People

Director

Prof. Muhammad H. Zaman is a Kern Innovation Faculty Fellow, Innovative Engineering Education Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at Boston University. At BU he is the director of Laboratory of Engineering Education and Development and PI of Cellular and Molecular Dynamics Lab. Prof. Zaman got his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2003 where he was  a Burroughs-Wellcome Graduate Fellow in Interdisciplinary Sciences. After his Ph.D. he was a Herman and Margaret Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT from 2003-2006. He was Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at UT Austin from 2006-2009 and moved to BU in Fall 2009. His lab focuses on developing new experimental and computational technologies for high value healthcare problems in both the developing and developed world.

Prof. Zaman is actively involved in developing appropriate technologies for the developing world and is working on capacity building and engineering education in these countries as well. At BU his students have worked closely with the Center for Global Health and Development (CGHD) to develop robust, cheap and terrain-ready diagnostics and analysis toolkits.  He is currently involved in setting up the first biomedical engineering department at the University of Zambia in Lusaka to meet the immediate needs of the society in biomedical engineering.

Prof. Zaman has won numerous awards for his research and teaching, including FEBS Young Investigator in Matrix Biology, Tewkesbury Fellowship, American Society for Engineering Education Outstanding Assistant Professor Award, BME outstanding teacher award, College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching by an Assistant Professor Award (the youngest ever recipient, awarded in his second year as a tenure track faculty) and the highest award for teaching in the entire UT System (with over 18,000 faculty) the UT System Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. He has been invited by the National Academies of Engineering to participate in both frontiers of engineering and frontiers of engineering education. He has been a keynote and plenary speaker at major national and international conference s and symposia has published dozens of papers in the leading journals in the field that are regularly cited. He also serves on the editorial board of major biomedical engineering journals.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Catherine Klapperich is a Kern Innovation Faculty Fellow and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She is the Director of the Biomedical Microdevices Laboratory and is also a member of the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Before coming to Boston, Dr. Klapperich was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the lab of Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, and was a Senior Research Scientist at Aclara Biosciences in Mountain View, CA.  She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley with Drs. Lisa Pruitt and Kyriakos Komvopoulos; her M.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.

Dr. Klapperich’s research is focused on engineering medical devices for use in low resource settings and at the point of care.  Current projects are focused on disposable microfluidic diagnostics that incorporate on-board sample preparation and on minimally instrumented devices to enable molecular diagnostics.  Her work includes diagnostics for infectious diarrhea, respiratory infections and HIV. These devices have been field tested in Nicaragua.  Other work in the lab is focused on the design and deployment of devices to enable systems biology approaches to studying complex diseases including TB.

Dr. Klapperich’s lab is funded by grants from the NIH, DOD, CIMIT and the Coulter Foundation. Dr. Klapperich also works closely with Innovations in International Health at MIT to involve people in the developing world in the design process. In 2010, she was an invited participant in the National Academies of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference held in Agra, India. She serves on the editorial board of Biointerfaces and is an active participant in both national and international research conferences.

Research Professionals

Andrea Fernandes, MPH, brings experience in public health and international development. She has worked with government outfits and NGOs, including multiple UN agencies, to implement and evaluate community-based interventions enabling positive health outcomes. Andrea has experience in local health systems development and design of sustainable, contextually significant strategies and solutions. Skills include proposal development, program implementation, monitoring and evaluation and qualitative research. Currently, Andrea is working on obstacles associated with product introduction in remote regions as well as a platform to build engineering technical capacity of students in Zambia, Kenya and Nigeria.

Benvy Caldwell is a recent graduate of BU’s Biomedical Engineering program and is working towards her MPH in International Public Health.  Her past experience includes work in Honduras providing medical services and public health education for rural villages focusing on women and children.  Her current interest is in health capacity building through higher-level education, integrating engineering and public health.  She is engaged in areas of project design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as aspects of policy development.

Amy Canham recently graduated from BU’s Electrical Engineering program.  As an undergraduate, Amy received the Lutchen Fellowship to explore applications of systems dynamics modeling in public health delivery in resource-limited settings.  Amy also completed her senior capstone project with LEED, working on a compact, point of care biosensor for dengue fever diagnosis.  She is currently working on continuing development of a rugged, solar-powered pulse oximeter, embedded system design for a self-contained counterfeit drug detection device, and using systems engineering tools to identify optimal intervention points for the technologies developed at LEED.

