real world solutions - whiting school of engineering · real world solutions 14 from cleaner...

The magazine of The Johns hopkins WhiTing school of engineering sUmmer/fall 2008

Real World Solutions

steeped in theory and fundamentals, senior design teams test their mettle on vexing real world problems.

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JOHNS HOpkiNS ENGiNEERiNG

Editorial Staff

Sue De PasqualeConsulting Editor

Abby LattesExecutive Editor

Angela Roberts, MA ’05 (A&S)Managing Editor

Royce FaddisArt Director, JHU Design and Publications

Rob SpillerAssociate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations

Kimberly WillisAssistant Director of Development and Alumni Relations

Contributing Writers: Sarah Achenbach, Maria Blackburn, Geoff Brown ’91 (A&S), Mike Field, Abby Lattes, Kurt Kleiner, MA ’92 (A&S), Greg Rienzi, MA ’02 (A&S), Angela Roberts, MA ’05 (A&S), Phil Sneiderman, Kimberly WIllis

Contributing Photographers: Matthew P. D’Agostino, Will Kirk ’99 (A&S), Jay T. VanRensselaer, Keith Weller

Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine is published twice annually by the Whiting School of Engineering Office of Communications. We encourage your comments and feedback. Please contact us at:

Abby Lattes ([email protected])Director of Marketing and CommunicationsWhiting School of Engineering 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218Phone: (410) 516-6852Fax: (410) 516-5130

From the Dean

arlier this year I had the opportunity, along with a few colleagues, to visit China to help

initiate new partnerships with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

These partnerships, which are just two of many that the Whiting School has recently forged,

are part of our larger strategic initiative to ensure that our faculty and students—both graduate

and undergraduate—continue to have unique and diverse opportunities to exchange knowl-

edge, share research, and solve problems of common social interest.

But they also serve as a reflection of our fundamental mission to encourage col-

laboration, innovation, and excellence on all levels of research and education. And while these

partnerships are new, our commitment to collaboration is not. For example, our part-time

engineering program, Engineering and Applied Science Programs for Professionals (EPP), has

a long-standing partnership with Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, finding its roots there more

than 40 years ago. For decades, our students have benefited from a vast range of educational

opportunities in the schools of Medicine, Arts and Sciences, Business, Nursing, Education,

International Studies, and Public Health, not to mention the Peabody Institute and the

Kennedy Krieger Institute. And each department within the Whiting School works, in some way,

with faculty and students from other departments, both within the Whiting School and across

Johns Hopkins.

But now more than ever, engineering at Johns Hopkins is embracing the spirit of

collaboration. The Whiting School recently initiated the Center for Biomedical Innovation and

Design, a new translational research center devoted to joining the expertise and skills of stu-

dents and faculty with that of industry in order to bring more innovative products from the lab

bench to the marketplace and bedside. This past October, we dedicated the campus’s newest

building, the Computational Science and Engineering Building (see p. 20) which, housing

four interdisciplinary centers and institutes, stands as a tangible example of this collaborative

spirit. And we have more than 20 institutes, centers, and laboratories dedicated to crossing

disciplinary research.

I’m sure you’ve noticed in past magazine issues the many stories of our alumni who

are engaging in interdisciplinary research, as well. After an education steeped in collaboration,

our graduates continue to practice it in their own research and careers. As you read this issue,

I urge you to take note of the creative ways the faculty, students, alumni, and administration of

the Whiting School and Johns Hopkins embrace the spirit of collaboration… and perhaps discov-

er new ways you can join us in our ongoing pursuit of collaboration, innovation, and excellence.

Sincerely,

Nicholas P. Jones

Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering

JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG sUMMER/FALL 2008 1

DEPARTMENTS

from the Dean

r+D The latest Research and Developments from the Whiting School 2 A New “Lab on a Chip”… What Sank the Titanic… Homewood’s Original Design… and more

a+L Alumni and Leadership making an impact 30 An Engineer of Change… Rewarding Student Initiatives… A Boost for Tech Transfer… and more

fInaL eXam Undergraduates learn to fold, dock, and design proteins. 36

fEATURES

Real World Solutions 14from cleaner streams to better pain relief, this year’s senior design teams have come up

with some impressive strategies for tackling engineering’s most challenging problems.

By Mike Field

Their Space 20Spend a week in the life of the new Computational Science and Engineering Building, where

researchers from varied disciplines are finding inspiration at the intersections of their fields.

By Angela Roberts, MA ’05 (A&S) Photos by Will Kirk

A Question of Ethics 26As technological advances lead to new materials, methods, and opportunities, Hopkins

engineers find themselves grappling with limited possibilities—and unexpected challenges.

By Geoff Brown ’91 (A&S)

In thIS ISSUe SUmmer/faLL 2008 VoLUme 6 no. 2

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T h e l a T e s T r e s e a r c h a n d d e v e l o p m e n T s From The Wh i T ing school—and beyon d

New Cues to Neuron GrowthA new “lab on a chip” developed by Whiting School engineers will make it easier to study how and why neurons grow the way they do.

For nerve cells to function properly they have to make the right connections. To do this, they follow their noses, making their ways to their final destinations guided by complex chemical cues. But it has been difficult to study how these chemical cues work in the lab.

If you grow the neuron in a liquid medium, shearing forces from tiny currents tend to affect growth or damage the cell. And it can be hard to control the amount and the gradient of the chemical signals you want to study.

Now Andre Levchenko, associate professor of biomedical engineering, has created a “lab on a chip”—a micro-scale tool designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain—that allows nerve cell growth to be precisely controlled and studied.

“The current state of the art is rather crude. People use micropipettes, which they bring very close to a growth cone, and try to dump out a little bit of soluble cue. It’s not a very precise technique, and it doesn’t allow multiple cues. It’s also not high throughput,” Levchenko says. “We wanted to design a device that would allow us to put living neurons into it. We want-ed to subject neurons to different cues and multiple cues at the same time.”

To create the chip, Levchenko and his col-leagues used a photolithographic technique

similar to that used to make silicon computer chips. They etched the pattern they wanted into a silicon wafer, and used the wafer as a mold to cast the plastic. When they were done, they had a plastic chip full of tiny channels and wells. Using computer-controlled valves, they could precisely control the flow of nutrients and chemical signals throughout the chip.

For the experiment, the researchers implanted embryonic spinal nerve cells from the African frog Xenopus in the wells in the chip. Some of the channels were coated with chemical cues. Other chemical cues were intro-duced in solution.

The entire device was mounted under a powerful microscope. As the cell grew, the researchers were able to watch how it respond-ed to the chemical cues on the channel walls, and also see how other cues they introduced affected the growth.

They were especially interested in how two different chemical cues might interact. They found that one chemical on a surface could attract the neuron to grow toward it, and another in solution could do the same. But when exposed to both cues at the same time, the cell grew in a random fashion.

Levchenko says that the chip will allow researchers to continue to examine how chemi-cal cues affect neuron growth. It could be especially helpful in studying how neurons regenerate after an injury, and could also have applications for drug discovery.

“It’s a wonderful tool,” he says. —Kurt Kleiner

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By the NumbersAt Hopkins, continuing education for engineers is embodied in the Engineering and Applied Science Programs for Professionals (EPP). Now in its 25th year*, the program has grown by leaps and bounds and the numbers prove it….

Year that classes at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) became part of the Whiting School of Engineering and EPP was born: 1983

Master’s programs offered by EPP in 1983: 6

Master’s programs offered by EPP in 2008: 16

Number of students enrolled in master’s pro-grams at EPP in 2008: 1,840

graduate Certificate programs offered by EPP in 2008: 6

Advanced Certificates in post-master’s study offered by EPP in 2008: 16

Students enrolled in certificate programs at EPP in 2008: 52

Percent of students whose tuition at EPP is paid for by their employers: 80–85

Number of online classes offered by EPP in 2008: 568

Program with highest enrollment in 2008: computer science (2,424)

*Through the years, the part-time program within the School

of Engineering has changed names several times. What

began, in 1983, as The Johns Hopkins University Part-Time

Engineering Programs, saw three name changes before being

renamed, a fourth time, to the Johns Hopkins Engineering

and Applied Science Programs for Professionals in 2005.

Associate professor Andre Levchenko, here with PhD candi-date Hojung Cho, has developed a way to mimic neuron growth on a microchip.


Guaranteed to Have a BallBicycles, springs, billiards, ball throwers, wind tunnels, music, and lacrosse balls. Those may sound like unlikely components to an under-graduate engineering course, but that’s exactly what they are.

In the Department of Mechanical Engineering, a newly launched curriculum integrates hands-on lessons in physics and mechanical engineering to bring to life the underlying principles of mechanical engineer-ing. The curriculum is divided into three year-long components: Freshman Experiences in Mechanical Engineering I and II, Introduction to Mechanics I and II, and Mechanical Engineering Freshman Laboratory I and II.

In the Freshman Lab, toys are used to teach one-dimensional motion, bicycles in the study of forces, springs to illustrate the conservation of energy, and billiards to show the physics of collisions and momentum. Students must design ball throwers as a mid-semester design project, the wind tunnel is used to teach con-cepts of fluids, and music brings alive the com-plexity of wave theory.

“Every week there’s a brand new lab that’s never been thought of before,” says associate professor Allison Okamura, who teaches the

A. James Clark Endows Benjamin T. Rome Deanship A. James Clark, longtime friend of the Whiting School and a university trustee emer-itus, has committed $10 million to the Johns Hopkins University to endow the deanship of the university’s Whiting School of Engineering in honor of his mentor and business colleague, Benjamin T. Rome. Nicholas Jones, a former chair of the school’s Department of Civil Engineering and dean of the Whiting School since August 2004, was appointed the inaugural recipient of the Benjamin T. Rome Deanship in 2008.

Rome, who died in 1994, was a 1925 civil engineering graduate of Johns Hopkins Engineering and throughout his lifetime

generously supported the university’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), especially its China Studies Program. In fact, one of the two SAIS buildings in Washington, D.C., bears his name.

While Rome was president and CEO of the Washington D.C.-based George Hyman Construction Company, which was founded by his uncle, he hired a freshly minted college graduate named A. James Clark in 1950. Rome soon became not only Clark’s employer but also his mentor. In the late 1960s, Clark succeeded Rome as president of Hyman Company, which was later named the Clark Construction Group. Today, Clark is chairman and chief executive officer of Bethesda-based Clark Enterprises, a holding company for a variety of businesses, including Clark Construction Group. — Kimberly Willis

A. James Clark and Nicholas Jones, the inaugural Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering.

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course. The goal? To get engineering students engaged as quickly as possible, to retain a diverse group of students, and—fundamental-ly—to generate student interest in the field.

Planning and work for the new curriculum began in 2007, involving a committee of four professors: now-retired professor Bill Sharpe, pro-fessor Joseph Katz, former professor and former dean Ilene Busch-Vishniac, and assistant professor Lester Su, all in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Okamura was asked to develop the actual courses and, eventually, teach them.

“We asked, what turns people off?” Okamura says. The professors learned that, to better capture the imagination of young engi-neering students, they would have to teach physics with an engineer’s perspective. “Science is the study of what is,” she explains. “Engineering is the study of what can be.”

So, instead of sending their newbie students off to the School of Arts and Sciences to enroll in introductory physics, the department now incorporates a more engineering influenced physics education into its own curriculum.

Hence the lacrosse balls. By first building one and then measuring the density of it, fresh-men discover how uncertainty plays a role in engineering. “Students must question how measurement uncertainties increase when applied to the things we build,” says Okamura. “Because they must make the ball and then measure it, they evaluate how the building of it may have introduced design or production flaws that result in measurement challenges.”

The new curriculum, which is funded in part by the department chair’s budget and the WSE Kenan Teachers Fund, aims to “instill in students, early on, a love of design and engi-neering,” Okamura says. “There’s no question that we’ll continue to refine the curriculum. As we get feedback from students,” she says, “we’ll keep improving the courses.” — Angela Roberts

“every week there’s a brand new lab that’s never been thought of before.” — allison okamura

More Masters in the Whiting School UniverseFinancial mathematics

To be officially launched this fall, the new Master of Science in Financial Mathematics program aims to produce the next generation of financial markets leaders, by sending its graduates to brokerages, trading floors, hedge fund companies, and banks around the world. Housed within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, the Financial Mathematics master’s program is based in probability, statistics, optimization, partial dif-ferential equations, and scientific computing.

“Financial Mathematics quantifies and enables much of the modern interplay among companies, investors, and financial agents in global markets,” explains David Audley, PhD ’72, who spent 35 years in the financial markets industry before returning to Hopkins to teach a new generation of financial mathematicians.

Dan Naiman, who heads the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, believes the new program will enhance students’ quanti-tative abilities, and strengthen their ability to communicate with specialists and non-specialists alike. “Fundamentally,” he says, “we are giving our graduates the ability to translate real-world problems into mathematical ones and determine solutions that can be applied in the global markets industry.”

master of science in engineering management

Based within the school’s Center for Leadership Education, the Master of Science in Engi-neering Management (MSEM) program offers an equal blend of graduate-level engineering knowledge with professional development training including communications, manage-ment, law, leadership, entrepreneurship, and technology commercialization.

Beginning this fall, students can enter the MSEM program directly after graduation from a bachelor’s program or after a few years of pro-fessional experience, but must have a bachelor’s degree in engineering, mathematical sciences, or natural science and are expected to have complet-ed courses in accounting and marketing. And undergraduates can choose to combine the program with their undergraduate work, creating a five-year bachelor’s/master’s program. —AR


Bridge BuddiesFew visitors to Homewood’s gilman Hall realize that the second floor passage leading into the Hutzler Reading Room is built on a steel girder truss bridge spanning what was once an open courtyard. Decades ago, that breezy courtyard was enclosed to provide a home for the universi-ty bookstore, with the store’s ceiling suspended from the trusses above. Plans for the renovation of gilman Hall now under way call for the remov-al of the bridge, to be replaced with a soaring glass-roofed atrium.

