her team won a first place prize for their senior design proj-ect at UIC’s Engineering EXPO, which was held in April. Sponsored by RK Inventions, LLC, they developed a hand-strengthening device to help treat patients who have undergone hand surgery. “Experiences like this one have shown me how much I’d like to work in research and development. To be part of the whole process of creating a product or figuring out how a product should work would be a dream come true.”

Gardner Yost, Master’s StudentDuring his undergraduate years, Gardner Yost (MS ’14) might have said that com-petitive rowing was his greatest passion—possibly because it taught him so much. “It was the type of thing that the more work you put in the more results you saw. But it also wasn’t something where hard

work and failure were mutually exclusive. And so you learn a lot of lessons doing that.”

It was while Yost studied biological sci-ences at Cornell University that he found something even more captivating than rowing. He decided to take some bioen-gineering courses, including a medical devices class—even though they were outside of the requirements for his major. That’s when he realized he wanted to be involved in the design of medical products.

Since this discovery, Yost says he finds his life almost surreal. “The access I have to current and developing medical technology has been extremely inspirational,” he said. “And the research support is unbelievable. I couldn’t find anywhere else that supports their master’s students like UIC does.” Cur-rently, he’s working to finish his thesis on the acoustic evaluation of the artificial heart pumps called left ventricular assist devices (LVADs). The evaluation is a noninvasive method of monitoring these implantable cardiac support devices.

The New Faces of Bioengineeringby Kirsten Gorton

1515

Outside of his research in the lab, he works at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn performing in vitro experiments and listening to patients’ implanted pumps to collect clinical data for his analysis. Yost noted that he meets some patients in such severe cardiac failure that they are short of breath at rest. “But the LVADs restore blood flow, including oxygen perfusion to the brain, and patients feel better and regain some function. It’s so amazing to see.” For him, bioengineering is equally challenging and deeply satisfying.

While he remains involved in rowing as a coach for the Lincoln Park Juniors, Yost knows his future career trajectory lies in bioengineering. “The work I am doing has the potential to improve detection of com-plications which affect a patient’s quality of life and help physicians treat them before they become life-threatening,” he said. “It’s such an incredible prospect that I truly can’t wait to get to work every day.”

Amelia Zellander, PhD Graduate“I knew for a long time that I was interested in medicine. But during high school, with exposure to laboratory work, I realized I liked to be creative in that way and began trying to find an opportunity to connect medicine and engineering,” said Amelia Zellander (PhD ’13), who now works

as a preclinical scientist for Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson.

As a kid, Zellander’s curiosity drew her to science, but she believes being where she is today lies partly in serendipity. “It was a huge blessing that the city of Memphis—right around the time that I was coming into school—just happened to put more focus on math and science programs,” she said.

After attending a magnet high school, Zellander went on to pursue biomedical science at the University of Pennsylvania where she joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. And later, she did master’s degree work in biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University during her active duty in the U.S. Navy as an oceanographer.

“At first I was worried that being in the Navy had nothing to do with bioengineer-ing. I thought I had taken a wrong turn,” she said. But Zellander now sees how piv-otal the Navy was in bringing her dreams to fruition. “I saw while I was in the Navy that there was just so much more that I could achieve,” she said. She believes her growth there gave her the confidence to do what she always dreamt of doing: pursuing a doctoral degree.

And so after completing her active duty in 2008, Zellander knew all signs pointed to UIC. “I needed to choose a place that would allow me to do the research I wanted to do,” she said. That the program she had chosen was in a dynamic world city was a bonus, she thought.

After working for four years—with adviser Michael Cho, PhD—to create a prosthetic cornea implant made of synthetic polymers that would self-adhere to the eye, she suc-cessfully defended her dissertation in May

2013. “Amelia is a remarkable woman. She readily accepts challenges and possesses incredible resourcefulness to overcome them,” said Dr. Cho.

