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Biomedical Engineering

About
Deji Akinwande is a professor and holds the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering #8 at The University of Texas at Austin, Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2009, where he conducted research on the material science, device physics and circuit applications of carbon nanotubes and graphene. His master’s research in applied physics at Case Western Reserve University pioneered the design and development of near-field microwave probe tips for nondestructive imaging and studies of materials.

Akinwande was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2021, and he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017. He has been honored with the 2018 Fulbright Specialist Award, 2017 Bessel-Humboldt Research Award, the U.S Presidential PECASE award by President Obama, the inaugural Gordon Moore Inventor Fellow award, the inaugural IEEE Nano Geim and Novoselov Graphene Prize, the IEEE “Early Career Award” in Nanotechnology, the NSF CAREER award, several DoD Young Investigator awards, the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, and was a past recipient of fellowships from the Kilby/TI, Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Stanford DARE Initiative.

His recent results on silicene have been featured by Nature News, Time and Forbes magazines and were selected among the top 2015 science stories by Discover magazine. He invented 2D memory, also known as atomristors. His work on flexible 2D electronics was highlighted among the "best of 2012" by the nanotechweb news portal and has been featured on MIT's Technology Review and other technical media outlets. He is a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Electron Device Society, an Editor for Nature NPJ 2D Materials and Applications and on the editorial boards for Science, ACS Nano and Nano Letters journals. He is the co-chair of the Gordon Research Conference on 2D electronics, and was a past Chair of the 2018/2019 Device Research Conference (DRC), and the Committee Chair of Nano-devices for the 2018 IEEE IEDM Conference. He co-authored a textbook on carbon nanotubes and graphene device physics by Cambridge University Press, 2011, and was recently a finalist for the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, the highest teaching award from The University of Texas System. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Research Interests

• Nanoscale devices
• Carbon nanotubes and graphene
• Plastic nanoelectronics and nanotechnology
• High-frequency analog circuit design
• Biosensors

Research Focus
Akinwande's research focuses on 2D materials and nanotechnology, pioneering device innovations from the lab towards applications.

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Research Interests

• Immunoengineering
• Biomaterials
• Nanomedicine
• Drug discovery and delivery
• Cell and tissue engineering

Research Focus
Research in the Yin lab focuses on employing a biomaterials-centric approach to elucidate the key mechanisms for potentiating or diversifying the immune responses, and in parallel, to precisely modulate the immune system and create new immunotherapies against cancer and infectious diseases. The lab leverages cutting-edge technologies in synthetic chemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, systems immunology and organoid models to advance developments in cancer immunotherapy and anti-viral vaccines. Yin's ultimate goal is to translate these new technologies and therapies for clinical applications.

Related Websites
Laboratory of Biomaterials for Immunoengineering

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About
Lief Ericsson Fenno, MD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dell Medical School and an assistant professor of neuroscience in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Fenno received his bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and an M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed the adult psychiatry residency at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and is board-certified in adult psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Additionally, he completed postdoctoral training in bioengineering at Stanford University.

Research Interests

• Molecular biology, genetics and genomics
• Cellular/molecular structures
• Optical imaging
• Cognition and sensory systems
• Neurological disease/addiction
• Electrophysiology, optogenetics and chemogenetics
• Neuroscience

Research Focus
Dr. Fenno's clinical specialty is the medical management of addiction, with a focus on the use of medication-assisted treatment, including buprenorphine and methadone, for the treatment of opioid use disorder.

Dr. Fenno's scientific goal is to design, construct, validate and apply novel molecular and viral tools to understand the brain in health and disease for the benefit of diverse patient populations. His specific research interests include the development and application of novel molecular tools that enable precision manipulation of targeted neuron populations in awake, behaving subjects.

