McKelvey School of Engineering

Raised in a secret town in Siberia and trained in control theory for ICBM guidance, Igor Efimov, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, wouldn’t be working at WUSTL had the Soviet Union not broken up immediately after he defended his dissertation in biophysics, providing him an opportunity to leave. His research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then pausing before repeating.

This summer students participating in the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environmental Partnership (MAGEEP) International Summer Experience traveled to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong metropolitan area to learn about alternative energy research and practice but also to explore the festivals, museums and food of another culture.

Just one second, one heartbeat. That’s what is needed for a new, noninvasive functional imaging technology, developed by a Washington University in St. Louis scientist, to record data for locating the source in the heart of a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia (VT). WUSTL researchers in biomedical engineering and medicine report in the Aug. 31, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine, that the technique would far more quickly find the source and type of VT, saving hours of mapping.  

St. Louis-area high school student Anjali Fernandes creates a wind turbine during the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s “Explore Engineering” program July 26. The program grew out of a conversation between students who belong to the National Society of Black Engineers and Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean and the Spencer T. Olin Professor, and seeks to give underrepresented groups exposure to engineering and to the university.

A clinical warning system undergoing a feasibility study at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis will include wireless sensors that take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute. The data  and lab results in the electronic medical record will be continually scrutinized by a machine-learning algorithm looking for signs of clinical deterioration. If any such signs are found, the system will call a nurse on a cellphone, alerting the nurse to check on the patient.

Two recent research studies have found differences between the distribution of potassium-ion-channel variants in the mouse heart and in the human heart. In the mouse, the ion channels in the atria are different from those in the ventricles. In people there is no such chamber specificity. The difference is crucially important for the development of safe and effective cardiovascular drugs.

Student Financial Services can help departments hire part-time student workers for the 2011-12 academic year. Departments hiring eligible federal work-study students pay only 50 percent of the student’s total earnings; the other 50 percent is covered with U.S. Department of Education funding. Work-study-eligible undergraduates worked in more than 170 university departments and offices during the 2010-11 academic year, and their work activities ranged from coordinating university-wide blood drives to serving as tutors.

Educators from across St. Louis will build and test robots using LEGOs as they explore teaching science, technology, engineering and math in grades K-12. They will share strategies for using the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, which can turn the building toys into programmable robots, during an all-day conference Friday, June 17, at Washington University’s Whitaker Hall. 

The Optical Society (OSA) has awarded the C.E.K. Mees Medal to Lihong V. Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. The medal was given for Wang’s seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.

Bolstering its emphasis on interdisciplinary efforts, Washington University will offer five new courses rooted in a partnership between two or more schools. In tandem with the growing trend of cross-collaboration in research and the professional arena, the Office of the Provost created its Cross-School Interdisciplinary Teaching Grants Program in 2010. The first of those grants was announced last month.