Zellander knows from her time at UIC that developing biomaterials is a challenge, but her determination trumps any difficulty. “When I’m trying to create something that doesn’t already exist, the goal posts change throughout the game, and it’s stressful. But because I really love what I am doing, it’s more rewarding than anything else.” :

Photographer: Jeff Fusco

“The work I am doing has the

potential to improve detection

of complications. It’s such an

incredible prospect that

I truly can’t wait to get to

work every day.”

Gardner Yost

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“We can’t base our goals for where we want to go on what is, but on what

should be,” according to retired CEO, en-trepreneur, and alumnus Rick Hill (BS ’74). “The key to success for Chicago and its universities will be creating an environment that stimulates investment in breakthrough medical technologies, which will lead to rapid economic growth,” he said.

Hill and his wife, Loan, have pledged $6.5 million to the Department of Bioengineer-ing to help lead the way in this vision of UIC and Chicago. The gift, the largest in the college’s history, brings the couple’s total giving to UIC to nearly $9 million. They believe more donors should get on board, invest, and make this vision of the university and of the city a reality. Passionate about medicine and education—Hill majored in bioengineering with an eye toward medical school—bioengineering at UIC is a natural for his support, he said.

Of course, how and why individuals give differ as much as they themselves do, Hill added. “Lots of people think of philanthropy as total altruism, but that isn’t the whole picture. For me, the good feeling I get through giving is important too. For others, it may be mostly about giving back, or gratitude, or pride in a great institution.”

For the Hills, there’s also a strongly practical side to the philanthropic choice to sup-port bioengineering at UIC. They see huge potential in the convergence of technology and biology for solving growing medical problems like glaucoma and cancer that beset our aging population. Investing in research is the key to tackling those prob-lems. By supporting new endowed chairs, professorships, fellowships, and program

initiatives, their gift will promote the leading-edge, multidisciplinary work that can gener-ate revolutionary and translational discover-ies. “That’s impact for your giving,” said Hill.

Hill’s career in business has attuned him to the need for efficiency while maintain-ing quality, and he also sees in medical technology significant potential for improv-ing patient care while bringing down costs. “Imagine if we did a complete body scan in fifteen minutes using an 11.4 Tesla MRI like the one we have here at UIC, along with a complete blood work-up, all for $250,” he said. “Comparing the results to data amassed from years of bioinformatics data collected at UIC, a doctor would have a great picture of the patient’s overall health.”

“Rick and Loan’s gift comes at a critical time following our strategic repositioning of bioengineering within both the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine,” said Peter Nelson, dean of the college. “Their vision and generosity will strengthen UIC’s role as a national leader in bioengi-neering research.”

After working his way through his sopho-more and junior years at Chicago’s Brother Rice High School because he thought he’d get the best education there, Hill graduated early from Blue Island’s public high school to earn college money and then worked his way through UIC. Following a six-month stint in the U.S. Navy (an ear infection ended his naval career) Hill was out and looking for a job in a difficult market. “That was serendipitous, because if I’d been on tour for six years, I couldn’t have gotten the start to end up where I did,” he said.

Subsequently, Hill held engineering and management positions at Hughes Aircraft, Motorola, General Electric, and Tektronix.

In 1993, he became CEO of Novellus Systems, a small semiconductor capital equipment company in Silicon Valley, which he led to become one of the top ten semi-conductor equipment manufacturers in the world before stepping down in 2012.

Mrs. Hill, who is from Vietnam, was sepa-rated from her brothers and their parents during the fall of Saigon in 1975. She and her sisters escaped by a U.S. C-130 trans-port plane and the boys and their parents later fled by a leaky boat and were rescued by a cargo ship. All spent time in refugee camps and were, with some luck, finally reunited, before going on to build productive lives for themselves.

Comparing the challenges in their lives, Hill said, “I thought I had a tough life, growing up on the South Side and working my way through school—until I met Loan.” Mrs. Hill, says her husband, has always been a hard worker and an advocate of self-improve-ment. As a teenager, she, too, worked (for a butcher) while going to school and then went on to graduate from San Jose State University with a degree in computer science. She built her career in the computer industry.

