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Many scientists could advance their careers if they could just get the hang of storytelling. Impact statements that describe how their research improves peoples’ lives could help researchers secure funding, find collaborators, and share their findings with wider audiences.

“It’s not a matter of if your research will have an impact because it will,” said Harvard’s Deborah Burstein Mattingly, associate professor of radiology, health sciences, and technology. “We want you to focus on how and why your research will have an impact, and design it accordingly.”

Mattingly’s audience, a group of female scientists quickly rising in their fields, came together last month as part of the Rising Stars in Biomedical Engineering workshop held on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. Funded by several Hopkins institutes and departments and held at the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, the workshop aimed to give women the skills they need to pursue faculty positions in biomedical engineering.

While the number of women in labs and classrooms is growing, men still outnumber women when it comes to holding faculty positions in engineering disciplines. Johns Hopkins University and MIT are trying to change those statistics through programs such as the workshop, which was first held in 2016. It brings together a cohort of talented women graduate students and postdocs who represent the next generation of leadership in biomedical engineering research.

“Rising Stars began in 2012 at MIT with the mission of providing critical career development training for women in electrical engineering,” said Sri Sarma, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine. Sarma co-organized the workshop along with MIT professors Polina Golland and Martha Gray.

“We want these young rising stars to leave Hopkins empowered and excited to move onto the next phase of their careers,” she said.

Read the full story on The Hub >>

New exploratory method for exploring brain regions frequency features in neural data. Led by Ph.D. candidate, Macauley Breault. Click here to view.

Kristin Gunnarsdottir, a PhD student in the lab of ICM associate director and associate professor of biomedical engineering, Sridevi Sarma, has been awarded a fellowship from The American Epilepsy Society for the 2018-2019 academic year for her research titled, “A Novel Tool for Localizing the Epileptogenic Zone.”

Gunnarsdottir, who is pursuing her PhD in biomedical engineering, is developing a computational tool for seizure localization and treatment in patients with medically refractory epilepsy (MRE). The tool will create precise and accurate maps of the seizure onset region from invasive EEG recordings in MRE patients by (i) providing a more dense brain coverage with estimated invasive EEG recordings, and (ii) using network modeling to reveal the onset region in the form of heat maps. Ultimately, these maps will guide multiple laser ablations of specific brain areas.

Raina D’Aleo, a neuroscience PhD student in the lab of Sridevi Sarma, associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine, has been accepted into the 2018 Brains, Minds and Machines advanced research training course hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Brains Minds and Machines.

The intensive three-week course held at at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, will give advanced students a “deep end” introduction to the problem of intelligence – how the brain produces intelligent behavior and how we may be able to replicate intelligence in machines.

The class discussions will cover a range of topics, complemented with workshops and tutorials to gain hands-on experience with these topics. The course aims to cross-educate computer engineers and neuroscientists, with the core presentations given jointly by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists and collaborative research projects performed in teams that combine students with diverse backgrounds.

Four students in the ICM lab of Sridevi Sarma, associate director of ICM and associate professor of biomedical engineering, participated in DREAMS 2018, an undergraduate research day that took place last Friday, April 27. Anil Palepu, Julia Costacurta and Kathy Hu, sophomores in the department of biomedical engineering and Sharmini Premanathan, a senior in the department of neuroscience, presented research projects conducted under the direction of Sarma at the event.

Sarma’s lab integrates aspects of computational medicine and neuroscience by using computational methods to model the central nervous system. The students’ projects spanned a variety of neuromedical research areas, including sleep stage scoring, inter-ictal discharge detection for epilepsy, and optima control for brain machine interface design.

DREAMS 2018 is held annually to showcases the research, scholarly, and creative projects of JHU’s undergraduate students. Three hundred students participated in this year’s event which included 25 arts and humanities presentations, 45 public health & social science posters, 100 basic science and 55 engineering posters & presentations.

Julia Costacurta and Jung Min Lee, sophomores in the Institute for Computational Medicine and the department of biomedical engineering, received a technology fellowship from the Center for Educational Resources for their research proposal, “An Interactive Set of Resources for Learning Control Theory.” The fellowship provides funding to support the proposed research under the direction of Sridevi Sarma, associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine and associate professor of biomedical engineering.

The goal of the project is to create a comprehensive set of interactive resources that will help students learning control theory to understand the course material and the applications of what they are learning. Costacurta and Lee aim to expand on a previous project completed by fellow Elli Tian, which involved the development of applets to visualize real-world control theory examples.

The project also aims to develop a set of tutorials and exercises in MATLAB, so that students can become more aware of the tools available in MATLAB to implement real-world applications of control theory.

“We hope that if students take advantage of these resources, they will be able to better understand the material and possibly apply control theory concepts in their future studies and work,” said Costacurta.

The  Center for Educational Resources’ Technology Fellows Program is a mini-grant initiative that enables faculty to partner with technology savvy students to develop resources that enhance pedagogy, increase or facilitate access to course content, encourage active learning, promote critical thinking, or support student collaboration.

Macauley Breault has been named an ARCS Scholar for the 2018-2019 academic year. This marks the second consecutive year that Breault has been awarded an Achievement Reward for College Scientists (ARCS) Scholarship to support her research in the lab of Sridevi Sarma, associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine and associate professor of biomedical engineering.

Breault, a PhD student in biomedical engineering, is focusing on building a brain network of non-motor regions that encode how movements are modulated using data collected from epileptic patients in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic.

Breault’s other research interest stems from personal experience. A sufferer of chronic pain, she hopes to impact research in the field by constructing a model of the dorsal horn that takes into account how treatments such as neural stimulation affect pain regulation.

ARCS Foundation provides unrestricted funding to talented, motivated American graduate and undergraduate students in science and engineering to create new knowledge and innovative technologies. ARCS scholars have been awarded more than 3600 patents and have gone on to found more than 1800 new companies.

More than two dozen members of the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland came to Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus Saturday to design and build miniature roller coasters out of cardboard boxes, pipe insulation tubing, cups, tape, and other household materials—and to learn about the field of engineering along the way.

The elementary- and middle-school-age Girl Scouts were challenged to construct 5-foot roller coasters that incorporated as many “thrill” elements as possible—tunnels, hills, banked curves, vertical loops, helixes, in-line twists—and then to transport marbles through the contraptions.

Sridevi Sarma, associate professor of biomedical engineering and associate director of the Institute for Computational Medicine, hosted the event as part of L’Oréal USA’s Changing the Face of STEM Mentoring Grant, which she received in September.

“We want to introduce these young girls to science and engineering in a way that will keep them engaged,” Sarma said. “We’re taking the concept of energy and breaking it down into basic ideas that they will understand, and we’re reinforcing those concepts through the process of building a roller coaster.”

To ensure the event stayed on track, nine female Johns Hopkins engineering students guided the girls through the design process from brainstorming to realization. Each team, organized by troop number, worked within an allotted timeframe to build the fastest and most creative coaster.

“We’re working as a team and having fun, all while learning how to be an engineer and build things,” said Malai Bowman from Troop 736.

Excerpted from The Hub >>