But 15 Civil Engineering seniors in their capstone Design and Synthesis II class were asked to imagine a different future: How could the goals of the three-year, multi-million dollar gilman Hall renovation be achieved while at the same time preserv-ing and incorporating the second floor truss bridge?

“Our theme has been preservation engineering,” says Michael Palantoni ’08, explaining that the first step in preserving any structure is first finding out how it’s put together. “Part one is an existing condition survey, which means doing a detailed structural analysis of the building in its current state.” In several hard-hat visits to the construction site, students went at the passageway with hammers and saws to see past finished walls, floors, and ceilings for a good look at the bones of the bridge.

“We probed into the bridge by taking out sheet walls to see the old steel connectors,” Palantoni says. “It was an interesting challenge. The roof is very complex and involved.” Site visits gave the students an opportunity to do field drawings and take careful measurements, which they subsequently employed to calculate the strength and capacity of the existing structure. On another visit, the site construction supervisor took them from the basement to the attic level of gilman Hall for an up-close look at building practices from nearly a century earlier. “You can see how columns change in size as they descend through the building,” reports Palantoni. He adds, “You don’t see structural brick nowa-days, and you know when you see a three-foot- thick brick wall you’ve got some pretty serious structural elements.”

After probing, measuring, and calculating, the students were ready to begin designing. They

Designing minds

broke into groups of three and began imagining new uses for an old bridge. “The biggest thing in trying to use an existing structure is figuring out how to do it economically,” says Zach Rosswog ’08. “Our group opted to keep existing steel col-umns in place, but proposed welding steel plates to their sides in order to increase load capacity.”

In final presentations each of the five student groups had to solve a complex set of design criteria, which called for allocating space for a 1,500-square-foot lecture hall, creating mechan-ical space at or below the second floor level, preserving the existing bridge while adding north/south traffic flow to its east/west axis, and cover-ing the final structure with a glass roof above the

Civil engineering students created theoretical plans for the renovation of Gilman Hall, including this plan creat-ed by undergraduates Jesse Richter, Zach Rosswog, and Josh Hoagland.

fourth floor level. Most of the groups opted to strip the bridge of its original brick cladding to expose and highlight its steel truss structure. Proposals also included adding new stairways or separate bridge walkways to accommodate north/south pedestrian traffic. Each team made a detailed presentation before their classmates and a group of engineering faculty and construc-tion experts, who critiqued the work.

The students found that when moving from theory to practice, experience counts. “The biggest challenge in any project, but especially something like this, is generating an actual way of accomplishing your concept,” says Palantoni. “It’s connecting what you want to do with what actually exists, and resolving all the structural issues.” —Mike Field


alumni making news

A Riveting Solution to What Sank the TitanicThe mystery has remained unsolved for nearly a century. The RMS Titanic was a 46,000-ton, double-hulled marvel of modern engineering. Unsinkable, people called it. Why then on April 14, 1912, did a glancing blow off an iceberg cause the Titanic to sink into the depths of the North Atlantic in less than three hours? For decades after the sinking, scientists offered up different theories. Perhaps, many speculated, it was the brittleness of the ship’s hull, an attack by a German U-boat, or a patch of low-lying pack ice that was to blame.

Enter Jennifer Hooper McCarty (MSE ’99, PhD ’03). She has spent the last decade study-ing remnants of the Titanic recovered from

the ocean floor, examining their makeup, testing their strength, and researching how and where they were made.

Along with her co-investigator, Tim Foecke, a materials scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology

and a Whiting School adjunct professor, what she found in the first-ever hands-on forensic investigation was surprising.

“It was sort of like the unzipping of a seam,” explains McCarty, who details her findings in the book she co-wrote with Foecke, What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries (Citadel Press, 2008). “This enormous ship that was supposed to be unsinkable sank in less than three hours because of 12 square feet of damage.”

They determined that the 6-inch-long rivets used in the Titanic’s bow and stern were hand-forged from wrought iron—not steel—in order to save money and meet deadlines. Some of the iron rivets, which had been made and installed by apprenticed and sometimes less-experienced workers, contained a high concen-tration of slag. While the glasslike substance adds strength at smaller concentrations (2 to 3 percent), the duo concluded that the higher concentration of slag weakened the wrought- iron rivets. Thus, the rivets popped under the stress caused by the ship’s contact with the iceberg, resulting in the flooding of five or six

watertight compartments. Had the rivets been stronger, fewer compartments would have been compromised and the mighty ship would have remained afloat for several more hours—enough time for the nearby Carpathia to rescue all those on board, McCarty hypothesizes.

McCarty began her research on the Titanic while she was still at Hopkins, where she won a Carl E. Heath Jr. Fellowship for women in engineering. In 1999 when her advisor, Professor Tim Weihs, asked her if she would be interested in studying some 45 riv-ets from the Titanic for her dissertation in materials science, she jumped at the chance. “I’ve always liked the historical aspect of materials science,” says McCarty, who cur-rently works as a clinical assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. At Hopkins, her research started in the lab, where she looked at the rivets under the microscope, tested them mechanically, and created computer models to see how the rivets responded under condi-tions similar to the iceberg collision. Following completion of her PhD she spent two years in England delving through records and correspondence detailing how the Titanic was built. “At times I really did feel like a detective,” she recalls.

For her next project, McCarty is interested in researching and writing about the building of the Eiffel Tower. “I’m just fascinated by this whole iron and steel age,” she says. “I love the idea of bringing people into the story of Gustave Eiffel and why he was so incredible as a designer and a builder; [I want to] talk about how the Eiffel Tower was built and why it has stood all of these years.” — Maria Blackburn

Partnership Offers Promise for New Surgical ToolsResearchers at the Whiting School and the School of Medicine have forged a partnership with Europe’s largest research organization. Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has a staff of 13,000 scientists and engineers, an annual research budget of € 1.3 billion, and is commit-ted to undertaking various applied research projects for both the private and public sectors.

The partnership with the organization, which has more than 80 research units at locations across Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East, has resulted in the Johns Hopkins– Fraunhofer Initiative for Innovations in Interventional Medicine. The goal: to develop new, minimally invasive surgical tools. “This agreement provides a wonderful opportunity for researchers from the two insti-tutions to work together to develop important new medical tools and move them out of the lab and into applications where they can help patients,” says Kristina M. Johnson, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Hopkins.

In the initial phase of the collaboration, projected to last a total of 15 months, scientific researchers and biomedical engineers will focus their efforts on three distinct but related proj-ects. The development of a computer-aided endoscopy tool will enable physicians to better diagnose gastrointestinal disease. A laparoscopic surgery tool will help align pre-operative CT scans during surgery. And a new system will be developed to track endoscopes and surgical tools during medical procedures. “Although this collaboration will initially focus on these three specific projects, we expect that the underlying technology developed can be applied to a broad spectrum of interventional and diagnostic medicine,” says Elliot McVeigh, Johns Hopkins’ director of Biomedical Engi-neering and the university’s Massey Professor. Perhaps most importantly, McVeigh says, the partnership will prompt the development of long-term, working relationships that will bring new technologies into practice more rapidly.

—AR

J. H. McCarty

Alumna Jennifer Hooper McCarty studied rivets from the sunken Titanic to solve one of the world’s most famous mysteries.

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Edward Bouwer, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and Environ-mental Engineering, has been named the Abel Wolman Professor of Environmental Engineering, succeeding

Charlie O’Melia. Bouwer has been the chair of DOGEE since July 2007. He is a co-author of The Illusion of Certainty: Health Benefits and Risks (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2007), which explains the principles of calculating basic epidemiologic risk estimates.

from the archives

More Than a Century of “Restrained Elegance”Luanne green, a principal architect with the Baltimore based firm Ayers/Saint/gross, refers to the period from the turn of the century to the 1920s as the “golden age” of campus planning. Several prestigious universities during this time grew up, and out, and had to shed their original skins, says green.

At Johns Hopkins, that skin-shedding began in November 1894, when university president Daniel Coit gilman asked local businessman William keyser for his assistance in securing another site for the school, which was outgrowing its location in downtown Baltimore on Howard and Eutaw streets.

The effort took some time, and creative deal making, but eventually yielded the acquisition of the Homewood site. In early 1901, keyser and his cousin William Wyman offered 179 acres to the university with the condition that at least 30 acres of the property be given to the city for use as a public park—what would become Wyman Park. The trustees accepted the offer on feb. 22, 1902.

Later that year, university trustee R. Brent keyser (William’s son) laid out his vision for the newly acquired campus. keyser, who agreed to pay the cost of the architectural plan, wanted the future buildings, dormitories, athletic grounds,

and other structures “to form a symmetrical whole.” The university invited five firms to enter a competition to create an overall campus plan that would lead Hopkins into the future.

University leaders ultimately chose the plan presented by the firm of Parker and Thomas.

The plan featured a circular driveway leading from Charles Street to a roughly square quadrangle and a second, longer quad to the south to be bordered by the university’s scientific laboratories.

Parker and Thomas chose to orient the Upper Quad’s buildings on a line parallel with Charles Street, rather than at an angle, realizing the street would become a major thoroughfare. green says that the architects also wanted to create a sense of order and work with the topog-raphy of the land. I call it pre-bulldozer planning,” she said. “They were interested in the least amount of grading.”

A later revised Parker/Thomas Plan also took into account the addition of two new buildings, the Mechanical and Engineering Building (Maryland Hall) and the Power House for the

newly created School of Engineering.green said that the architects essentially

intended to create a tree-lined enclave within an urban setting. The plan called for the buildings to define the campus’s open space and to serve as linked outdoor rooms. “The vision was that you

would enter this academic retreat by passing through a blanket of trees to its very ordered core,” says green.

Construction began on both Maryland Hall and gilman Hall in 1913 and they were completed in 1914 and 1915, respectively. gilman Hall capped the Upper Quad (later renamed the keyser Quadrangle), and Maryland Hall became the first piece for what would later be known as Wyman Quadrangle, the engineering quad.

The original plan also anticipated the university’s future growth.

“They planned well for the things they knew about and what they thought was over the horizon that could not be defined,” says green.

However, for all its strengths, the Parker/Thomas Plan could not anticipate the impact of

New Chairs and ProfessorshipsBouwer’s named chair honors Professor

Abel Wolman, one of the most highly respected leaders in the field of sanitary engineering, and a member of the faculty for more than 50 years, from 1937 until his death in 1989.

Professor Jin Kang has been named chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, succeeding Gerard Meyer, who served as the depart-ment’s chair since 1999.

Professor Howard Katz has been named chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, succeeding Robert Camma-rata, who served as the department’s chair since 2003.

Peter Searson, professor of materials science and Engineering and the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnol-ogy, has been named the inaugural Joseph R. and Lynn

C. Reynolds Professor in the Whiting School.

“The vision was that you would enter this academic retreat by passing through a blanket of trees to its very ordered core.” — Luanne Green, architect, Ayers/Saint/Gross


Searson joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 1990, having received his PhD in 1982 from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.

Joseph Reynolds, who earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins in 1969, is the founder and CEO of RTI Consulting LLP. He founded FTI Consulting Inc., is a university trustee, and is the current chair of the National Advisory Council.

Ben Hobbs, professor in the Department of Geography and Environ-mental Engineering, has been appointed the inaugu-ral Theodore M. & Kay W. Schad Professor in

Environmental Management. Hobbs is also chairing the university-wide Task Force on Climate Change, a group formed by President William R. Brody that will help guide the development of the university’s new climate change policy.

The late Ted Schad, who graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1939 with a degree in civil

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engineering, is considered one of the 20th centu-ry’s leaders in federal water resources planning.

Schad, who died in 2005, established this chair in memory of his first wife, Kathleen White Schad. The professorship also honors his long friendship with Abel Wolman, a world pioneer in water treatment and waste disposal and one of Schad’s teachers.

the automobile, green says, which in subsequent decades led to the creation of a spaghetti-like mish-mosh of roads and parking slots throughout campus.

By 1999, university leaders were ready for a new plan to guide future growth and fix the mounting car congestion problem. They turned to Ayers/Saint/gross.

green says her firm essentially returned to the campus’s planning roots. Ayers/Saint/gross opted to restore the full circle that historically ran entirely around “The Beach” and back to Charles Street, bring back the park-like setting, and create

new symmetric quads that could be filled out. In less than eight years, all has come to pass.

What made implementation of the new plan possible, green says, was the university’s strict adherence to the original plan and unwillingness to fall prey to the trappings of modernism.

“No high-rises popped up here in the 1970s like at other campuses. Happily, Johns Hopkins was unharmed by all of that,” she says. “Nothing is over the top or excessive. I like to say that the Homewood campus is a picture of restrained elegance.” —GR

A. Library

B. Chapel

C–D. Museums

E. Administration Hall

F. Academic Building

G–H. Class Rooms

I–K. Laboratories

L. Museum

M–O. Laboratories

P. President’s House

T. Auditorium Hall

1–10. Dormatories

12. Gymnasium

13. Carroll Mansion

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The “Parker/Thomas Plan,” initiated in 1902, laid the groundwork for the current day Homewood campus.


Corporate Connections

A “Boot Camp” for Young Engineers Terry Neimeyer warns that waning national inter-est in the engineering profession has reached cri-sis proportions. With the Baby Boomer generation set to retire, and their replacements in exceed-ingly short supply, a level of anxiety has crept in for employers like Neimeyer, who is the CEO of kCI Technologies, a multidisciplinary engineering firm that has offices in 13 states.

“There’s a feeling of helplessness in some respects,” he says. “It’s become clear that we in the engineering profession have to do more to get students interested in engineering and the sciences.”