Today, investing in the future occupies the Hills just about full time. They believe strongly that the world’s future lies in urbanization. “UIC is a winner and it’s in a winning position—located in a world-class city that’s both a leading academic medical destination and has a biotechnolo-gy business base that’s poised to expand,” Hill said. “We hope our latest gift will help kick-start UIC to become a major player in the biotechnology sector: it should and can be a magnet for public-private partnerships.” :

Largest Gift in College’s History Promotes Excellence

Philanthropy

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Rick and Loan Hill have pledged $6.5 million to help UIC become a major player in the biotechnology sector.

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Professor Sloan Writes Book on Internet Security With ongoing technological advancements, online security has become an increasingly pressing issue. Robert Sloan, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science, knew that finding solutions to the problem would involve combining disci-plines. “I realized that most of the writing about security and privacy in the legal scholars’ community was somewhat techni-cally naïve and that almost all of the writing about security and privacy in the computer

science commu-nity—even some very good writing about the influence of economics—pretty much totally ignored legal is-sues,” Sloan said. Teaming up with Richard Warner, professor at the

Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law, the two have endeavored to bridge the gap between technology and policy in understanding the issues surround-ing online security. The book, Unauthor-ized Access: The Crisis in Online Privacy and Security, is available on Amazon.

UI LABS Lands $70M Federal Grant UI LABS has been awarded a $70 million Digital Manufacturing and Design Innova-tion Institute (DMDII) grant from the Depart-ment of Defense to help fund Chicago’s new Digital Lab for Manufacturing, a part of President Obama’s vision to revive U.S. manufacturing. UIC is among the twelve core academic partners on the DMDII grant. UI LABS, which involves all three University of Illinois campuses, began more than two years ago with the goal of applying cutting-edge mobile, cloud, and high-performance

computing technologies to current manu-facturing challenges. UIC’s CAVE2™ Sys-tem (pictured above) can provide advanced visualization to facilitate the research and promote the capabilities of the new lab. The initiative brings together forty industry partners; more than thirty academic, gov-ernmental, and community partners; and more than 500 supporting companies and organizations, which have, combined, com-mitted over $250 million in matching funds.

For updates and more information, visit uilabs.org.

New Faculty Research FundingThe evaluation of soybean droplets in the bloodstream, the prediction of the long-term behavior of steel-encapsulated nuclear waste, the contextual protec-tion of private data storage, and the production of nanoparticles to detect and treat complex diseases: all these are new engineering research projects being conducted on UIC’s campus.

• Professor Ernesto Indacochea, PhD, Department of Civil & Materials Engineer-ing, was awarded $700,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to create the first predictive model to evaluate how nuclear waste encapsulated in corrosion-resistant metals and oxides will degrade over a long period of time. The work is a collaboration of UIC and the Chemical Science and Engineering Division of Argonne National Laboratory.

• Assistant Professor Chris Kanich, PhD, Department of Computer Sci-ence, was awarded a $596,970 NSF CAREER Award for a project to help secure our digital lives by creating a methodology to identify an individual’s private data that is useful to cyber criminals so that security systems can incorporate these values using a data-driven, defense-in-depth approach.

• Assistant Professor Ying Liu, PhD, Department of Chemical Engineering, was awarded a $400,163 grant from the NSF Early Faculty Career Develop-ment Program to conduct research with promise to treat complex diseases with nanotechnology. Her work focuses on achieving a comprehensive understand-ing of the competitive kinetics required to design, optimize, and consistently generate polymeric nanoparticles that encapsulate water-insoluble drugs and deliver them with maximum efficacy.

