The Biomedical Engineering Society will be having a meeting Wednesday, February 18 at 5:00 pm in BEC 157 (IDEAS Meeting Room). We will be discussing the application process for medical school, including how to best use your background in engineering or science in medicine. We will go over the application timeline in detail, as well as discuss how to choose schools, volunteer experience, and how to write your personal statement.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
The next BMES meeting will be held Wednesday, January 27 at 6:00 pm in BEC 157. During this meeting, we will hear from some of the graduate students who will talk about their experiences. Also, we are continuing to hand out t-shirts to those members who paid for them, so if you paid for a shirt and haven't picked it up yet, be sure to come!
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
"The Biomedical Engineering Society needs your opinion on several aspects of the Fall Annual Meeting. The field and BMES have grown dramatically since the first Annual Meetings, but the structure and operation of the meeting have changed very little. The BMES Board of Directors is now considering whether it is time to make some changes. They recognize that our members and other attendees may have different perspectives, and need solid advice on what currently works well and what needs improvement. Thus your participation in the BMES Annual Meeting Survey is very important. We hope to complete this survey in a short time, so please use the link provided here and take the survey today. This will take just a few minutes of your time."
Link to BMES Annual Meeting Survey: BMES Annual Meeting Survey
Rob Linsenmeier
Chair, National Meetings Committee, BMES
Dr. Donghui Zhu from University of Rochester Medical Center will present in Biomed room 157. Dr. Zhu is a faculty candidate for Biomedical Engineering. Students are encouraged to attend to see an example of a current "job talk" and to have input into our hiring process. Dr. Zhu's abstract and title of seminar are below.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
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Alteration of Cellular Membrane Dynamics under Stress
Donghui Zhu, Ph.D.
Oxidative stress produced by excess reactive oxygen species (ROS) has been implicated in the pathogenesis of brain injuries and neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Excess production and deposition of cytotoxic amyloid-b peptide (Ab) in brain is widely regarded as a major cause to the pathology of AD. ROS or Ab induced stress may affect cellular membrane dynamics, including plasma membrane and mitochondrial membrane. First, we investigated how ROS affect cellular membranes and associated cytoskeletal organization as well as the underlying mechanisms for these changes in rat primary astrocytes. ROS promoted actin polymerization, induced the formation of cellular protrusions and cell-to-cell tunneling nanotube-like connections among astrocytes, and increased the colocalization of myosin Va with F-actin. ROS also caused plasma membrane to become more gel-like. Intracellular p38 MAPK pathway was found to play an important role in all these alterations due to ROS. Cytosolic phospholipase A2 (cPLA2), then, was shown to be the downstream enzyme which mediates the membrane property changes induced by ROS. ROS increased F-actin-dependent translocation of cPLA2 to plasma membranes. Next, we studied the alterations in mitochondrial membrane dynamics and the role of PLA2 due to Ab insult in primary astrocytes. Inhibition of both cytosolic and calcium-independent PLA2 (iPLA2) significantly suppressed Ab-induced mitochondrial membrane potential loss and ROS production. cPLA2 needed ~12 minutes for activation and translocation to mitochondria, whereas iPLA2 mediated mitochondrial dysfunction immediately after addition of Ab. Our study provided some meaningful insight into the mechanisms of how oxidative stress and Ab alter cellular morphology and functions.
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BMES will be having a meeting this MONDAY, DECEMBER 15 at 6pm in BEC 157. Dr. John Mays, an orthopedic surgeon and Louisiana Tech biomedical engineering alumnus will be our guest speaker. Also, t-shirts will be handed out to those students who paid their local membership dues after the meeting (assuming the company finishes our order on time).
Also, here are two upcoming events in the college that you may want to attend.
"Colonel Gary Johnston will be our guest speaker at the “Today’s Leaders in Engineering and Science” Series. Colonel Johnston will make his presentation to the COES student body on Wednesday, December 17th in the IfM Auditorium at 4PM." The flyer for this event is attached.