Neimeyer and others in his position see hope in Engineering Innovation, a unique pre-college program aimed at demystifying engi-neering and showing off its creative character.

The program, founded in 2006 and run by the Whiting School’s Center for Educational Outreach, allows rising high school juniors and seniors to enroll in What is Engineering?—a course originally designed for Hopkins undergrad-uates by Michael karweit, a research professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

The program’s participants spend four to five weeks at Johns Hopkins or a partner institution (a college, high school, or learning academy) in the summer learning the basics of engineering as they conduct hands-on laboratory experiments and complete assignments that range from assem-bling a digital circuit that operates a robot to con-structing a bridge made out of spaghetti and epoxy. The course, taught by college-level instruc-tors trained by Johns Hopkins, is designed to illus-trate how engineers think and problem solve.

Students who complete the program with a “B” or better are eligible to receive three transferable (elective college) credits from Johns Hopkins.

This summer, the Whiting School offered the program at 14 locations: four in Maryland, one in New Mexico, one in Pennsylvania, and eight sites in California (four within the University of California system).

The program has attracted an impressive list of private and public donors, including corporations such as Bechtel, Black & Decker,

Pool and kent, TIME Center, and Whiting-Turner Contracting. The sponsors have allowed Johns Hopkins to expand the program, originally offered just in Maryland, and offer need-based financial aid for partial and full scholarships. Last year, nearly 80 percent of those enrolled received some tuition assistance.

This past year, due to increased sponsor support, Engineering Innovation was able to enhance its offerings by launching the New Mexico site and creating a monthlong Homewood residential program that offers a more immersive experience.

Neimeyer is buoyed by the program’s poten-tial, especially in reaching students from disad-vantaged backgrounds, which was until now a largely untapped demographic.

“The hope is that [the high school students] who go through the program, get and stay inter-ested in the field,” he says, “and one day, maybe four to six years down the line, we’ll be able to recruit them as interns or employees.”

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“The hope is that [the high

school students] go through the

program, get and stay interested

in the field, and one day, maybe

four to six years down the line,

we’ll be able to recruit them as

interns or employees.” — Terry Neimeyer

Marc Donohue, vice dean for research for the School of Engineering, says that most students enter the program with little to no knowledge of engineering. They are thrown into the deep end.

“This is a very challenging course in think-ing. It’s more like boot camp than a summer camp,” says Donohue, adding that only half of participants earn a “B” or better.

Donohue concurs that the engineering pipe-line is shrinking at an alarming rate. According to national statistics, engineering school enrollments have declined nearly in half over the past 10 years. Part of the problem, Donohue says, is that students lose interest in math and science during their middle school years and it’s tough to win them back.

Engineering Innovation may offer one ave-nue for re-igniting student interest: A survey of the program’s alumni showed overwhelmingly positive responses.

And an optimistic Neimeyer is quick to note that “it’s a long shot, but one well worth trying.” —GR


Pooling Expertise to Combat PollutionTwo Johns Hopkins chemists—one environ-mental and the other bioinorganic—have joined forces to create a new approach for studying pollutant reactions in the environ-ment. By drawing on their different areas of expertise, researchers Alan T. Stone and Justine P. Roth hope to develop a better way to predict the behavior of previously unexplored pollut-ants, including some hazardous metals.

The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’ Roth, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, develops methods to examine how enzyme-bound metals gain or lose elec-trons, most notably in response to reactions with oxygen. A number of elements, including oxygen, exist as two or more natural isotopes, meaning their atoms possess the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. Molecules made up of different isotopes react at slightly different rates when the electrons move from one position to another. By comparing these rates, Roth is able to collect important information about the reactions and interpret the results using computational chemistry.

Stone, an environmental chemist in the Whiting School of Engineering, realized that Roth’s approach could uncover critical new data about how pollutant molecules react with chemicals that are naturally present in water, soils, and sediments.

Their decision to pool resources recently received a key endorsement from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, which allocat-ed a $120,000 fellowship grant that will sup-port two years of research by a postdoctoral scientist who will be supervised by both faculty members. The researcher will seek to develop fundamental models that describe the transfer of electrons to and from dissolved chemicals and mineral surfaces.

Roth and Stone are especially interested in gains or losses of electrons that occur when pol-lutants react with naturally occurring minerals. For example, manganese oxide minerals, which appear black, and iron oxide minerals, with red, yellow, orange and brown hues, are believed to play a particularly important role when they make contact with some hazardous metals. When these minerals take electrons away from the toxic metal chromium, the metal is less

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Researchers Alan T. Stone and Justine P. Roth bridge the School of Engineering and the School of Arts & Sciences to jointly explore pollutant reactions.

Prize for exceptional research in Engineering and Applied Science.

Michael Falk will be joining the Depart-ment of Materials Science as an associate profes-sor. Falk, who earned his PhD in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and served as a visiting scholar at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Hynek Hermansky will join the Depart-ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a professor. Hermansky earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo and served as professor and director of the Center for Information Technology in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology.

Youngmi Hur will join the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Hur received her PhD in mathematics from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining Hopkins, she was the C.L.E. Moore Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nam Lee will join the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics as an assis-tant research professor. Lee recently received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California San Diego.

Tim Sui-Tang Leung will join the Depart-ment of Applied Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Leung recently received his PhD in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.

Danielle Tarraf will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. She received her PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT and has been a postdoctoral associate at MIT and a postdoc-toral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

likely to stick to soils and is often carried away by water. In contrast, taking electrons away from the toxic metal lead causes the metal to precipitate, forming solid particles that separate from the water instead of dissolving in it.

The Johns Hopkins scientists say the Dreyfus Foundation funding should bolster their efforts to use advanced chemistry lab tech-niques to help remedy real-world concerns.

“We need a better understanding of what kind of chemical reactions occur when hazard-ous metals and other waste materials come in contact with minerals that are already there in the environment,” says Stone.

Adds Roth: “In the past, these types of questions haven’t been addressed because the tools weren’t available. This is a chance to apply some of our new lab techniques to practical problems encountered in the Chesapeake Bay and other ecosystems. We’re really forging a new field in environmental science by focusing on the fundamental reactions that are taking place when contaminants are present in soil and water.” —Phil Sneiderman

New Faculty Faces Michael Bevan joined the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering as an associate professor. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Hopkins, he was an associate professor of chemical engineering and mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University.

Kai Loon Chen will join the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor. Chen earned his PhD from the Environmental Engineering Program at Yale. His doctoral research focused on the aggre-gation and deposition behavior of both naturally occurring and engineered nanomaterials and earned him the Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate


When Nanotechnology Hands You a Lemon…Technology now allows researchers to manipu-late matter on the scale of a nanometer—one 5,000th the width of a human hair. From tiny electronic circuits to little gears and pumps, scientists are developing all sorts of nano-scale devices that could be useful in everything from computers to medical devices.

But the physical world at that scale often exhibits unexpected properties that can be trou-blesome to the device designer. Among these

effects are the often counterintuitive interac-tions of surfaces, which can stick together when you would expect them to slide past each other, or vice versa.

Joelle Frechette, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is exploring these interfacial interactions, with an eye toward helping designers not just to work around them but actually to take advantage of them.

“In many cases, surfaces or interfaces are considered a problem. When any device gets small enough, interfacial and surface forces

“When any device gets small

enough, interfacial and surface

forces become important.

My view is not to look at this as

a problem but as forces that can

be harnessed.” —Joelle frechette

Crystal Ball

How green?We asked Professor Ben Hobbs, chair of

Hopkins’ President’s Task Force on Climate

Change and the recently appointed Theodore M.

& Kay W. Schad Professor in Environmental

Management in the Whiting School’s Department

of Geography and Environmental Engineering,

to imagine visiting the Homewood campus in the

year 2018. What “green” changes—both visible

and behind-the scenes—will be in place?

Many more people will be riding bikes in

Baltimore. The city has already established bike

lanes on streets near campus and I like

to think there’s finally going to be a

safe and pleasant way to bike down

Charles Street and University Parkway

with barriers between car and bicycle

traffic. You’ll see bike racks everywhere

on campus. I think commuting by bike

is an idea people will adapt to fairly quickly—the

more cyclists people see, the more it occurs to

them that they can do it, too.

The number of hybrid cars available for

short-term rental will have grown from the few

we have today. They’ll be located across the

campus and their ready availability and populari-

ty will make it much less necessary for students

Wolman—our department’s founder who

championed the provision of clean, safe water

supplies for everyone.

New ecological landscaping means areas

will be planted with low-maintenance grass, leafy

plants, and shrubs that require less fertilizing and

watering—resulting in decreased water runoff

and pollutants entering the Bay.

Enter the buildings—even the older ones—

and you’ll notice changes. Window replacement

and rooms equipped with sensors that automati-

cally douse lights when the spaces are unoccu-

pied will reduce our energy load. Paperless

offices will be common, so file cabinets will be

a rarity. That will reduce the need to store files

and books, resulting in more available space

and less construction.

Labs will be equipped with “intelligent”

fume hoods that effectively protect users, don’t

interfere with laboratory work, and minimize the

loss of heated or cooled air. We already have

hoods that can be closed, but students and fac-

ulty just don’t close them. By 2018, people’s

behavior and sensitivity to the environment will

have changed enough that they won’t see

switching a hood off as an inconvenience.

Some of these changes are relatively inex-

pensive and easy to implement, but many that

will have the greatest impact won’t necessarily

be visible and will require large, long-term invest-

ments in infrastructure. New HvAC systems will

include smarter building and individual room

controls, allowing us to keep from overheating

and overcooling some rooms while inadequately

servicing others. Plans are already under way for

a combined heat and power plant that will wring

more energy out of the natural gas we burn at

Homewood, generate electricity by burning natu-

ral gas, and use waste heat to provide space

heating and cooling and hot water.

Perhaps most significant, though, is the

research we’re generating at Johns Hopkins that

will not only lead to changes on the Homewood

campus but provide global solutions to climate

change. We’re finding ways to derive more ener-

gy services from the fossil fuels we have and

expand renewable energy production while

reducing costs and pollution.

—Interview by Abby Lattes

Enter the buildings—even the older ones—and you’ll notice changes. Window replacement and rooms equipped with sensors that automatically douse lights when the spaces are unoccupied will reduce our energy load.to have their own cars. Our parking lots will be

half empty and most of the cars you do see will

be conventional hybrids, plug-in hybrids, or

fueled by natural gas or biofuel.

When you walk around campus, disposable

water bottles will be a rarity. People will still carry

water bottles, but the refillable kind. That change

should happen at Hopkins if for no other reason

than out of respect for the legacy of Abel

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alumni making news

Cool Thinking Saves the Day

His strategy paid off. Several days after the injury, Everett could move his legs. Today he can walk.

It’s the kind of recovery that makes head-lines, lands one on Oprah, and causes people to bat around words like “miracle.” Cappuccino, 46, credits his studies at Johns Hopkins for teaching him how to make critical decisions. “One thing my professors always pushed us to do was to think outside the box,” says Cappuccino, who earned undergraduate degrees in biomedical engineering and materials science before returning to Johns Hopkins after medical school to undertake specialty training with nationally recognized spine surgeon Paul McAfee. “They encouraged us to think critical-ly and not to be afraid to make decisions we could support in our work and support in the literature.”

In addition to running his private practice, Cappuccino does research and product devel-opment on the biomechanics of spine implants. He lives in Lockport, N.Y., with his wife, breast surgeon Helen Cappuccino. They have six children, aged 14 to 27.

For Cappuccino, treating Everett last fall was a life-changing experience. “Over 15 years, things can become pretty straightforward,” he says. “You can be at the top of your practice but things can become routine. This whole experience reminded me that what we do is significant. We can make a difference.” — MB

Spine specialist Andrew Cappuccino performed the surgery that allowed tight-end Kevin Everett to walk again.


AP P

HO

TO

become important. My view is not to look at this as a problem but as forces that can be harnessed,” Frechette says.

Earlier this year, Frechette received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award of $400,000 for a proposal to develop ways to achieve external, reversible, and local control of wetting and adhesion properties.

At the nanoscale, for instance, tiny “capil-lary bridges” of water or other liquids can form between surfaces, and they can interfere with the electronic or mechanical functioning of the devices. Frechette wants to figure out how these bridges can be controlled and even made useful. So she is studying exactly how they can be modified through changes to the wettability of the surfaces they form on and through the application of electric fields. What happens when the wettability of surfaces—how much they attract or repel liquids-—is changed? She also wants to examine electrowetting, a technique in which an electric charge can be used to influence the shape and movement of nanodroplets.

The work can have implication for the fair-ly new field of optofluidics, which combines optics and microfluidics. Breakthroughs in optofluidics could lead to better low-power dis-play technology for computers or cell phones. They might also produce better designs for “labs-on-a-chip,” a micro-scale tool, which could manipulate liquids in tiny, discrete quan-tities.

To study the interactions she’s interested in, Frechette uses a piece of equipment called a surface force apparatus (SFA). The SFA uses two moving plates to measure separation to a resolution of 0.1 nanometer, and surface forces to 10 nanonewtons.

Frechette has been studying surface forces ever since earning her PhD in chemical engi-neering and materials science at Princeton University in 2005. From there she went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley, before joining Hopkins Engineering in 2006.

“Our group is tackling important issues in surface or interfacial science, keeping in mind that the results one day could be used in new generations of devices,” Frechette says. —KK

It was the opening day of the NFL season at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo, N.Y., last September. Buffalo Bills tight-end Kevin Everett made a tackle that injured his spine and left him lying on the field, paralyzed.