Graduate Students

Grace Wu is a graduate student in the Biomedical Engineering program at Boston University. She is currently working on a portable and robust CD4+ cell counter for rapid HIV monitoring and diagnosis in low-resource settings, integrating sample preparation, reagent storage, and sample analysis. She is also interested in healthcare education in the developing world. Grace obtained her BS degree in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley in 2008.

Erika Fong is a first year PhD rotation student. She graduated in June 2010 from University of California Los Angles with a BS in Computational and Systems Biology. She is interested in microfluidics and community service and is focused on addressing global health problems with biomedical devices  as a perfect way to integrate these interests. She is currently developing a multiplex diagnostic device for resource limited settings.

Darash Desai is a graduate student in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. His work involves a collaborative effort with USAID and U.S. Pharmacopeia in the development of an improved counterfeit drug detection system that is portable, robust, and cost-effective enough for use in the developing world. He completed his B.S. in Biochemistry and Physics, with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics, at Stetson University.

Jane Zhang is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She is developing point-of-care sample concentration devices for increasing molecular and photonic diagnostic sensitivity. She is also interested in building low cost microfluidics with fast prototyping materials and methods, as well as developing better on-chip nucleic acid extraction and analysis assays. Jane was the fundraising chair for Engineers without Borders BU chapter for 2007-2008, to support student teams to a Peruvian village to implement civil projects.  Jane has a BASc degree in Engineering Science from University of Toronto in 2005.

Shichu Huang, Post-Doctoral Associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. Her research focuses on designing, engineering and integrating polymer-based, disposable microfluidic devices for infectious diarrhea detection and surveillance.  She specializes in development of a disposable polymer lab-on-a-chip with a micro/nano biosensor, an on-chip nucleic acid assay and diagnostic devices using low-cost materials and simple instruments for point-of-care in resource-poor settings.

 

Jason Keller is a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering program at Boston University. He is using a microfluidic platform to study the systems biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is estimated to claim 9 million lives annually, with most of these deaths occurring in the developing world. Jason’s work will help elucidate the mechanisms of tuberculosis infection, with the intent of eradicating the spread of this pathogen. Jason is a GAANN Nanotechnology Fellow in the labs of Catherine Klapperich and James Galagan. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 2009 with a degree in bioengineering.

Qingqing Cao is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. Truly portable, fast and effective diagnostics could help to relieve the huge burdens of infectious disease worldwide. Her work is aimed at developing polymer-based microfluidic devices for low-cost, fast, and sensitive nucleic acid diagnostic. These chips include sample preparation on board and allow for true sample in/answer out capability. Cell lysis, nucleic acid purification, amplification and end-point detection in thermoplastic chips is performed. Targets include influenza A and infectious diarrhea.

Undergraduate Students

Patrick Carney is a senior in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He is interested in the factors that make biomedical devices feasible to implement in low-resource settings. He is pursuing a minor in Computer Engineering to apply to medical apps for use in improving health care. Patrick is working on an affordable CPAP machine for use in low-resource settings for his senior project with Veronica and Luai.

Veronica Faller is a senior in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. Veronica has worked in the Galagan lab performing ChIP-Seq to aid in mapping the gene regulatory network of M. tuberculosis. She is an aspiring pediatrician in the ENGMEDIC program at Boston University and will be attending medical school at BU next year. Veronica is working on an affordable CPAP machine for use in low-resource settings for her senior project with Patrick and Luai.

Luai Zakaria is a senior in the Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. Luai has an interest in medicine and public health and is applying to medical school for next year. Luai previously worked in the Grinstaff lab using a CT contrast agent to predict early stages of osteoarthritis. He is collaborating with senior project teammates, Veronica and Patrick, as well as professionals at the Boston University School of Public Health on designing and developing a CPAP machine to treat pneumonia in developing countries.

 

Lab Alumni

Dan Lustick
Meredith Duffy
Paul Vermilion
Alex Giannakos
Nadia Ouhib
Nick Giordano
Imaly Nanayakkara
Shahar Torton
Stephanie Nelson
Supriya Jain