"The annual ESA Christmas Party will be held on December 17th at 7pm in BH 304. To insure that the night will be fun filled, I would encourage you to help spread the word. Remember, the more is always merrier. There will be food, games, and prizes. Also this party would be a great opportunity for freshman engineering students to get their sheet signed. I appreciate your time and hope to see you there."
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
BMES will be having its first meeting of the winter quarter Thursday, December 4 at 6pm in the biomedical engineering building. We will hear from some of our professors and introduce the class representatives. Hope to see you all there!
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
It's that time again to renew your membership (or join) the national BMES organization. You can do so by going to www.bmes.org and clicking "Join BMES Now" in the middle of the page. Students can join for $30 (and you have the option of adding the journal print subscription for $50). Your affiliation is BMES student chapter, and the faculty advisor (Sponsor) is Dr. Alan Chiu, alanchiu@latech.edu.
After joining, you will receive a BMES national ID number. Please email me your name, email address, and this number once you receive it. We have to have this information to maintain our status as a student chapter.
Please let me know if you have any problems, and thanks for joining!
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
BMES will be having our last meeting of the fall quarter this Wednesday, November 5, at 7pm. We will meet in Adam's Parlor at 7pm to take our organization photo for the yearbook. Try to be there a few minutes early to take the picture so that we can stay on schedule.
After our photo, we will all go back to the biomed building to finish our meeting. At the meeting we will be completing our BMES quarter evaluations. We will also be collecting the class representative applications. The class representative applications are due by the end of the meeting, so if for some reason you cannot attend, make sure you contact me to turn in your form early.
We will also be discussing a social activity for the first week of the winter quarter.
Hope to see you all there, and good luck with the rest of this quarter!
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
We will be taking our organization photo for the yearbook Wednesday, November 5, at 7pm in Adam's Parlor. All BMES members are invited to be a part of this photo. Please be sure to arrive a few minutes early so that we can stay on schedule.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
I was just wondering if anyone would like to talk about their experiences at conferences or during internships or undergraduate research at our BMES meeting tomorrow night (7pm). All that is required is a few minutes worth of stuff to talk about so that people know what kinds of opportunities are available as undergrads. If you could, please just make up 1 powerpoint slide for each experience you want to talk about and email it to me (mms022@latech.edu) tomorrow so I can add it to the rest of the slides.
Johanna Skinner will be talking briefly about the national conference trip we recently took. I am hoping Melanie Groan, Drew Thomas, and Sami Shalhoub will be willing to talk more about the Glenwood internship, especially since students will be registering for classes soon.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
The next presentation in Dr. Napper's "Today's Engineering and Science Leaders" Series is scheduled for next Thursday, October 23 at 4:00 in the IfM Auditorium. Rick Fiser is the Global Director for R&D for Covidien, a major medical device manufacturer in St. Louis, MO. Rick received his BS and MS degrees from Louisiana Tech in Biomedical Engineering. He worked for several years for NASA and then moved into medical device research and development. He will highlight lessons learned from industry and from his
many projects.
Those of us who attended the BMES National Conference this fall were able to meet Rick Fiser in St. Louis. He is a very engaging speaker, and I highly recommend you all attend this lecture if possible, especially as he is a biomedical engineer.
I hope you are all able to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
If you have been involved with any internships, co-ops, summer jobs, or research experiences, or if you have attended any society conferences relevant to biomedical engineering, I would like to invite you to share your experience with BMES at our next meeting. All that would be required is a few PowerPoint slides that help explain what you did, and you would need to be able to stand up and talk about your experience for a few minutes.
This is a really great opportunity to get the word out about the experiences that have helped you in your career so far. If you are interested in sharing your experiences, please reply to this email with a little bit of information about you (classification, hometown, concentration, future plans, etc) and what you would like to talk about.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
BMES will be having a meeting Monday, October 13, at 5pm in BEC 157. This meeting is in conjunction with the Biomedical Engineering Doctoral Seminar Course. We will be guests of Dr. DeCoster and this class during the meeting, so please remember this if you attend and behave accordingly.