• Assistant Professor Belinda Akpa, PhD, Department of Chemical Engineering, is part of an interdisciplinary group of researchers at UIC that will investigate whether a therapy currently used to treat certain drug overdoses may be protec-tive in the event of a chemical attack. Her portion of the $3.5 million five-year NIH CounterACT grant is $247,361 to study how droplets of soybean oil injected into the bloodstream could

Around the College

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UIC’s CAVE2™ System, which facilitates research through visualization, is poised to play an important role in UI LABS’ Digital Lab for Manufacturing. Here, data from the National University Rail Center related to high-speed rail operations is rendered in virtual reality. Photo: Lance Long

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rapidly trap a toxin that would otherwise cause potentially fatal internal bleed-ing or long-term neurological injury.

Student Teams Bring Home TrophiesUIC’s Chicago Engineering Design Team (EDT) dominated the prizes at the 27th Annual Jerry Sanders Design Competi-tion (JSDC), the Midwest robotics event held March 14 –15 at Urbana-Champaign. The 25-member team won first place and most points in a single round with its robot, Richard, and third place with robot Glados, which earned “Most Minimal Design.”

Award for Excellence in Teaching. He teach-es mathematics for engineering concepts to undergraduate and graduate students. Danilo Erricolo, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Dale Reed, PhD, clinical professor of computer science, were recognized by the UIC’s Teaching Rec-ognition Program for their excellent class-room performance over a three-year period. Professor Erricolo teaches modern linear optics and electromagnetic compatibility, electromagnetic scattering, and electromag-netic field theory. Professor Reed teaches the computer science introduction course and programming design, and he partners with Lane Technical College Prep to teach computer science to high school students.

New Research Holds Potential for Synthetic Gasoline Production UIC researchers have found a new way to reduce carbon dioxide using a cocatalyst system that efficiently converts carbon diox-ide to carbon monoxide using inexpensive, easy to fabricate carbon-based non-fiber materials. The team is led by Amin Salehi-Khojin, professor of mechanical and indus-trial engineering and includes first author Bijandra Kumar, UIC research scholar, and coauthors Jeremiah Abiade, Mohammad Asadi, Davide Pisasale, Suman Sinha-Ray, and Alexander Yarin. They hope these findings will lead to commercially viable processes for the production of syngas, gasoline, and other energy-rich products. :

Spring Opportunities for StudentsWhether it’s helping admitted students transition into college or assisting seniors with networking for their future careers, the College of Engineering supports all of its students with a variety of events each spring. • In February, the college held its

annual Engineering Career Fair, hosting sixty-eight companies to match students with internship, co-op, and full-time employers. Nearly 1,300 students attended.

• Under the auspices of the Minority Engineering Recruitment & Retention Program, events in March included a black-faculty brunch for African American admitted candidates and their family members, and the first College of Engineering recruitment event for prospective women students.

• In April, UIC held its first IGNITE: Admitted Student Day, a day designed to give prospective students direct access to their college and academic programs, including college programming, financial aid seminars, and housing and campus tours.

• At the end of April, as the culmination of their undergraduate studies, seniors participated in the 25th Annual Engineering EXPO— the college’s senior design competition—completing and presenting sixty-eight projects to UIC engineering alumni and industry judges, fellow students, and visiting grade school students. :

This year’s success marks the third year in a row the team has earned first place at the competition.

UIC’s chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) took several prizes at the ASCE Great Lakes Conference held on April 11 –12 at Urbana-Champaign, including third place overall and first place in the environmental competition. The team also won third place in the steel bridge competition, earning them a ticket to the National Student Steel Bridge Competition.

UIC Awards Engineering Faculty EffortsFour engineering faculty members were recognized this year in the areas of research and teaching. Philip Yu, PhD, professor of computer science, was named as a 2013 Researcher of the Year recipient by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. Professor Yu’s work focuses on using vast sets of data to identify valuable patterns. Ludwig Nitsche, PhD, associate profes-sor of chemical engineering, was given the

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First-place-winning robot, Richard, during production

(L-R) Amin Salehi-Khojin, Bijandra Kumar, Mohammad Asadi

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New Hires

José Oberholzer, MDProfessor, Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering; C. & B. Frese and G. Moss Professor of Surgery, Endocrinology, and Diabetes; Director of the Islet and Pancreas Transplant Program; Chief of the Division of Transplantation

