McKelvey School of Engineering

The Department of Energy has funded a three-university collaboration led by Washington University in St. Louis to approach the problem of algal fuels systematically.In a two-step project, the team will first attempt a comprehensive understanding of the metabolic machinery of selected cyanobacterial strains and then implement that understanding by assembling a novel bacterium with the machinery needed to produce fuel molecules. They will be bringing to bear on the problem of algal fuels the most sophisticated approaches contemporary biology now has to offer: systems biology and synthetic biology.

The White House announced Sept. 27 that Lan Yang, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science of Washington University in St. Louis has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers.The early career award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Preston M. Green Hall, a new engineering building on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, was dedicated Friday, Sept. 23. The keynote speaker at the dedication was be Charles M. Vest, PhD, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nancy Green, widow of WUSTL benefactor Preston M. Green, for whom the building is named, also spoke.

Mary C. Molloy, secretary and receptionist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science since 1981, died Sept. 3, 2011, of a stroke. She was 81.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis will dedicate a new building, Preston M. Green Hall, Friday, Sept. 23, and in conjunction will hold the symposium “Challenges & Opportunities in Engineering Education & Research.” The symposium, which will feature National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh, DSc, is open to the public. It will be held from at 2:30 p.m. in Room 300 of the Laboratory Sciences building on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus. 

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.