Related Websites
Fenno Lab
Dell Medical School Faculty Profile
UT Austin Department of Neuroscience Faculty Profile

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Research Interests

• Biotechnology
• Protein therapeutics
• Vaccine development
• Applied immunology
• Microbiology

Research Focus
Jennifer Maynard's lab develops protein therapeutics and vaccines to address unmet medical needs in infectious diseases. These proteins aim to directly interfere with disease progression or augment essential immune system activities. To do this, they design a candidate protein with an emphasis on engineering the kinetics with which it interacts with other proteins, as well as targeting protein transport to specific tissues in the body. This is followed by protein expression and purification to make the protein; biophysical, biochemical and cellular analyses to elucidate the molecular basis of activity; and, ultimately, in vitro and in vivo experiments to evaluate the protein’s ability to prevent disease.

Maynard's specific research goals include understanding mechanisms of protective immunity and using this information to engineer more effective vaccines and therapeutics and reverse engineering pathogenic strategies used by bacterial pathogens for biomedical and biotechnological applications. She is also interested in controlling cellular immunity through manipulation of T cell receptor-peptide MHC interactions. and applying protein engineering approaches to issues in structural biology.

Awards & Honors

• National Academy of Inventors (NAI), Senior Member, 2023
• Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, 2017
• Inaugural University of Texas “Emerging Inventor of the Year” Award, 2015
• Bill & Melinda Gates Grand Challenge Awards, 2009, 2016
• Texas Exes Teaching Award for the Cockrell School of Engineering, 2012
• Most Outstanding Professor in Chemical Engineering, Student Engineering Council, 2010
• Packard Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, 2005
• Dreyfus New Faculty Award, 2003
• National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2002-2004

Related Websites
Maynard Lab

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About
Linda J. Noble-Haeusslein is a professor of neurology for the Dell Medical School and a professor of psychology for the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Research Interests
Translational neuroscience research in the field of neurotrauma

Research Focus
Linda Noble-Haeusslein is working to develop targeted therapeutics that will improve recovery after traumatic spinal cord and pediatric brain injuries. Her research relies on cellular, molecular and behavioral tools to identify key mechanisms underlying early cell injury that impair recovery processes in preclinical models of neurotrauma. This multifaceted approach has led to the discovery of new pharmacologic and stem-cell-based therapeutics that ameliorate several key features of spinal cord injury, namely, bladder and locomotor dysfunction and central neuropathic pain.

More recent research includes a novel model of concussion in the gyrencephalic adolescent brain, where the early immune response may render the brain more vulnerable to repeat insults. In addition, she is addressing the cross-talk between the injured pediatric brain and the microbiome, which may give rise to long-term changes in social behaviors.

Related Websites
Noble Lab
Dell Medical School Faculty Profile
College of Liberal Arts Faculty Profile

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About
José del R. Millán is a professor and holds the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a professor in the Department of Neurology at Dell Medical School and faculty of the Mulva Clinic for the Neurosciences. He is co-director of the UT CARE Initiative and associate director of Texas Robotics.

He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, in 1992. Prior to joining UT Austin, he was a research scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (Italy) and a senior researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny (Switzerland). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford as well as at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. Most recently, he was Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL), where he helped establish the Center for Neuroprosthetics.

Millán has made several seminal contributions to the field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI), especially based on electroencephalogram signals. Most of his achievements revolve around the design of brain-controlled robots. He has received several recognitions for these seminal and pioneering achievements, notably the IEEE-SMC Norbert Wiener Award in 2011, elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2017, and election as Fellow of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2020.

Research Interests

• Brain-machine Interfaces (BMI)
• Neuroengineering
• Neuroprosthetics
• Human-robot interaction
• Statistical machine learning
• Neuroscience
• Neurorehabilitation

Research Focus
In addition to his work on the fundamentals of BMI and the design of neuroprosthetics, Millán is prioritizing the translation of BMI to people who live with motor and cognitive disabilities. In parallel, he is designing BMI technology to offer new interaction modalities for able-bodied people that augment their abilities.

Related Websites
Clinical Neuroprosthetics and Brain Interaction Lab
Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG)
Texas Robotics
Cellular to Clinically Applied Rehabilitation Research and Engineering (CARE)

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