Andrew Cappuccino ’84 was there. Cappuccino, a spine specialist who has been an assistant team orthopedic surgeon for the Buffalo Bills since 1995, was one of the first medical professionals to reach Everett in the moments after the accident. His immediate assessment? The 24-year-old football player would most likely be a quadriplegic for life. But, at that point, Cappuccino’s focus was on keeping Everett breathing.

“Don’t leave me like this,” Cappuccino remembers a frightened Everett saying to him that day. And so, with Everett and his family’s agreement, the physician began a course of treatment that included spine surgery and induced hypothermia, an extreme cooling of Everett’s body temperature to reduce swelling of the tissue surrounding his spine. Hypothermia had never been used in a human spine patient before, but Cappuccino felt that it was the best course of action—both during the surgery and in the hours afterward. “If I did nothing, chances were he would remain a quadriplegic and on a respirator for the rest of his life,” he says. “Or I could try something risky [risks include cardiac arrhythmia] and it might help to preserve some spinal cord function. He was just a kid—the same age as one of my boys. I wanted what was best for him.”


Kudos Gregory S. Chirikjian (left), professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Kevin Hemker (below), professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have been elected fellows of the American Society of Mech-anical Engineers (ASME). A fellow is the highest grade of membership within ASME; it recognizes exceptional engineering achievements

and contributions to the engineering profession.

Joelle Frechette, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, given in recognition of young scientists’ commitment to research and education. (For more on her work, see p. 10.)

In a ceremony on June 15, Sharon Gerecht, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomole-cular Engineering, received the Outstanding Young Engineer Award. The award,

sponsored by the Maryland Academy of Sciences and conferred by the Maryland Science Center, aims to encourage the impor-tant work of young scientists and engineers in the state of Maryland, and to increase public awareness of their accomplishments.

David Gracias, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomole-cular Engineering, has been selected as one of 12 recipi-ents of the 2008 DuPont Young Professor Award.

This award is designed to provide start-up assistance to promising young and untenured research faculty.

Ben Hobbs, the Theodore M. & Kay W. Schad Professor in Environmental Manage-ment, has been elected a fellow to the Class of 2008 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for “integration

of economic and environmental concerns into power systems design and operation.”

Susan Hohenberger, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, received a 2008

Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship. The fellowship will support Hohenberger’s research in cryptographic challenges in verifying authenticity of incoming messages and encrypt-ing outgoing ones in energy-, data-, and time-constrained applications, computer security, algorithms, and complexity theory.

Kristina M. Johnson, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs and professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the 2007 American Association of Engineering Society’s John Fritz Medal. Established in 1902, the medal is widely considered the highest award in the engineering profession and is pre-sented each year for scientific or industrial achievement in any field of pure or applied sci-ence. Past honorees have included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse, and Orville Wright.

Nicholas Jones, dean of the Whiting School and professor of civil engineering, received the 2008 Robert H. Scanlan Medal from the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The medal is awarded annually to recognize distinguished achievement in engineering mechanics based upon scholarly contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of structural mechanics, wind engineering, and aerodynamics. Jones was recognized in particular for his many contribu-tions in the fields of aerodynamics of bridges and full-scale monitoring of structures.

Rachel Karchin, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Institute for Computational Medicine, was awarded a Susan B. Komen

Investigator Initiated Research Grant. It pro-vides three years of support for the exploration

of new ideas and novel approaches to breast cancer research and clinical practice.

Howard E. Katz, professor of materials science and engineering, was named one of 34 inaugu-ral fellows of the Materials Research Society. This honor was given “for introducing multi-functional organic materials into electronic and optical devices including transistors and electro-optic modulators; for innovation in materials synthesis; and for serving the materials commu-nity through society leadership, editorship, and government outreach.” Katz will assume the presidency of the International Union of Materials Research Societies in 2009.

Hai-Quan Mao, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has received a National Science Founda-tion Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)

award, given in recognition of young scientists’ commitment to research and education.

Carey Priebe, professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, is one of six to be named a 2008 National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow by the

Department of Defense. This new program provides grants to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct long-term, unclassified, basic research, in an effort to engage the next generation of outstanding scientists and engi-neers in the most challenging technical issues facing the government.

Russ Taylor, professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology, has been select-

ed as a co-recipient of the 2008 Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The award recognizes individuals who have made a significant impact on the robotics and/or auto-mation fields by initiating new areas of


research, development, or engineering.

Natalia Trayanova, profes-sor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Institute for Computational Medicine, was selected as a fellow of the Heart Rhythm

Society. The most distinguished level of the society, fellow status recognizes members who have realized significant professional achieve-ment, provided exceptional service, and are prominent in the field of cardiac arrhythmia research and treatment.

Peter Wilcock, professor in the Department of Geography and Environ-mental Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Civil Engineering, received the

2008 Hans Albert Einstein award from the American Society of Civil Engineers for his contributions to research in sediment transport in gravel-bed rivers.

to China’s Academy of Sciences and Academy of Engineering. By forming this partnership, the universities aim to promote academic interac-tion and joint research between faculty and stu-dents in the area of bioengineering.

At its core, the agreement supports a Collaborative Ph.D. Student Agreement, enabling PhD students from the two universi-ties to participate in one to two semester-long exchange programs and supports symposiums, such as the one held recently in China.

In May of last year, Ronald Gue ’62, PhD ’64, chairman of Phoenix Health Systems Inc. and a member of the National Advisory Council for the Whiting School of Engineering, visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University while he was on a trip to China. Gue, who earned his PhD from the Whiting School in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, met with Professor Jin Wei, director of International Cooperation & Exchange, as well as the faculty of the Biomedical Engineering Department, on behalf of the National Advisory Council to reinforce Johns Hopkins’ commitment to inter-national outreach and the partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Also this past January, the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Tsinghua Univer-sity, one of China’s premier research universities, established the Tsinghua–Johns Hopkins Joint Center for Biomedical Engineering Research. That month, Provost Kristina Johnson joined Jones, Douglas, McVeigh, and Wang in a cere-mony in Beijing to sign a memorandum of agreement between the two universities.

To be housed on Tsinghua University’s campus in Beijing, the center will provide joint research projects, exchange of visiting scholars and students, joint educational initiatives, and conferences. Its research focus includes neuro-

engineering and neuroscience, medical imaging, tissue engineering, and biology in medicine.

At the heart of the program is an under-graduate exchange program that will enable students from Johns Hopkins and Tsinghua to spend summers at each other’s campuses, work-ing on collaborative research projects.

Additionally, many of Tsinghua’s doctoral students and faculty will travel to Baltimore to study in the labs of Johns Hopkins or work as visiting scholars, while Johns Hopkins faculty will spend semesters in Beijing teaching at Tsinghua or studying during sabbatical leave. A final component of the center is the joint research symposia, which will be held regularly and be open to participating faculty and students from both universities.

The two schools have shared a history since the 1920s, when William Henry Welch, the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, traveled to China and was instrumental in founding the Peking Union Medical College, the medical school of Tsinghua University. For the past decade, Johns Hopkins and Tsinghua have had an informal but strong working relationship, and the center, three years in the making, has formalized that commitment.

“The commitment in China to the devel-opment of a world-class research enterprise is extraordinarily impressive. The opportunities this presents to our students and faculty are very broad and dynamic,” says McVeigh.

“The opportunities for collaboration,” adds Jones, “particularly in the field of bioengineer-ing, have been increasing in the past decade. As we partner with our colleagues across the globe in countries such as China, we vastly increase our ability to share ideas, conduct groundbreaking research, and contribute toward the betterment of all society.” —AR

Partnerships in ChinaOne of the four focus points of the Whiting School’s Strategic Plan is a commitment to local and global strategic partnerships throughout academia and industry. Illustrating that com-mitment are two recent partnerships between the Whiting School and universities in China.

This past January, a delegation from the Whiting School traveled to China to participate in a successful joint bioengineering symposium. Attending the event along with Dean Nick Jones were Andrew Douglas, vice dean of faculty; Elliot McVeigh, director of Biomedical Engineering; Hedy Alavi, assistant dean for international programs; and professors Nitish Thakor, Jin Kang, Xiaoqin Wang, Joel Bader, Gislin Dagnelie, and Hai-Quan Mao.

The symposium was co-hosted by the Whiting School and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University College of Life Science and Technology, after a partnership was formed between the two schools last May. Founded in 1896, Jiao Tong is one of the oldest universities in China, with over 200 of its alumni belonging

Provost kristina Johnson and Professor Jining Chen formalize a partnership between Johns Hopkins and Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

teeped in theory and fundamentals throughout their four years at the Whiting School, students from all departments get to step out as seniors and, working in teams, apply what they’ve learned through a senior design project. The projects they tackle, proposed by industry experts, clinical faculty at Hopkins Hospital, and medical device companies, truly test their engineering mettle, forcing them to communicate clearly with nontechnical colleagues and customers to create solutions that not only work but are economically viable. The fruits of their labors have been impres-sive. Over the past three years alone, senior design projects have resulted in at least 16 provisional patents, three full patent applications, four licensing agreements, and two start-up companies. Herewith, meet four design teams from the Class of 2008, whose creative solutions—for everything from cleaner streams to better pain relief—show particular promise.

By Mike FieldPhotos by Will Kirk


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By Mike Field

Photography by Will Kirk

JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG WiNTER 2008 15

“Pumped” with inspiration: (left to right) Dave Filipiak, Manuel Balvin, Shyam Khatau, Anne Gatchell

n paper it looks like someone tried to cross the Reebok Pump athletic shoe with one of those oxygen masks that drops from overhead when your plane is going down. But as senior chemical and biomolecular engineering major Anne Gatchell is quick to point out, looks can be deceiving.

“It is often the inventor who comes up with an idea and convinces people there is a need,” she says with true entrepreneurial brio. Gatchell and fellow chemical and biomolecular engineering majors Manuel Balvin, Dave Filipiak, and Shyam Khatau believe they have identified a need currently unmet: how to ame-liorate the effects of acute mountain sickness among the estimated 100 million travelers who visit high-altitude mountainous regions across the globe every year.

Gatchell, who is from mile-high Denver, and Balvin, a native Peruvian, were familiar with the headaches, dizziness, nausea, lethargy, and other symptoms that unacclimated visitors to their mountainous countrysides can sometimes experience. At high altitudes—defined as eleva-

tions of 5,000 feet or more above sea level—lower atmospheric pressure means less oxygen is available in every breath, and hemo-globin in the blood becomes less efficient at delivering oxygen to muscles and tissues. Lower atmospheric pressure can also cause blood ves-sels to extend, releasing fluid into surrounding tissues. A sudden change, as for instance when a coastal visitor flies into a high altitude city, can cause feelings of physical exhaustion, pain and discomfort, gastro-intestinal difficulties, and in extreme cases, pulmonary and cerebral edemas.

Currently, the vast majority of people who experience difficulties at high altitudes must simply suffer through until their bodies adapt to the change in pressure. But studies have shown that by increasing the percentage of oxy-gen in each breath, the effective change in ele-vation can be reduced to a range in which there are few, if any, side effects.

Combining creative thinking with a little chemical and biomolecular engineering know-how, Gatchell and her classmates devised the Altitude Alright Supplemental Oxygen System, which uses a commercially available gas separa-tion membrane to increase the amount of oxygen inhaled by at least 25 percent. Pumps attached to the user’s feet drive air through the membrane stored in a small backpack. Oxygen-enriched air then travels by flexible tubing to a plastic mask worn over the mouth and nose. “The system would be lightweight, portable, and would cost less than $100 per unit to produce,” Gatchell says. “We see a ready market for high altitude resort owners, or tour groups visiting elevations between 8,000 to 18,000 feet above sea level.”


the altitude alright Supplemental

oxygen System uses a commercially

available gas separation membrane

to increase the amount of oxygen

inhaled by at least 25 percent.

ropical fish enthusiasts prize the black ghost knifefish, a jet black river dweller from South America marked by two white rings on its tail, a white blaze on its nose, and a long undulating fin running along its belly. That fin—called a ribbon fin—allows the fish to hover or advance or change direction almost instantaneously by propagating different wave-forms down the length of its underside. So effective is this mechanism that the fish catches its food by gliding past unwary targets and then suddenly changing course and attacking in the blink of an eye: up, down, forward, back, or side to side.

Watching one of these knifefish pivot through the water can be an amazing sight (check out the dozens of black ghost knifefish home videos on YouTube to see), but it was also bound to get scientists thinking …can we design an underwater vehicle to do that? And so the quest was on for SWAMP, the Submersible Wavelength/Amplitude Modulating Propulsion system. Scientists in Japan and at Northwestern University have already had a go at it. Now enter Johns Hopkins Team SWAMP—mechanical engineering majors Chris Blizzard, Ross Burns, and Makibi Takagi—with a uniquely different approach to the challenge.

“Nothing like this had been tried before,” says Burns. The other groups tackling the prob-lem started with a parallel row of closely-spaced rods that approximate the bones in the fish’s ribbon fin. But while the Japanese and Northwestern groups utilized a series of inde-pendent actuators to move each rod back and forth, Team SWAMP took a more traditionally mechanical engineering approach, utilizing revolving shafts linked to a row of 18 parallel plastic bars. A complex system of gears and actuators link the shafts to independent electric motors that can be used to vary the speed and direction of the bars’ movement. A third shaft controls the amplitude (the height of the wave motion) by raising or lowering the fulcrum point for each bar. The entire unit is controlled by a variable power supply and a simple switch-ing circuit.

“This kind of system underwater could allow far greater maneuverability than a stan-dard propeller,” Burns says of the prototype he and his classmates designed, machined, and assembled themselves. “The hardest challenge for the team was actually putting it together. We had to build it and rebuild it several times to get it to work.” At one point the group fell behind schedule by more than a month when gears on parallel shafts refused to mesh properly and the mechanism seized. Team SWAMP’s final report notes tersely: “It was then that the panic set in.” In the nick of time the group entirely redesigned the base unit, which effec-tively eliminated the problem and allowed work to resume. There were many long nights in the lab getting the device in working order, but in the end, they had a functioning prototype for their project sponsors to test drive. “They were in awe that we were able to do it,” says Burns with a trace of pride bordering on relief. “The greatest thing we learned was how to take ideas and actually make them real.”


