December 18, 2012
The Henry Luce Foundation’s Clare Boothe Luce Program has awarded the University of Washington (UW) a roughly $500,000 grant to support the creation of two professorships for women in engineering. The grant, which will be distributed over the course of five years, will support the addition of two faculty members; one will be a scholar in the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute (MolES) and the other a scholar in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), two new innovative interdisciplinary research centers. Read More
The 2012 Engineering Lecture Series took a close look at how engineers are using small molecules to solve big problems. The emerging field of molecular engineering builds from the bottom up and aims high, promising new ways to diagnose disease earlier and treat it more precisely, and inexpensive and practical ways to harness clean sources of energy. Attendees learned how the UW’s new Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute is aiding these efforts by bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines in a collaborative working environment. Read More
UW Bioengineering faculty Drs. David Castner and Xiaohu Gao wereinducted as AIMBE Fellows at the organization’s annual meeting February 17-19 in Washington, DC. AIMBE, or the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering,is a non-profitadvocacy organization dedicated toimproving lives through medical and biological engineering. Drs. Castner and Gao join a distinguished group of more tahn 1,000 other fellows from academia,industry and government who have made significant contributions to bioengineering research, industrial practice, and education.
Read in American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering > Read More
A paper in Science describes an organic crystal that shows promise as a cheap, flexible, nontoxic material for the working parts of memory chips, sensors and energy-harvesting devices.
Georg Seelig, assistant professor of EE & CSE, has received the 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award from the Department of Defense.
The DARPA Young Faculty Award program identifies and engages rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions and exposes them to Department of Defense needs as well as DARPA's program development process. With the award, Seelig’s group aims to develop a cheap and easy-to-use point of care diagnostic test for infectious diseases. As a specific application, they will focus on the diagnosis of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in low resource settings by integrating DNA-based logic circuits and amplifiers with paper-based lateral flow devices to engineer a complete diagnostic test. Read More
The U.S. Department of Energy this month awarded $4 million to a team, led by UW chemical engineers, that aims to develop bacteria to turn the methane in natural gas into diesel fuel for transportation.
Congratulations to MolES faculty David Castner (Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering) who has been selected as a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to improving lives through medical and biological engineering. Castner joins a distinguished group of 1,000 other fellows from academia, industry and government who have made significant contributions to bioengineering research, industrial practice, and education. Read More
By Leila Gray, UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine
November 29, 2012
By following certain rules, scientists can prepare architectural plans for building ideal protein molecules not found in the real world. Based on these computer renditions, previously non-existent proteins can be produced from scratch in the lab. The principles to make this happen appear this month in Nature magazine.
The lead authors are Nobuyasu Koga and Rie Tatsumi-Koga, a husband-and-wife scientific team in David Baker's lab at the UW Protein Design Institute. Read More
Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers show promise as a cheap, versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. New funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help MolES faculty member Kim Woodrow further test the system's versatility and feasibility.
Congratulations to MolES faculty David Ginger, who was named fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 2012. Ginger was honored for advances in the physical chemistry of nanoscale materials relevant to optoelectronics, particularly photovoltaics, and innovation in surface microscopy techniques for probing such materials.