The meeting will be a guest lecture given by Dr. Alan Chiu. Below is a brief synopsis of his lecture. I hope you are able to attend this seminar - it should be very interesting.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
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"Coupled oscillator model of the hippocampus for the study of spatial entrainment and resonance behavior"
The coupled oscillator model was developed to characterize the transmembrane voltage activity of excitable cells that arises from the membrane mapping of a potential intracellular clock. It is a robust model that is especially suitable for the study of cellular assemblies with endogenous rhythms. In this presentation, the ability of the coupled oscillators to model the lobster stomatogastric ganglion and in-vitro hippocampal pyramidal cells /interneurons network is illustrated. The relationship between the network complexity and the model coupling parameters is discussed. Utilizing properties such as unstable periodic orbits in the chaotic manifold, the analysis of potential seizure control strategies using small perturbations and stochastic resonance measurement in the theta and gamma range are performed to study the effect of noise on network entrainment and signal-to-noise ratio improvement.
Other ongoing work in my research group
will also be presented. First, we validate the small network simulation results using layer-by-layer assembly techniques for function restoration application. Second, we modify the synaptic coupling pathway of the coupling equations to include facilitation and potentiation in small
networks. Lastly, we expand the phase to waveform mapping function to higher dimensions to incorporate the rate of change in ionic movement and channel conductance to compute the transmembrane potential.
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Please see the email below from Dr. Napper. This should be a very interesting presentation. The flyer is attached.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
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"Please join me in inviting our students to the first of this year’s “Today’s Leaders in Engineering and Science”. Dr. John “Pete” Ball is a distinguished business leader, with a technical background (B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University, Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin), and a business background (MBA from the University of Richmond, M.S. in Management and Entrepreneurship from Carnegie Mellon University). As a co-founder of his company, Xroads Solutions Group, Pete has over 30 years of corporate turnaround experience, and has a keen ability to quickly isolate and correct operational and financial problems. He has successfully served as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Advisor, and Board Director for troubled manufacturing, retail/franchising, temporary staffing, healthcare and energy-related companies. He has also led manufacturing and industrial service firms, including aerospace and defense, heavy equipment, sporting goods, automotive parts, oil field equipment, apparel and footwear.
Dr. Ball will introduce students to some of the business principles he has used, and the career decisions he has made. The presentation will be on Thursday, October 2, at 4:00 in the IfM Auditorium."
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BMES will be having its first meeting of the school year Monday, September 22 at 7 pm in the biomedical engineering building, room 157.
We will discuss careers in biomedical engineering, internship and job opportunities, local chapter events and activities, our t-shirt design, and leadership positions for freshman and sophomore representatives.
We will have local membership applications at the meeting and will be collecting local dues ($35, checks can be made out to BMES). Local dues entitle you to 1 year of local membership, a BMES t-shirt, and admission to all local chapter events.
BMES will also have a booth at Gumbo Fest (Wednesday, September 17 from 5-7 pm) where you can fill out membership applications and pay local dues.
Hope to see you all there!
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
I just wanted to remind everybody about the Fall Career Days (September 25 and 26). You need to register for the Career Fair in Keeny Hall if you plan to attend. The Career Center website is below. You can see what companies are coming to the career fair on the website by clicking on the students and alumni link and then on the career/recruitment days link.
http://www.careercenter.latech.edu/
Michelle Sibille
BMES President
We would like to reserve the nominations for the Engineer's Ball court for seniors to honor their contributions to the program. However, you must be present at the meeting to be nominated. If for some reason you cannot attend the meeting, please email me today (mms022@latech.edu).
Also, I have to turn in the list of participants for the COES Major competition tomorrow night after the meeting. BMES will be covering the registration fee, so don't worry about that. If you are interested in competing, please email me as soon as possible. It is first come, first serve.
Michelle Sibille
BMES President