“this kind of system underwater

could allow far greater maneuver-

ability than a standard propeller.”

—ross Burns Team sponsor: Applied Physics Lab through a Navy research grant

“Propelled” to finish: (left to right) Chris Blizzard, Ross Burns, Makibi Takagi

good strategy for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay is to first clean up all the rivers and streams that flow into it. The Bay’s water-shed, or “reach,” extends miles beyond the shoreline and includes all the streams and water-ways flowing through Baltimore—including East Stony Run, a picturesque babbling rill that is a central landscape feature on the university’s historic Evergreen property. The stream provides unique challenges and opportunities for clean-up efforts.

“If you look on Google Maps, half the stream on the property flows through a mani-cured lawn, and the other half is undeveloped,” notes Department of Geography and Environ-mental Engineering professor Peter Wilcock. The city is already engaged in rebuilding the culvert that carries the water flowing out of the property under Charles Street and has been extensively monitoring the water quality of the Stony Run for some time, creating, says Wilcock, a perfect opportunity. “We want to see if we can figure a way to reduce sediment and nutrient loading to the Bay coming out of this property.”

Wilcock’s one page charge to his class: Find the most cost-effective way to restore East Stony Run to health. Team members Colin Beck, Daniela Martinez, Jasmine Serlemitsos, and Carol Zuerndorfer were charged with con-sidering the history, location, aesthetics, and water chemistry of the stream in crafting a comprehensive plan of action. “What they are now calling ‘stream restoration’ is such a new field that almost all the literature is still very recent,” says Serlemitsos, spokesperson for the group. “So starting out we didn’t have much to go on.”

Of chief concern is the overabundance of nutrients—primarily nitrogen and phospho-rus—that enter streams largely though rain water runoff. Phosphorus is typically removed from water by settling sediment and letting it “fall out” of the water. Denitrification, on the other hand, is a more complicated process that requires standing water and a carbon source, usually from decaying plants. These conditions permit an anaerobic process to occur in which bacteria convert nitrogen in the water to its gas-eous forms, which escape into the atmosphere.

“After looking at the history and current condition of the East Stony Run, we concluded there were four possible courses of action,” Serlemitsos says. “We could do nothing; re-route the stream through a pipe or culvert; try spot-treating it only in certain places; or spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a full-scale restoration that would include lower-ing the banks of the stream, reintroducing native species, and creating marshy areas of standing water for denitrification.”

In the end, the group decided a full-scale excavation of the stream was unwarranted, instead opting for spot treatments to prevent erosion and encourage some denitrification. “The challenge in this field is trying to figure out how to measure success,” Serlemitsos says. “If you build a building and it falls down, everyone knows. But if you set out to restore a watershed, how do you know when it works? Our spot treatment plan is not conventional. It’s a little out there.”


A Clean Sweep: (left to right) Colin Beck, Carol Zuerndorfer, Daniela Martinez, Jasmine Serlemitsos

Team sponsor: Baltimore City Department of Public Works

ood things, it is said, come in small packages. Someday that may be especially true if you are facing surgery.

Each year, more than 3 million laparoscop-ic surgeries are performed in the U.S., encom-passing procedures ranging from coronary artery bypass surgery to gall bladder removal. In most of these operations, the surgical inci-sion required is very small—less than an inch in length. Typically, these minimally invasive surgeries require little or no post-operative hos-pitalization, and many are performed on an outpatient basis. But even small cuts can hurt a lot, so doctors prescribe systemic oral narcotics for incisional pain.

Doping the whole body to relieve pain in one small location is hardly ideal, however. Side effects of the systemic opiates typically used include nausea, constipation, and temporary dementia, and can sometimes result in extend-ed hospitalizations. With all the advantages of micro-surgery, might there not be a manner of introducing micro pain control as well?

Eight biomedical engineering undergradu-ates set out to find the answer. Henry Chang, Dhanya Rangaraj, Meet Patel, Vincent Wu,

Joseph Wood, Hyun-sun Seo, Shaoi Zhang, and Alice Wu report that there is currently no available technology to deliver extremely focused, localized pain relief for patients of minimally invasive surgery. “We think that the greatest end benefit might be to save additional lives through the increased use of endoscopic exploratory surgery,” says Rangaraj, noting that current post-operative pain management issues may inhibit use of the procedure.

The team came up with a novel approach: a postage stamp-sized envelope containing local anesthetic, anti-inflammatory agents, and growth factors impregnated in a commercially available biologic matrix made from the small intestine sub mucosa of pigs. At the end of a procedure the packets are slipped into the existing incision just before suturing. The matrix gradually releases the drugs over time as it is absorbed into the wound, promoting healing and providing round-the-clock pain relief in the process. The design is simple and elegant enough for the group (aided by faculty advisor Malcolm Lloyd ’94, a physician and CEO and founder of Device Evolutions, a medical device company) to file a provisional patent application.


“The great thing about this approach is that it potentially offers a way to control post-operative pain without side effects,” Rangaraj says. “We had to find novel ways to bind the drugs to the matrix material, and we kept refin-ing the way to fold up and seal the implant. It evolved over the year we were working on it, but in the end we settled on this technology we think has great potential.” n

A Cure for Pain: (left to right) Alice Wu, Henry Chang, Joseph Wood, Dhanya Rangara, Shaoi Zhang, Meet Patel, Vincent Wu. Hyun-Sun Seo not pictured.


Not bound by departmental

divisions, the new Computational

Science and Engineering building

allows researchers and students

from a variety of disciplines

to find inspiration at the

intersections of their fields.

Their Space

if you walk, any night of the week, onto the Homewood campus through

its southern gate, you’ll see one building glowing amid an otherwise darkened

campus. Light radiates from within, pouring out through the white-paned

windows, illuminating the surrounding brick and marble trimmed sidewalks.

As the nearby buildings slumber, the new Computational Science and Engineering

(CSE) building pulses through the night, charged with an energy seemingly more

vibrant than mere electricity….

By Angela RobertsPhotos by Will Kirk



monday morning brings quite a different scene as faculty, staff, and graduate students stream into offices and laboratories throughout the CSE building’s four floors, which are con-nected inside by an elevator and a floating stair-case. Each floor has a wide central corridor, and the individual labs, offices, and conference rooms that sit like vertebra along this backbone are home to various engineering research groups.

At the ground level, the mammoth robotics equipment of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) towers above lab benches in the building’s two-story, open-air laboratory high bay. One floor above, in the Swirnow Mock Operating Room, researchers from the Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) develop and test robotic surgical tech-niques. On the second floor, the Institute for Computational Medicine’s (ICM) server room can be seen through its glass walls, blue and purple lights gleaming, its cooling mechanism creating a soft hum. And the third floor is home to the labs and offices of the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP).

Unlike its neighboring buildings, the CSE building is not dedicated to a particular depart-ment, but to four of the Whiting School’s interdisciplinary institutes and centers.

Jusuk lee, a fifth-year phd student in the lcsr, uses computational methods to learn how cockroaches run and how humans walk and run. Today he is at work on his com-puter in the Locomotion In Mechanical & Biological Systems (LIMBS) lab run by his advisor, assistant professor Noah Cowan. His task: to create computer simulations of loco-motion. Lee divides his time between building robots that replicate the gait of the cockroach and creating computer simulations that repli-cate the gait of the human.

“To understand why humans inherently strive for a symmetric gait we make mathemati-cal models that represent human running motion and simulate the models with a com-puter,” Lee explains. “The power of mathemat-ics is that it provides proof to support or refute a theory. Using these mathematical models, we can help biologists narrow down the variables they consider.”

The end goal? To learn how animals turn sensory information into action so that physi-cians can diagnose people with abnormal gaits caused by neurological damage and create reha-bilitation plans for them.

And why cockroaches? Interestingly, the gait of humans and that of cockroaches are similar: both bounce from step to step as they

run. But the real allure of cockroaches lies in their ability to run extraordinarily fast (equiva-lent to humans running at 200 mph) under guidance from their antennae. Understanding animal locomotion at the limits of performance can lead to new insights into biology and evo-lution, and also to the development of novel robotic sensors and algorithms.

Lee alternates between the office and the lab, or “labpod,” in which he and fellow gradu-ate students build the robots they use to test their theories. In contrast to his orderly office, Lee’s labpod, one of many that line the perime-ter of the high bay, is filled with machinery, tools, and robotics equipment. Workbenches are covered with a jumble of hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, soldering irons, flat screen moni-tors, keyboards, towering hard drives, and spools of wire. A large, red toolbox stands by the door, its drawers labeled, “screwdrivers, sockets, clamps, sand paper, hammers, nails and screws,” and “squeezy things.”

Jusuk Lee (left) and Alican Demir make adjustments to the cockroach robot.

The open framework of the CSE building’s interior is designed to promote interaction at every level of research and learning.

The work accomplished in the Swirnow Mock Operating Room can be observed by those passing through the building’s breezeway.


Later in the day, Lee sits among this mélange discussing the latest enhancements that Alican Demir, a mechanical engineering master’s candidate in the LIMBS lab, has made to the cockroach robot.

About a cubic foot in total size, the robot has three wheels, a chassis, a controller base, and a single antenna that sweeps out from its side. As it speeds along a wall, it can measure its dis-tance from the wall by constantly calculating the shape of its antenna. Inside, a wireless modem instantly sends the data to a nearby computer. “When you’re going to build a robot,” Demir says, “your goal is to build something that can do things humans can’t. Like communicate wirelessly and directly to a computer.”

several floors above this duo, Anne Albinak is at work in her office, preparing for the next morning’s Institute for Computational Medicine staff meeting. Albinak, the adminis-trative director of the ICM, oversees the staff of nine software engineers, systems administrators, and administrative staff who are building the Cardiovascular Research Grid (CVRG). The

grid, which is just one of the ICM’s many proj-ects, will be the first worldwide digital data net-work dedicated to the open exchange of infor-mation on heart-related illness.

Three years ago, when Albinak was recruit-ed to become administrative director of the ICM, it wasn’t just her background in adminis-trative management that was appealing. It was also her passion. “I don’t know the science or the math,” she says. “But, everything I do can make a direct impact on the research, and that’s what keeps me motivated.”

Funded in large part by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the completed Cardiovascular Research Grid will enable research teams from all over the world to access and share experimental data, data analysis tools, and computational models.

As the lead collaborator for the project, the ICM at Hopkins partners with colleagues at Ohio State University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Diego. To keep all the parties in this long-distance rela-tionship well connected, the group’s second floor conference room is equipped with two flat screen monitors that stand side by side at one end of the conference table. The monitors are

digitally linked to conference rooms at the col-laborating universities so that, when need be, all three parties can easily communicate.

At Tuesday morning’s staff meeting, Albinak listens carefully as each of the eight

staff members gives the status of their current project. When it becomes clear that one of the partnering collaborators has caused a delay on a small but significant aspect of the project, Albinak’s response is gentle but firm. “We’re the lead institution, so it’s our responsibility to push the ones who are lagging behind,” she reminds the team.

With funding for four years, the project is about halfway into its second year and the ICM has, so far, created multiple storage meth-ods that can accept various forms of clinically derived data such as ECG, genome, and pro-tein. Today the team is discussing how to inte-grate all that data and enhance the methods by which the end-user can access and analyze it.

An ample view of the grassy engineering quad and the facade of Shriver Hall can be spied from the conference room’s long window, but the team is instead focused on what’s writ-ten in orange marker on the whiteboard wall. “WebSSO, XML Data Service, AIM/XNAT, HL7aECG, WFDB, Open Clinica, Protein DB.” This cryptic list of acronyms inspires an animated discussion of how to create website flow so that individuals can both access it and add their own information.

Unlike its neighboring buildings, the CSe building is not

dedicated to a particular department, but to four of the

Whiting School’s interdisciplinary institutes and centers.

Anne Albinak, the ICM’s administrative director, leads a staff meeting in the ICM’s conference room. The room’s interactive media technology allows for open communication with collaborators at partnering universities in Ohio and California.

In the building’s open air high-bay, large scale robotics equipment stands side by side with conference tables.


Eventually, the ICM team’s efforts will mani-fest in a bevy of grid-based software tools that will enable researchers to access and confidentially share information comparing the tissue of healthy people with those who have cardiac disease—and thus accelerate the treatment of heart disease.

down the hall, on the northern end of the third floor, faculty members Sanjeev Khudanpur and Jason Eisner are conferring outside the offices of the Center for Language and Speech Processing. Khudanpur is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, while Eisner is an associate profes-sor in the Department of Computer Science. The two collaborators used to work in separate buildings. Now their offices are just a few steps away from each other.

“Jason is the algorithm guy and I’m the model guy,” is how Khudanpur explains their relationship. “One thing that this building has done,” he continues, “is enhance our ability to work together. We used to be scattered in so many places. We had a strong bond at an intellectual level, but now everyone is literally next door. It makes it so much easier to talk to people.”

And that’s exactly what they do each Wednesday at 1:30 p.m., gathering in a meet-ing room they’ve dubbed “the fishbowl.” With

two walls made entirely of glass, the room provides those inside with adjacent views of the float-ing staircase and central hall—and those passing by a glimpse of the work taking place within. Here in the fishbowl the engi-neers are joined by linguists from the Department of Cognitive Science in the School of Arts and Sciences to swap ideas on the many ways in which people pro-cess language. The linguists study how the brain learns and uses language, and they want to learn computational models from the engineers to explain the workings of this human ability. The engineers build computers to learn and use language, and want to gain greater insights into how humans do this.