Dr. Oberholzer studied medicine at the University of Geneva, as well as at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he completed a fellowship in hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery and

transplantation. He has been heading UIC’s Islet Transplant Program since 2003, leading a comprehensive multiorgan transplant program with

emphasis on transplantation for diabetes, as well as on robotic surgery in living donors for kidney, liver, pancreas, and small bowel transplants. Dr. Oberholzer has dedicated his career to finding a cure for diabetes and, to this purpose, founded the Chicago Diabetes Project, a global collaboration for a functional cure of diabetes through cell-based therapies.

Vuk Uskokovi c, PhDAssistant Professor, Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering

Professor Uskoković earned his undergraduate degree in physical chemistry from the University of Belgrade, his master’s degree in materials science and engineering from the University of Kragujevac, and his doctoral degree in nanosciences and nanotechnologies from

the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School. He has been a research fellow of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial

Research and in 2013 he was awarded a certificate for innovation by the American Chemical Society. Professor Uskoković’s main research interests include nanostructured materials for drug delivery and tissue engineering applications. Here at UIC, he will continue his research in the design of a new generation of biomaterials for hard tissue engineering, particularly in the treatment of bone disease.

Daniela Valdez-Jasso, PhDAssistant Professor, Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering

Professor Valdez-Jasso earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees

in applied mathematics and her doctoral degree in biomathematics from North Carolina State University. During her

postdoctoral training, Professor Valdez-Jasso investigated the tissue structure

and biomechanics of the normal and pressure-overloaded right ventricle of the heart. At UIC, she will continue her research in soft-tissue biomechanics and in multiscale mathematical modeling of tissue function, particularly as they pertain to understanding the vascular adaptations to pulmonary hypertension.

Brian Chaplin, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering

Professor Chaplin holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Minnesota in civil engineering and a doctoral degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in environmental

engineering. He became interested in electrochemistry as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering

at the University of Arizona. Professor Chaplin’s research focus is on novel electrochemical and catalytic processes for water treatment with an emphasis on developing technologies that promote water sustainability.

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and is the recipient of the outstanding dissertation award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Igor Paprotny, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Professor Paprotny holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Dartmouth College, undergraduate and master’s degrees in industrial engineering

from Arizona State University, and an engineering diploma in mechatronics from the NKI College of Engineering

in Oslo, Norway. In addition to his UIC appointment, he is an affiliated scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is the founder and lead of the UIC/LBNL/UCB Air-Microfluidics group. His research includes the applications of MEMS technologies to distributed microsensors for electric power systems, air microfluidics for environmental monitoring, and microrobotics.

Benjamin O’Connor, PhDAssistant Professor, Civil & Materials Engineering

Professor O’Connor earned undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota in civil engineering. Prior to joining UIC,

he worked for Argonne National Laboratory as a hydrologist and was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey

in Reston, Virginia. Professor O’Connor plans to continue research he began during his postdoctoral training examining the role of fluid motion on ecological processes in watersheds.

Mahshid Amirabadi, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Professor Amirabadi earned her doctoral degree from Texas A&M University, her master’s degree from the University of Tehran, and her undergraduate degree

from Shahid Beheshti University—all in electrical engineering. Her main research interests and experience include design,

analysis, and control of power converters; renewable energy systems; and variable speed drives, publishing more than twenty papers in IEEE conferences and transactions on these topics. Professor Amirabadi is the coauthor of a book chapter, has two pending U.S. patents,

Hulya Seferoglu, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Professor Seferoglu earned her doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Irvine, her master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Sabanci University, and her

undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Istanbul University. Before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago,

she was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Seferoglu has worked at Microsoft Research Cambridge, Docomo USA Labs, and AT&T Labs Research as a summer research intern. Her research interests are in the general areas of network optimization and design, wireless networks, network coding, and multimedia networking. :

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