Dr. Entcheva and her team have been awarded a five-year $2.43M grant from the National Institutes of Health "Cardiac Optogenetics: A Cell Delivery Approach" - the first grant by NIH to specifically expand the new field of optogenetics to the heart. Dr. Entcheva's team has pioneered the application of light-sensitive ion channels to mammalian cardiac tissue and the integration of optogenetics with high-speed, high-resolution optical imaging of excitation. This grant, a collaborative work with Drs. Ira Cohen and Peter Brink, draws on expertise in optical mapping, mathematical modeling, and genetic modification of stem cells for use in cardiac electrophysiology. It aims to develop a quantitative framework for cardiac optogenetics in silico, in vitro and in vivo and to allow imaging and actuation of heart tissue by light with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution for the better understanding, prevention and termination of life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.

Press/media coverage of our recent work on cardiac optogenetics - some shown below:

• American Heart Association
• MIT's Technology Review
• Photonics.com
• Science Daily
• Stony Brook University News

Wedding bells for current and former lab members this August!

• Former lab member Rupinder gets married to lovely Ayesa – an Indian wedding in New York!
• Marcel (our German-in-Japan visiting scientist) ties the knot with lovely Marina – a Japanese wedding!
• Kwan (new lab member) gets married – a wedding in Taiwan!

Good luck to all!!!

New grants: Ujas (now medical student) was awarded the highly competitive Glorney-Raisbeck fellowship in cardiovascular disease from the New York Academy of Medicine to perform research in the lab.

Jackie won a summer URECA fellowship, and Sandy will spent the summer at NIH supported by a bioengineering fellowship.

Congratulations to multiple graduates affiliated with the lab!

Harold obtains his MD; Steve, Aashay, Budassi, Hala and Syed get their B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Mitch graduates from high school!

Mitch deservingly becomes a semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent competition 2008-2009 for his research project in the lab!

 

Our lab congratulates multiple graduates!

CY and Pei get their PhD degrees in BME and Computer Science, respectively; Ujas, Ravi and Sal get their BME Bachelors degrees!

Our lab is part of a newly NIH-funded grant to establish a Systems Biology Center in New York State (SBCNY). This is a collaborative large-scale effort involving Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM), Columbia University College of Physicians, Stony Brook University, Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences at NYU, City College CUNY and IBM TJ Watson Research Lab.

Ujas Shah becomes the second Goldwater scholar from our lab!
This competitive scholarship program recognizes the best undergraduates in science and engineering nationwide.
Congratulations!

Our review article on optical mapping, which appeared in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology this year, was featured in Biophotonics International, p.61, under a heading "Toward Ideal Imaging Equipment".

And Rupinder Singh becomes the second private pilot from the lab!

Congratulations to Rupinder Singh, selected as the outstanding BME senior for the 2006 graduating class! And off he goes to Cornell! Good luck!

LAB UNDERGRADS SWEEP MORE AWARDS: Lenny and Rupinder received recognition awards for excellence in research. A hat trick: Lenny, Ujas and Ravi got the URECA award to conduct research in the Summer of 2006.

Lenny Varghese is awarded a fellowship from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program.

Emilia Entcheva has been awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation - an experimental grant on bioelectricity and cell signaling and a computational grant on applying hybrid automata to biological problems in collaboration with the Computer Science Department.

Congratulations to Melissa Farrell and Hui-Jing Yu, graduating with B.S. in BME!

Our "acoustic micromachining" article in Lab-on-a-Chip has been selected as a "hot article" by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and featured here: "Microchips killed the radio star"

Harold Bien becomes officially a private pilot!

Harold Bien is awarded National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Fellowship entitled "Myocardial Response to Particulate Matter Air Pollution"

Lihong Yin is awarded the Master's Degree in Biomedical Engineering (Thesis: "Intracellular Calcium Dynamics in Engineered Cardiomyocyte Networks")

Emilia Entcheva was awarded a 4 year grant by the American Heart Association to study the hypertropy arrhythmias connection in an engineered model of heart tissue.

Cover illustration in April 2003 issue of Journal of Cell Science, accompanying D. Ingber's "Commentary on Tensegrity"; Entcheva E, Bien H, and Yin L. "Mechanical and spatial determinants of cytoskeletal geodesic dome formation in cardiac fibroblasts" (submitted manuscript)

Harold Bien won 1^st Place in the Annual IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Conference Student Paper Competition at the Second Joined BMES and IEEE EMBS Meeting in Houston, TX