“We would like to get a computer to understand speech and text with as much nuance and depth as a human would,” Eisner explains. By achieving that, computers could help man-age the vast quantities of infor-

mation available and, even, automate some of what we do, he says. “Computers have taken

over a lot of the drudgework that used to fall to secretaries, librarians, accountants, and clerks. We want this trend to continue,” Eisner notes. “Perhaps they’ll understand your email well enough to draft responses for you, manage your calendar, follow up with others, and remind you of your own promises.” What’s more, he says, since more and more human activity is going online, “the Web is our Library of Alexandria. Wouldn’t it be a pity for all that information to sit out there and have nothing done with it?”

Yet, there are hurdles to creating machines that can sift, understand, and organize those enormous tomes of verbal and written informa-tion (not just websites, but also books, research papers, news articles, newscasts, fiction, blogs, reviews, etc.). As Khudanpur points out, “Speech can be ambiguous due to dialects, pronuncia-tions, surrounding noise, mispronunciations. When humans hear it, they can sort it out by analyzing the context. Computers can’t, because they lack the real understanding of language that

is needed to resolve such uncertainty.”In his office, Khudanpur keeps an old-fash-

ioned cassette tape player. By rapidly alternat-ing between play and pause, he demonstrates how single words, when heard individually, can be surprisingly difficult to understand. Yet, when heard within a complete sentence, the word being uttered is suddenly obvious.

Consequently, the researchers in the CLSP spend their days and nights mapping out clues for the computer to look for that address the multitude of language uncertainties. “We build a degree of freedom into the model by giving the computer a range of possibilities and allow-ing it to adjust within them,” Khudanpur says. “Essentially, we’re giving the computer a knob that it can adjust to individual speakers.” With such a tuning “knob” the computer can now, for example, figure out that the sounds “pehn,” “peyan,” and “peen” can all mean pen, “particu-larly if they are preceded by words such as ‘You can write with a...’ Khudanpur explains.

on Thursdays, the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates affiliated with the CLSP attend a lunchtime paper club in a third floor conference room. Today the room is packed with students and professors. The club, initiated by Eisner, offers a chance for students to sharp-en their presentation skills, discuss the latest journal articles, and relax with their colleagues.

“We used to be scattered in so many places. We had a strong bond at an

intellectual level, but now everyone is literally next door. it makes it so much

easier to talk to people.” — sanjeev Khudanpur

Here in the “fishbowl,” researchers from various centers, institutes, and departments share ideas and research.

Jason Eisner (left) and Sanjeev Khudanpur toss ideas around a whiteboard in the hallway outside the offices of the Center for Language and Speech Processing.

“Because these meeting spaces are right here, so close to our offices,” Khudanpur says, “there’s almost no excuse to miss meetings and lectures. In the past, I’d have to walk across campus but now I see people walking past my door to a seminar and think, ‘I should go to that.’ And I do. It’s great to have everyone on


this floor, finally working together.” While the luncheon paper club gets under

way, Albinak is down the hall, finishing up a weekly meeting with the ICM’s director, Rai Winslow. Once a week they exchange updates on the institute’s operations. Today, they review everything from the status of funding proposals and the benefits of co-applying for grants to the possibility of hiring an additional software designer and the purchase of new office furniture.

Like most faculty and staff offices in the CSE building, Winslow’s is spacious and airy, with a slender, floor-to-ceiling plate glass win-dow next to the door. On his desk are three flat-screen monitors, a Macbook Air, and a sin-gle stack of books, meticulously aligned. With a PhD in biomedical engineering from the School of Medicine and an appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Winslow also has joint appointments in the Engineering School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the medical school’s Department of Medicine and its Division of Health Sciences Informatics.

Long before the ICM was a functioning institute, it was an idea formulating in Winslow’s mind and, when he launched it in 2005, Albinak was his first hire. Since then, they’ve worked to build the ICM team to more than 50 people.

While their meeting wraps up, Lee is back downstairs, talking with his own director, Noah Cowan, who launched the LIMBS lab within the LCSR five years ago. Lee updates Cowan on his latest work with research partner Amy Bastian, an associate professor of neurology at the School of Medicine.

Lee and his collaborators meet twice a month to compare the empirical data Bastian gathers while working with patients at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Lee’s theoretical evidence gained through mathematical modeling of human gait. Through this partnership, Bastian and her team can give examples of how patients adapt to having abnormal gaits. And, in return,

“with the models we’ve built,” Lee says, “we are working to give them explanations as to why.”

by the time Friday arrives it is a gorgeous spring day and the atmosphere throughout the CSE building has become decidedly more relaxed. Lee is back in his office, preparing an email to fellow members of the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association (MEGA). He’s asking for their input in selecting furniture for the newly renovated mechanical engineering student lounge in neighboring Latrobe Hall. Launched in the fall of 2006, MEGA aims to foster interactions among faculty and graduate students through monthly lab socials, prospec-tive graduate student recruiting events, and even the occasional trip to a Baltimore Orioles baseball game.

As Lee finishes up his email, Eisner and Khudanpur return to the third floor conference room for a regularly scheduled noon seminar. Each Friday, lunchtime in the CLSP is devoted to giving graduate students the chance to pres-

ent their own research to the entire cast of the CLSP. “We try to make this a special event,” Khudanpur explains. “We have only one rule: no pizza.” On this particular Friday, the special-ty cuisine is Indian food.

As approximately 40 or so people pack into the room, a few must balance plates and drinks while standing in the doorway. Sitting among the gathering is the CLSP’s director, Fred Jelinek, the Julian Sinclair Smith Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who launched the center 15 years ago. Nikesh Garera, a graduate student in Computer Science, presents “Translating Compound Words Using Cross Language Evidence from Multiple Languages.” Garera’s intensely technical presentation draws a barrage of questions and eventually evolves into a lively discussion.

On the opposite side of the building, the offices of the ICM are dark and silent. Albinak, along with Winslow and the rest of the ICM staff, have gathered on the grassy lawn outside the building’s southern end. Having kicked off her shoes, Albinak relaxes with a Diet Coke. A grill, which the team handily stores in its office kitchenette, sizzles with hamburgers and turkey burgers. A Frisbee is tossed back and forth under a sunny sky.

As the staff and students enjoy a rare Friday afternoon respite from their intense work, the CSE building, its gray slate roof rising four stories above, provides ample shade from the sun. Another workweek in the life of the CSE building comes to a close. n

Graduate students relax and share ideas in one of the many casual meeting spaces sprinkled throughout the building.

On Friday afternoon, the members of the ICM enjoy a rare respite from the workweek.


For thousands suffering from Parkinson’s disease, an advance in biomedical engineering known as deep brain stimulation appears to be a godsend. The procedure uses an electrode inserted into the brain

to help calm Parkinson’s often debilitating tremors. “There are striking images of people who’ve received the procedure,” says Murray Sachs, recently retired director of Biomedical Engineering. “The tremor goes away like that,” he says, snapping his fingers.

But it’s also, potentially, something far less beneficial. Deep brain stimulation works by exciting the dopanergic regions of the basal ganglia, where neurons are dying. “If you can stimulate the dopanergic region, you can stimu-late anything,” explains Sachs. “What if it causes psychological changes? What if it causes learn-ing problems? At what point do you pull the stimulation?” These aren’t just hypothetical questions for Sachs. He himself suffers from Parkinson’s.

The ability to control a person’s behavior via an electrode could be both a wonderful cure and a potentially horrible crime, he points out.

“This is a problem,” Sachs says. “It’s not in the future. It’s right now.”

WE LIVE IN AN AGE when technological advances occur with lightning swiftness. But there’s a crucial element over which technologi-cal strides have sometimes leapfrogged. Though

A Question of Ethics

it’s not as obviously critical to engineers as stress tolerances or reactive properties, the role of ethics—the analysis of right and wrong and the gray area in between—is just as vital.

“Engineers are supposed to be building things to make life better,” notes Allan Bjerkaas, associate dean for Engineering and Applied Science Programs for Professionals (EPP). “In our society now, where we are building things that could have unexpected impacts on our lives, we need to think clearly about how to do that safely.”

Ethical dilemmas are hardly new to the field of engineering. One need only look back to the waning years of World War II, when a small group of engineers found themselves with an ethical question of unparalleled import: “Should we build and detonate an atomic bomb?” That fateful technological leap—in which the science predicted and developed by physicists was put into real-world practice—marked the beginning of the modern era of engineering ethics. “There is a shadow over engineers that says, ‘You don’t pay enough attention to social and moral issues,’” says Sachs. “For 16 years, my colleague Eric Young and I had Friday dinners with our wives and four children. When those children were younger, most of the dinners would be spent with them accusing us of being perpetuators of the atomic bomb.” He pauses, then adds, “Interestingly, two of those kids ended up as scientists.”

as technological advances lead to new

materials, methods, and opportunities,

Johns hopkins engineers find themselves

grappling with limitless possibilities—and

unexpected challenges.

By Geoff Brown ’91 (A&S)Illustration by Michael Gibbs


In the years since the advent of the atomic bomb, ethical oversights within engineering—whether deliberate, or compounded by negli-gence and lack of communication—have proved fatal, often casting a pall on the profes-sion’s public image that has taken years to restore. The Ford Pinto’s fiery design flaw of the 1970s. The 1981 Kansas City Hyatt/Regency walkway failure. The 1986 space shut-tle Challenger explosion. The 2007 Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minnesota.

Disasters like these still weigh heavily on the minds and thoughts of engineers today. They know that, ultimately, someone did something wrong that led to these mistakes, whether it was ignoring warnings, performing substandard work, or bowing to corporate financial pressures. “When Ford manufactured the Pinto, knowing that the gas tank could rupture and explode at a low-speed impact, the public might have asked why the engineers allowed this to happen,” says Glenn Rahmoeller, an engineer who has taught ethics for a decade (including four years at Hopkins) and who currently lectures in the EPP program. “When a bridge falls down, society loses confi-dence in [engineers]. People ask, ‘How could this happen?’”

What’s upped the ante today is the increased pace of technological advances. “As engineers advance into unprecedented territory, we face increasing ethical dilemmas,” says Whiting School dean Nick Jones. In fields like biomechanical engineering, nanobiotech-nology, and information technology, new mate-rials and modes of data interaction that didn’t exist even a decade ago are being created and implemented with breathtaking speed.

In this ever-shifting landscape, when there’s often no telling where innovations will lead, the need to consider ethics has never been greater for engineers, notes James G. Hodge Jr., of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health, a col-laborative center at both Johns Hopkins and Georgetown universities.

“There’s always room for technology to surpass what we perceive as possible,” he says. “Letting technology speed ahead of the ability to assess impacts—that can be dangerous.”

One of the fields in which safety is an ever-present and growing concern is nanobiotechnology—a rapidly emerg-

ing discipline that unites biotechnology with nanotechnology. Researchers already use mate-rials at the nano scale (from 100 nanometers down to the level of individual atoms) in every-thing from sunscreen to water filtration systems to stain-resistant slacks. Creating material at that small a scale presents both enormous opportunities and innumerable questions, notes Marc Donohue, vice dean for research.

“First, nano is important not because it is smaller but because, in the nano region, fundamental physical properties are different,”

Donohue notes. “We don’t know how to pre-dict what they are. The biological properties are different too. Technology has gone beyond our scientific understanding of the implica-tions of this.”

“There’s an interesting duality in this area,” says Peter Searson, the Joseph R. and Lynn C.Reynolds Professor. “We need to be cognizant of nanoscience’s potential public health issues—but the flipside is that the science and tools that come out of this endeavor have beneficial impact and can solve problems.”

Another issue that compounds the difficulty of nanobiotechnology research is its broad impact across the physical spectrum. “It’s an incredibly multidisciplinary problem,” says Searson, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, which brings together some 162 faculty, staff, and researchers from Engineering, Public Health, Medicine, Arts and Sciences, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s the complexity of the problem now that distinguishes it. If you want to understand how a nanoparticle will interact with a cell, you need

to understand the cell. There’s the composition of the particle, the shape of the particle, its size. If we keep going, there are the various interac-tions we need to consider: What does the cell see as it comes into contact with the nanoparti-cle? It will respond in different ways to different biochemical cues. It requires scientists and engi-neers with very diverse backgrounds to address these issues.”

To illustrate Searson’s point, consider the current example of sunscreens that use titanium dioxide nanoparticles to make the lotion more effective at filtering out harmful ultraviolet rays. So far, so good.

But when the person wearing that sun-

screen takes a shower, those nanoparticles are washed off the skin and into the public sewer system. At that point, the civil engineers work-ing at the water treatment plant downstream are now going to be handling the nanoparticles: They need to know that they are coming, understand the science and policy issues associ-ated with them, and prepare the water system. How will the particles affect the environment? The material has jumped into a discipline that isn’t immediately obvious, and that’s part of the challenge of nanobiotechnology.

This complexity is a challenge both in the lab and in the real world because the public, too, has to be educated about it. “This isn’t something a research group can work on for six months and come up with all the answers,” Searson continues. “There’s an almost infinite number of combinations. We have a huge matrix and a clamor for one single answer. We need to make the public realize this is a very complex subject. We have to find more effective ways of conveying that.”

“If we are developing new technologies, it’s critical that we are also looking at the societal impact at the same time they are being developing—not after they have been released.” — Peter Searson


The exponential increase in the amount of—and access to—information that the Internet gives society has presented

computer and software engineers with their own unique set of challenges.

“I’ve been quoted as saying, ‘When the Internet was created, almost everybody naively assumed that people are going to play fair,’” says Gerry Masson, director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (JHUISI).

