ETIC Investments at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) are focused in biomedical engineering and environmental observation and prediction. These investments have increased OHSU's capacity to perform research that supports Oregon industries and to educate graduate students who can join these industries to perform innovative research and development in these disciplines.
Success Stories in Biomedical Engineering
Student Profiles: Biomedical Engineering
Success Stories in the NSF Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction (CMOP)
Nano-biomedical Engineering:
BME successfully recruited Dr. Wassana Yantasee to OHSU in Dec. 2009. Dr. Yantasee has been quick to establish new collaborations within BME and the broader OHSU community. She is establishing a new translational company that will focus on moving benchside discoveries in this area to clinical interventions. Our existing work in nano-dots spearheaded by Dr. Tania Vu continues to be productive with new collaborations researching cancer delivery mechanisms with Dr. Brian Druker of the Knight Cancer Institute. Her work recently received an additional award from ONAMI in a new collaboration with Dr. Brian Druker on cancer delivery mechanism.
Vascular & Cardiovascular Engineering:
Dr. Owen McCarty has received several important awards including a new collaboration through Scripps Research Institute working on cancer cell mapping and detection. This five-year award involves multiple agencies that will likely lead to additional long-term collaborations and enhancements to cancer treatment.
Neurotechnology Recruitment:
Our neurotechnology area continues to be strong, with an excellent record of funding. Our neurotechnology faculty along with collaborators within OHSU’s Departments of Medical Informatics and Neurology are part of a nationwide project aimed at determining how to assist the elderly not only in being independent longer and healthier, but are part of a larger movement that will change our health care delivery methods to more in-home and personalized care and monitoring.
BME recruits new chair:
Internationally renowned cancer and genomic researcher Joe Gray, PhD, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the new Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, holding the Gordon Moore Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering, effective January 1, 2011. Dr. Gray will also serve as the Director of the new OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine.
Dr. Gray will oversee investment in new faculty and technology that will help realize the Knight Cancer Institute vision to unravel the molecular subtypes of cancer and to develop durable therapies for these cancers, as well as provide significant new resources for basic science research across OHSU. As part of this, Dr. Gray envisions a vital scientific future and leadership role for the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and will leverage ETIC funds to recruit outstanding faculty and students.
Dr. Gray will move quickly to establish the new OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine. Under Dr. Gray’s leadership, the center will establish and support new internal collaborations, as well as academic, government and industry partnerships. The center will eventually be located in the new collaborative life sciences building planned for the South Waterfront.
Key research staff and others from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including Paul Spellman, PhD, will accompany Dr. Gray to OHSU. Dr. Spellman is an internationally regarded genome scientist. He will contribute to research at the new Center and will serve as a faculty member in the Department of Molecular & Medical Genetics. Dr. Gray will also recruit six new faculty members to OHSU, who will hold primary appointments in either basic or clinical departments depending on the best academic fit.
Nate Bodenstab (an Oregon native) has developed several novel techniques for very high efficiency context-free syntactic parsing, yielding substantial speed increases over widely used parsers in the field. He is the lead author on a paper that was one of only 18% of submitted papers that were accepted for the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the premier international conference in the field of Natural Language Processing. This work represents the most mature of his many thesis-related strands, and the excellent reception within the ACL reviewing process bodes well for the rest of that work. His thesis supervisor, Dr. Brian Roark, was supported by ETIC, and joined OHSU from AT&T Research Labs. Nate’s line of research is fundamental, and hence has a very wide range of applications, including Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech Synthesis – areas in which the Center has a world-wide reputation. Each of these technologies, in turn, have applications in the health (e.g., medical dictation, analysis of atypical language use in autism), commercial (e.g., navigation systems that listen and talk), and military sectors (e.g., speech data mining). Having participated in competitive internship programs at Google and Nuance, he is well positioned for work in either industry or academia after finishing his thesis.
Maider Lehr, coming from the Basque region in northern Spain, works on Automatic Speech Recognition, and is supervised by ETIC-supported Dr. Izhak Shafran, who was previously with AT&T Research Labs. Before joining CSLU, she worked on Audio-Visual Speech Synthesis. Last year, she won the 2nd Best Student Paper Award in Automatic Speech Recognition at the premier international speech technology conference, the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2010. She attended the Hopkins Summer School on Language Technology to take advantage of close collaboration with leading speech and language researchers, and will be participating in the highly selective Hopkins summer workshop this year, working for 6 weeks on solving problems in the frontiers of speech and language research. She plans to pursue a career in industrial research.
Chris Whelan came to CSLU from Harvard's Computer Science Departmenet with extensive industrial coding experience. He is supervised by Dr. Kemal Sönmez, who joined CSLU from SRI International in Palo Alto and whose startup package was funded by ETIC. He designed and built a popular Network Biology tool (GraphletCounter) as a part of open source CytoScape project. It is already used in several projects. He also built a computational peptide design framework using Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFST), the first application of WFSTs to computational biology and arguably one of the most sophisticated sequence models to be used in comp bio so far. Using this framework, he predicted peptides with (i) specific binding abilities, and (ii) anti-microbial properties, both under validation at UW Genetically Engineered Material Science and Engineering Center (GEMSEC). Major publication to follow validation. He is currently working on analysis of genomic rearrangements in cancer with next generation sequencing technologies (massively parallel sequencing) using both The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data and locally produced data. His work exemplifies the synergy between diverse areas – speech, language, and computational biology – when researchers share a common core of algorithms and closely collaborate.
Center of Excellence: ETIC investment was applied by the Oregon Health & Science University to strengthen and ensure the renewal to full-term of a national center of excellence, the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation & Prediction (CMOP).
ETIC investment has been applied to attract or retain faculty who work closely at the interface of technology and science. In particular: