SWE - Winter 2009 - (Page 26) ALEKSEI AKSIMENTIEV AND KLAUS SCHULTEN, THEORETICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL BIOPHYSICS GROUP , BECKMAN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN. Created with the computer program Visual Molecular Dynamics, this image is a snapshot from a molecular dynamics simulation — a computational method for imaging nanometer scale processes at the atomic level. lenge is to develop a robust device that can work on more than one frequency. Thinking ahead to the other advances, Lyons points to a public safety system that would not only proactively dispatch but also report and survey what is going on as it happens and direct the safety measures. Health Semahat Demir, Ph.D., is adamant that the solutions to challenges in the health category must be interdisciplinary, and she has a solid basis for that observation. Her career is as interdisciplinary as is the field of biomedical engineering. Beginning with her research focus on computational modeling of bioelectricity in subcellular, cellular, and multicellular systems, she was a professor of biomedical engineering at the Joint Biomedical Engineering Program of the University of Memphis and University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Her background from industry, academia, and government has prepared her to find solutions to the grand challenges in the health field. THURMAN HOBSON, UNIV. OF TENNESSEE HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER “Medicine can become predictive, preemptive, and personalized. This is a major challenge in how we can engineer better medicines and new treatments for emerging diseases.” Semahat Demir, Ph.D., Program Director for Biomedical Engineering, National Science Foundation, 2003 SWE Distinguished New Engineer, 2005 SWE Emerging Engineer Award in Academia, FY07 and FY08 SWE Director of External Affairs Currently, she directs and administers grant programs by reviewing panels and recommends proposals to receive funding, and she participated in the development of 10 crossdirectorate and interagency funding programs. “My work encompasses three of the challenges in the health category that relate to my field: advance health informatics, engineer better medicines, and reverse engineer the brain,” she explained. According to Dr. Demir, biomedicine covers a wide spectrum of clinical and basic science and uses tools from math, the physical sciences, and engineering. For that reason, she said, the solutions must cross boundaries. She asks three questions that summarize her recent work: “How can we understand the brain and thus understand diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism? How does the interplay of biology and experience form our brains, and how do we keep our brains healthy?” To accomplish this, she said, biomedical researchers must be able My fellow SWE engineers: to manipulate “Many women are interested and underin medicine because of the stand living impact they can make on systems at the society. I challenge my SWE lowest level, colleagues that if they are by reaching working in an engineering the nano- and discipline in which they don’t pico-scales, see an immediate impact to which are medicine, you will find that close to the engineering can be applied atomic level. to medical science.” Her challenge is to go to the lowest level and integrate knowledge from the lowest to the highest. “The brain is the least understood organ in the body but is the control center,” she noted. “Learning from living organisms or biomimetics that imitate nature will greatly advance our ability to develop better computers and brain-like devices.” Any opinions, findings, or conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Joy of living Judy Vance, Ph.D., has a broad perspective of virtual reality and its functionality for engineers. She saw the progression from vellum drawings, to 2D AutoCAD®, to 3D computer modeling. Now she looks ahead to advances in positioning sensing and force-feedback devices to give users a sense of touch and cites Wii™ computer games as “one of the most widespread virtual reality interfaces to date.” Graduate students Jessica Stubbs, left, and Janice Zawaski, right, at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center use tools from math, the physical sciences, and engineering to understand living systems. 26 SWE WINTER 2009
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