For Masson and his colleagues their neme-ses are not physical, like rust, water, or weight: The enemies they are fighting are other human beings, malevolently intent on bypassing securi-

ty measures and stealing personal data and information. “Anything as complicated as the Internet has major flaws in it, and those flaws can be exploited,” Masson says. “A lot of really great software can be used as a weapon. The designers never thought of that possibility.

“The information security area is interest-ing,” he continues. “There’s a neat aspect, which is that you have to tell everybody what you’re doing. And you almost have to invite people to see if they can come up with a way to get in.”

And if they do? JHUISI is working on developing answers to that ethical question as well. “We’re looking at the ethics of discovering flaws and what you do with that information,” Masson says. “Let’s say I discover that my smart key [a purely electronic key] can be used to get into any Toyota Prius. Do I tell Toyota? Do I make this info known?”

The answer, according to JHUISI, is yes. Take two recent examples of software issues made public by JHUISI faculty. In what may be their most celebrated case, Computer

Science faculty member Avi Rubin and other researchers at Independent Security Evaluators (a private company founded by Rubin) were the first to find a way to hack into Apple’s popular new iPhone, allowing outside entities to take control of the device. The researchers immediately alerted Apple about the vulnerabil-ity, and even created a software patch that could solve the problem that they were ready to hand over to the company. Rubin and his colleagues also gained national attention after they revealed serious security flaws and lapses in electronic voting machines.

“When you find a vulnerability, it’s kind of naïve to think that someone else won’t discover

it as well. If you think you’re the only person who finds a flaw, that’s arrogant,” says Masson. “What you have an obligation to do is to iden-tify the proper channels and let the information be known.”

Is engineering education keeping up with the need to equip a new generation of engineers with an ethics-focused approach to their

work and research?“Three or four years ago, the answer [for

BME graduate students] was absolutely not,” says Murray Sachs. “We did a terrible job for many years. We used to have a graduate student retreat once a year, at a place chosen by the students.” For about a day, the students would break into groups and discuss examples of ethical challenges. And that was it.

“Then, we, as a department, mandated to teach ethics,” he says. “The NIH also mandated it.” Now, the topic of ethics is infused into courses within each department, and plans are being developed to increase courses available to students going into fields in which ethics will

play a guiding role. More lectures are devoted to getting engineers to consider the impact of their work, and to talk about concerns and questions. Sachs himself has plans to debut a course next spring for graduate students; it will take place off campus, in a relaxed environment aimed at getting students to open up, he says.

In the lab, Hopkins Engineering faculty have already started to increase interdisciplinary collaboration in hopes of increasing the quality of research while minimizing unforeseen consequences (like those raised by Searson mentioned in the example of nanoparticles in sunscreen).

“When engineers come up with a new technology, they ought to talk to people in other disciplines early on,” says Rahmoeller. “Talk to sociologists and experts from the scien-tific disciplines that will use the technology. Study the long-term effects instead of waiting for a problem to occur many years down the road. In the case of nanotechnology, for exam-ple, some 95 percent of the research budget is spent on studying the potential benefits and only about 5 percent on the potential harm to individuals and society. There should be a greater balance in the funding of this research.”

“If we are developing new technologies,” agrees Searson, “it’s critical that we are also looking at the societal impact at the same time they are being developing—not after they have been released.”

For five years, Hodge has been teaching ethics to engineering and information technol-ogy undergraduate and graduate students at Hopkins. “I find that when I get them out of their element, this is a tough class for them,” he says. “The class requires them to step away from their world of programming and design, and be placed in a world that is focused on people who are affected by their programs.

“My mentality is not to limit technology for the sake of limitation,” says Hodge. “That’s not realistic. It’s about smart use. It’s about antici-pating potential impacts. Technological innova-tions can lead to tremendous health benefits. But let’s not create unintended, negative public health or health consequences along the way.”

“It’s helpful for an engineer to sleep at night if they know the overall picture, know what’s out there,” Bjerkaas adds. “And to know what they don’t know.” n


On a warm spring morning this past April, John Rettaliata ’32, PhD ’36, reclined in a chair in his suburban Chicago home and recalled his days at Johns Hopkins Engineering—and the high points of his illustrious 70-year career. Over the decades, Rettaliata has witnessed the ends of wars, helped usher in the beginnings of eras, and has, time and again, made significant and long-lasting contributions to the advance-ment of technology and society. Among his many accomplishments are the 21 years he served as president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a position on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first aeronautics committee, and the distinction of being one of the first humans to fly in a jet aircraft.

As a teenager, Rettaliata attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which pre-pared him to enter Hopkins Engineering as a sophomore in 1929. He studied under the advisement of Professor Alexander Graham Christie. “He only had about three or four pupils,” Rettaliata recalls. “We’d sit around his table and that’s how we’d conduct our courses, studying steam and gas turbines.” Those table-side conversations led to enhancements in the ways the turbine could extract thermal energy from pressurized steam, converting the energy into mechanical labor, he recalls.

When Rettaliata left Hopkins in 1936 with his freshly minted PhD, Christie helped him secure a job in Milwaukee at Allis-Chalmers, a leading manufacturing company in the Midwest. He worked in the Steam Turbine Department for eight years building turbines for military destroyers, and his diligence earned him a position on the U.S. National Advisory Council’s subcommittee on aeronautics gas turbines. During World War II, he continued his work with the United States Government; he joined a group of government-contracted aerospace experts on a tour of British aeronauti-cal research facilities—work that ultimately led to America’s first jet aircraft and dominance in aeronautical research. The work also had a personal pay-off: Rettaliata became one of the first people ever to fly in a jet.

As World War II came to a close, the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships dispatched him to Europe to, as he puts it, “see what the Germans were doing.” For weeks he was delayed in Paris, waiting for the war to end, and when it did, he accompanied the U.S. government into Germany. Rettaliata was one of the first to inspect the factories in which the opposition had built their submarines. What he found was astonishing.

At the time, submarines were powered by diesel engines when they sat on the surface of the ocean but had to resort to battery power

alumni and leadership maKing an impacT

Rettaliata, by then a recognized expert in steam and gas turbines and engines, inspected the now-defunct military’s U-boat factories, he discovered that the Germans weren’t zooming along at 20 knots on battery power; they had devised a way for their motors to run within the ocean’s depths.

As he made his way through the factories, Rettaliata learned the German engineers’ secret. “We called it a Hydrogen Peroxide Machine, because that’s what they ran it off of,” he says. To store the liquid, they filled the space between the inner and outer hulls with it. They could then disassociate it, remove the oxygen, and use it to run their engines underwater.

Returning to the U.S., Rettaliata joined the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1945 and relocated to Chicago, where he still lives today. At IIT, he rose quickly to become its dean in 1948, vice president of academic affairs in 1950, and president in 1952 at just 40 years old. As president, he led the school for more than 20 years, overseeing an explosion of growth for the school. “If you don’t have good faculty, you’ll go out of business,” he says now. Therefore, he set out to make IIT a place where people would love to teach. He initiated ambitious fundraising efforts that secured a $20 million annual budget, oversaw the con-struction of a new downtown campus center (along with architect Mies van der Rohe), and guided IIT to national prominence.

Seven years into his tenure as president, Rettaliata was asked to join President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Aeronautics and Space Committee. “We’d meet twice a month in his Cabinet room. We were drawing plans for space exploration,” Rettaliata says. That committee eventually evolved into NASA. And, 40 years ago, his brother gave me a very illustrious award,” he says, referring to one of the university’s first Distinguished Alumnus Awards, bestowed upon him in 1963 by university president Milton S. Eisenhower.

Today that award hangs in Rettaliata’s study, on the second floor of his office in his Chicago home. The walls of his office are covered with other illustrious awards— from mayoral proclamations to military commenda-tions to the Chicago Gold Medal of Merit and a fellowship from the American Society of

John rettaliata ’32, phd ’36 Engineering’s Engine of Change

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Among his many accomplishments are the 21 years he served as president of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

when they went below the surface, a switch that decreased their power and limited their speed. However, Rettaliata says, the German submarines could travel at up to 20 knots, more than twice the speed of their American counterparts that ran at 9 knots. When

Now 96, Rettaliata was one of the first to fly in a jet.


Mechanical Engineers. He also holds six hon-orary doctorates, from De Paul University, Chicago-Kent College of Law, the Michigan College of Mining and Technology, Rose Polytechnic Institute, Valparaiso University, and Loyola University.

Rettaliata retired from IIT in 1973 (“Twenty-one years as president was a long time,” he says chuckling), then became the chairman of Chicago’s Banco de Roma, which he led for six years. From there he continued to sit on at least 15 various boards, ranging from Johnson Wax and Western Electric to Sante Fe Southern Pacific and the Interna-tional Harvester Company.

Now 96, this kind and unassuming man is happy once and for all to be fully retired. “Oh, I try to stay out of trouble. I’m off all the boards, but I keep busy,” he says. Along with his wife, Caryl, Rettaliata now spends half his year at home and the other half on their yacht, which stays docked at Chicago’s Burnham Harbor. “I’m mainly attracted to the yacht because of the engine. There’s always some-thing to do in the engine room of a boat,” he says with a contented smile. “I could live in an engine room.” —Angela Roberts

Rewarding Student InitiativeFor a start-up, cVision Medical SolutionsTM is racking up an impressive track record. Founded in 2007 by Johns Hopkins research-ers and graduates, cVision’s flagship product cVeinTM began as a senior design project of students Vikram Aggarwal, Aniruddha Chatterjee, Jason Chiang, Yoonju Cho, and Wai Yim Lam. Today, the device is in clinical human trials at Hopkins’ Bayview Medical Center Cardiac Catherization Lab and will soon expand to a cardiology group in Denver.

But getting to this point wasn’t easy, recalls PhD candidate Aggarwal, MS ’07. After he and his team had created a second-generation prototype cVein (a low-cost, noninvasive solu-tion for measuring central venous pressure, safely, accurately and in real-time by a hand-held, ultrasound-guided probe), they were eager to compete at the 2007 Boomer Venture

Summit Business Plan Competition at Santa Clara University.

They lacked just one thing: the money to travel to California. “Funds were scarce at that point,” he recalls. Then they learned of the WSE Student Initiatives Fund (SIF). “Without it, we would not have been able to go,” says Aggarwal. “We were selected as one of five finalists in the competition, and the contacts and exposure we made there have catapulted us to the stage we are now.”

Established by Dean Nick Jones in 2006, the Student Initiatives Fund supports both individual students and student groups. Awards are used as seed money for projects that are so often essential to taking a student’s education and experiential learning to the next level.

Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) Council executive board member and University Alumni Council member Carl Liggio ’96, MS ’00, PhD ’01, is an enthusiastic donor to the fund. After a presentation about the Student Initiatives Fund during an October 2006 SEA Council meeting, Liggio, the founder of the energy industry’s Systems Analysis, offered a challenge on the spot to all in attendance. “I said I would donate $500 and by the end of the day, the fund had $2,000,” he recalls proudly. “I give every year. Without funding, student groups have to struggle to do things well. A little money from the fund goes a long way.”

Just ask Linda Wan ’09, who is beginning her yearlong tenure as president of Hopkins’ Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter and is a veteran of two EWB trips abroad. As leader of Hopkins’ EWB Ecuador project—the chapter currently focuses on engineering projects in Ecuador, Guatemala, and South Africa—Wan traveled in January 2006 to the rural community of Santa Rosa de Ayora, Ecuador, to assess the development and con-struction of a much-needed daycare center.

Typically, the Student Initiatives Fund supports “in country” living expenses for

Vikram Aggarwal and Linda Wan are both

grateful for the Student Initiatives Fund.

students, such as room, board, transportation, and interpreters. “It aids us in places where grant money or our own fund-raising falls short,” Wan says. “Because of the SIF, we’re able to complete our assessments and projects, so we can go back home and do our design.” As a result of her experience in EWB, Wan changed her major from chemical engineering to civil engineering, and she’s planning to apply to Michigan Technological University’s Master’s International program, which includes a year of course work followed by two years in the Peace Corps. “At Hopkins, it’s all about opportunity,” she says. “EWB has inspired me so much that I want to continue to use my skills to help people.”

Like Aggarwal and Wan, Liggio believes students gain far more than just engineering experience from the activities supported by the SIF: “It’s a great training ground. The projects make them better problem-solvers, innovators, and leaders,” says Liggio. “Students learn to create new ideas and think on their feet—that’s what they’ll need to be successful.”

—Sarah Achenbach

the Student Initiatives fund ChallengeSupporters of the Student Initiatives fund

challenge fellow engineering alumni to join with

them to raise $10,000 for the fund by end of

June 2009. This larger scale funding will enable

more student groups to pursue their passions,

spurring innovation and leadership opportunities

on campus for engineering students.

To make a gift or obtain additional information

about the fund, please contact the Whiting

School Development and Alumni Relations Office

at (410) 516-8723.

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Fischell Awarded Honorary Degree

Robert Fischell, widely recognized as the father of modern medical stents, lifetime pace-maker batteries, and implantable insulin pumps, was presented with the Doctor of Humane Letters at Hopkins Commencement ceremonies on May 22. The honorary degree, presented by President William R. Brody, rec-ognizes Fischell’s extraordinary contributions to society through his many medical device inventions, generous support to biomedical engineering education, and medical research.

Before embarking on a 38-year career with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) as a space scientist and medical device inventor, Fischell earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Duke University and a master’s in physics from the University of Maryland. During his career, he has been recognized with a U.S. Inventor of the Year Award and induction into the Space and Technology Hall of Fame as well as the National Academy of Engineering. Fischell now holds over 200 patents.

Throughout his lifetime, Fischell has founded several medical device companies

including NeuroPace, which is developing a new implantable device for ending epileptic seizures and NeuraLive, which is developing a magnetic pulse device to stop migraine headaches. Another of his companies, Angel Medical Systems Inc. (named by his grand-daughter), has developed a pacemaker-sized implantable computer that provides the earliest possible warning of an impending heart attack.

Fischell’s passion for medical devices prompted him, this past May 6, to serve as a judge for the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s annual Design Day, held at the Johns Hopkins medical campus. Fischell is slated to present the keynote lecture at next year’s design day on Monday, May 4, 2009, at the Homewood campus. —AR

A Boost for Tech TransferNurturing emerging technology into the marketplace is something Anton “Tony” Dahbura ’81, MS ’82, PhD ’84, knows more than a little about. He spent 15 years in basic research at AT&T Bell Labs and ran Motorola’s research center, where he developed software for massively parallel supercomputers. In the mid-1990s, he joined Hub Labels, Inc, his family’s commercial printing company in Hagerstown, Maryland, and today he holds the title of corporate vice president.

With his solid background in both research and business, Dahbura has led the National

Advisory Council’s (NAC) Committee on Technology Transfer Management since the committee’s inception in October 2005. The Tech Transfer committee is advising Hopkins on the process of technology transfer, a process Dahbura says has been evolving over the past few years at Hopkins. “Knowledge is best when it is used,” he says. “Johns Hopkins’ mission of ‘knowledge for the world’ guides the work of our committee, but getting the technology to market is only one aspect. Getting the technol-ogy used is the ultimate goal.”

He and his eight committee members of alumni and friends represent venture capital, engineering, technology management, intellec-tual property law, and business. “Our mission is to understand the tech transfer process and identify primary challenges and opportunities at Hopkins,” Dahbura explains, adding, “John Fini’s appointment is a huge triumph for the process.”

Fini, who joined the university last January as director of intellectual property for the Whiting School of Engineering and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, brings a wealth of experience in tech transfer—and great enthusi-asm for the work of the NAC.

“There is great science going on here,” says Fini. “It’s very helpful to give the Whiting School an outside perspective on how we should be doing things better. You couldn’t ask for a better honest-broker relationship. The ad hoc committee’s interest is only to make sure that we’re doing a good job and could do things better.”

Working closely with Fini, the ad hoc committee meets three to four times a year to advise Hopkins on the development of a per-manent tech transfer infrastructure. This infra-structure will include a committee to evaluate the commercial viability of faculty-driven emerging technology, and to offer recommen-dations on next steps.

“We had a pilot session where a few faculty members presented their research, and we gave them feedback, which is something we want to do more of in the future,” says Dahbura. “Even to play a small role in some idea that was created at Hopkins and makes its way into the world and has some small benefit is one of the best things that I could do.” —SA

Fini: “There is great science going on here.”


2008 Reunion: Homecoming at Homewood

From April 11 to 13 more than 4,200 alumni and friends returned to campus to celebrate their reunions and the 2008 homecoming. It was an exciting weekend packed with 72 events, which ranged from small class dinners to a Saturday afternoon pre-game lunch where 2,827 crab cakes were served! The Blue Jays were victori-ous over local rival Maryland Terrapins, holding a 10-4 final score. Here are photos from a few events hosted by the School of Engineering.

Jai Madhok, Jason Yang ’05, Tara Johnson ’02, and Minnan Xu gather at the BME reception.

bme alumni reception & department chair celebration On friday afternoon the Department of Biomedical Engineering hosted a reception for alumni, faculty, and students to cel-ebrate the career of recently retired department chair Murray Sachs. Several people spoke about Sachs’ distinguished career with the school and Dean Jones led a toast in Sachs’ honor. Elliot Mcveigh, the department’s current chair, was formally welcomed and gave remarks about his excitement to be a part of the community.

please save the date for reunion 2009: homecoming at homewood, april 17–19, where the blue Jays will take on navy and there will be events for alumni and friends of all ages!

dean’s breakfast The Blue Jay stopped into the Dean’s breakfast for engineering alumni on Saturday morning. Here he is pictured with James Pitts ’73 ’77 and frank krantz ’49 (top) and Cecilia & george Hudgins ’58 ’71 (bottom).

alumni college are u.s. infrastructures safe? Whiting School of Engineering Dean Nick Jones, along with Civil Engineering profes-sors Ben Schafer and Tony Dalrymple, led a discussion on problems, solutions, costs, and the politics involved in improving our nation’s infrastructure.

Murray Sachs (left) and Elliot McVeigh


alumni awards

Distinguished Alumnus AwardEstablished in 1978, this award honors alumni who have typified the Johns Hopkins tradition of excellence and brought credit to the university by their personal accomplishment, professional achievement, or humanitarian service.

Gilbert F. Decker ’58 A member of the Whiting Legacy Circle and the National Advisory Council, Gilbert F. Decker was also honored with a Heritage Award in 1998. He currently serves as a co-chair of the

Whiting School’s Campaign Leadership Committee. Service to his alma mater inspired, no doubt, by his own undergraduate experience of attending Hopkins on a full trustee scholar-ship while earning a B.S. in electrical engineer-ing. In 1966, Decker earned a master’s degree from Stanford University in operations research, and then attended the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

Currently a private consultant to the tech-nology industry, Decker’s former positions include executive vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, Inc., president and CEO of three technology companies, and assistant secretary of Research, Development and Acquisition for the U.S. Army. He has also served as chairman of the Army Science Board, the Army Acquisition Executive, the Senior Procurement Executive, the science advisor to the Secretary, and the senior research and development official for the Army. For his service, Decker’s honors include the Distinguished Public Service Medal from the Department of Defense and the Distinguished Civilian Service Medal from the Department of the Army.

He is the former director of Anteon Corp. and Alliant Techsystems, Inc. Currently, he is the director of the Allied Defense Group, Digital Fusion Inc., and CoVant Technologies, LLC, trustee for the Hertz Foundation and the Association of the U.S. Army, and a board mem-ber of the Board of Army Science & Technology at the National Academy of Sciences.

The Heritage Award Established in 1973, The Heritage Award honors alumni and friends of Johns Hopkins who have contributed outstanding service over an extended period to the progress of the university or the activities of the Alumni Association.

Carl E. Heath Jr., PhD ’52Carl E. Heath Jr. enjoyed successful careers as a research engineer and execu-tive in various ExxonMobil domestic and foreign affili-ates, and as a consultant after founding Corporate

Transformations International (CTI), a man-agement consulting firm. Now retired as CTI president, Heath, who has a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, holds numerous patents and is the author of 20 papers. He is listed in the American Men and Women of Science and Who’s Who in the East, and is a member of the Engineering Management Society, the Organization Development Network, American Society for Training and Development, American Society for Quality, American Chemical Society and American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Concerned with the lack of women in the engineering field, Heath established the Heath Fellowship for Graduate Women in Engineering at Johns Hopkins in 1995 to pro-vide support for women engineering graduate students. Last fall marked the end of his six-year, two-term membership on the Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) Council, though he continues to be an active participant in the SEA Communications Committee. A current member of the University Alumni Council and Community Service Grants and Student Services Grants committees, he also has served on his class reunion committees, including his 50th Reunion Committee in 2002.

Willis C. Gore ’48, DrEng ’52The 44 years that Professor Emeritus Willis C. Gore spent in the School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering—twice serving as its chair—are legendary.

One of the Whiting School’s most loved and respected professors, Gore’s gift is his talent for recognizing and nurturing the potential in his students. During his career, he mentored many engineering alumni and advised more than 20 PhD and 35 master’s degree students. Gore taught 10 different undergraduate and 10 different graduate courses and received a Hopkins Distinguished Teaching Award.

His career started during World War II and continued through the Cold War, during which he made significant contributions to national security. While a Hopkins undergraduate, Gore was an instructor at the Radio Material School at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. His research evolved from power, electronic and control systems to the computer age with special interests in computer engineering, operating systems, information theory, and new classes of codes and new meth-ods of decoding, which have greatly aided the field of cryptography. Gore’s more than 25 publications range from information theory and coding to current arc detection, ultrasonics, nonlinear systems, and even models of muta-tion frequency in DNA sequences. He also holds a U.S. patent known as the Gore Automatic Frequency Locking Circuit.

A member of four honor societies and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (he served a term as chairman of the IEEE Baltimore Section), Gore is a Registered Professional Engineer in Maryland and enjoyed an active consulting role with more than 15 companies—among them, AAI Corporation, Litton Industries, Aerojet, Martin Marietta, Leeds and Northrup, and Westinghouse—and two government agencies: the State of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Re-challenge yourself.

Engineering Programs for Professionals

JhU inCircle is your key to staying connected!

Log in today atalumni. jhu.edu

JHU inCircle is a new networking tool designed exclusively for Johns Hopkins alumni, faculty, and students. JHU inCircle is a secure social online community that allows you to connect with friends based on shared interests, profession, location and more.

Login at www.alumni.jhu.edu to gain FREE access to this exclusive network. Once you are in, you can:

• Connect to alumni in your area or around the globe• Join groups and discussions about your areas of interest and local JHU events• Create your own group and invite your friends to join• Network and search for career opportunities• Post job openings to hire JHU alumni at your company• And much, much more!

Be sure to fill out your profile completely, join your local chapter group, and encourage your friends to join JHU inCircle as well.

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Charles “Charlie” C. Counselman ’38 Charles C. Counselman’s devotion to his alma mater is impressive. His advice, guidance, and support of the Whiting School’s Entrepreneurship and Management (E&M)

minor has played a pivotal role in the pro-gram’s development. He is a member of the Applied Mathematics and Statistics advisory board and its E&M advisory group. In 2000, Counselman, who is chairman emeritus of Riggs, Counselman, Michaels & Downes, Inc., a privately held property and casualty insurance brokerage in Baltimore, and his wife, Catherine, created an endowed fellow-ship in the Applied Mathematics and Statistics department to aid graduate students and help with recruitment. The Counselmans also host Whiting School alumni and development events in Naples, Florida.

A stalwart donor to Hopkins’ Wilmer Eye Institute, the School of Medicine, and the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Counselman is a devotee of the Hopkins school band—he played as an undergraduate—and is an avid supporter of Hopkins athletics and a member of Blue Jays Unlimited.

CAREER NIgHTThis annual event features Hopkins alumni

who speak with current engineering

students about their experiences in the

real world and offer advice on job searching,

internships, graduate school, and career

paths. Alumni from all different fields,

including non-traditional engineering

positions, are invited to attend and network

with the students.

Wednesday, September 24, 6 pmhomewood Campus



Final ExamIn the new course Design of Biological Molecules and Systems, undergraduates learn to design and build proteins. Or at least they get to try. The course, split into two seven-week sessions, is co-taught by assistant professor Jeff gray and associate professor Marc Ostermeier, both of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “In my half of the course,” says gray, “students apply rational thought and physics to the design of a protein, using computational methods to read and manipulate 3-D structures.” Making it all possible is PyRosetta, a computer program gray helped to develop that marries a programming language called Python with Rosetta, the leading research tool for protein structure prediction and design. fundamentally, a protein’s function is dictated by its structure (or shape), which is deter-mined by its gene sequence. “Structure is inter-esting to engineers because it’s like driving a car and then opening up the engine and seeing how it

works,” says gray. By using computer models to adjust and tweak the model’s sequence and shape, students change its theoretical function. However, since a protein is a complicated system of thousands of atoms, the calculations the students must perform often become inexact. “Many forces are very carefully balanced by nature and because calculating them can be tricky, we end up having to approximate things like the effect of water or the electrostatic energy,” says gray. That complexity often prevents the students from designing a protein that could survive in real life, so, halfway through the semester, Ostermeier takes over with a different method. Their new mission: to learn how proteins evolve and function in real cells. “My approach is quantitative and rational, while Marc’s is more experimental by trial and error,” gray says. “However,” he adds with a laugh, “his usually works and mine doesn’t.” “We use evolution as our design tool,”

Ostermeier says. “You put a protein into a scenario such that if it doesn’t do what you want it to, it doesn’t survive the process. It’s survival of the fittest.” Through readings and lectures, the students learn about such experimental methods and techniques that, essentially, take an approach opposite to gray’s: by forcing a protein to evolve function and later determining its sequence and shape. By the semester’s end, the students know how to design proteins theoretically in gray’s lab and, in Ostermeier’s, the methods and techniques that can be used to build them through experimentation. “Ultimately, if engineers could build proteins that perform specific tasks,” gray says, “they could potentially do things like make better drugs, make proteins that destroy agents in biological weapons, build biosensors that detect environ-mental contaminants, or make better enzymes for biofuels. The applications could be incredible.” —AR

This protein-protein complex was created by graduate student Sid Chaudhury by docking the unbound crystal structure of the enzyme alpha-chymotrypsin and the ensemble of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) structures of the inhibitor eglin-C. Using PyRosetta, stu-dents learn to fold, dock, and design proteins.

KNOWLEDGE You bet. Every day, around the globe, Johns Hopkins faculty, clinicians, staff, students, and alumni are researching and implementing dramatic new ways to push frontiers and improve people’s lives. Right here in our Baltimore community and well beyond, we are on the front lines addressing the big questions and developing innovative solutions for issues that hit close to home — like engineering new tools to enhance robotic-assisted surgery.

Our goal is not knowledge for its own sake; everything we do is shared with the world. And you

can share in this, too. Join us in our efforts by supporting The Knowledge for the World Campaign.

For more information, e-mail [email protected] or call 410.516.8723. Don’t delay, as the

campaign ends December 31, 2008!

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To make your contribution, visit www.johnshopkins.edu/annualfund.

Brian Ejsmont ’09, a senior mechanical

engineering student, is an executive member

of Engineers for a Sustainable World, the

coordinator and chair of freshman orientation,

a member of the men’s club volleyball team,

and the Paul J. and Susan D. Kadri Scholar.

real world solutions - whiting school of engineering · real world solutions 14 from cleaner...

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