BME Ph.D. student Babak Mahmoudi was a finalist at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine Society's student paper competition with his paper entitled "An Actor-Critic Architecture and Simulator for Goal-Directed Brain-Machine Interfaces".  The competition took place at the EMBS annual meeting in Minneapolis in September 2009.  Babak is doing his research in Justin Sanchez' laboratory.  Please join us in congratulating Babak.

Pardon our dust.  We are currently working on our new website.  Most of the infomation is here, but there are a few things still missing.  The faculty directory is not yet complete, so if you see your name missing, we apologize.

Michelle Griffin has left the department to pursue the career she been training for.  Michelle is getting ready to finish her Master in Public Health degree.  She has started her very prestigious intership at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.  We have enjoyed working with Michelle over the past 2 years, and we will miss her.  Good Luck Michelle!! 

While we are working on hiring a new person, Danielle Wise will take over Michelle's functions.

We are pleased to announce that the following students and Department of Biomedical Engineering advisors have been selected as College of Engineering participants in the 2009-2010 University Scholars Program:

Charles Crooks (student) / Dr. Benjamin Keselowsky (advisor)
Christina Bonarrigo (student) / Dr. Brandi Ormerod (advisor)
Christina Garcia (student) / Dr. Brandi Ormerod (advisor)

In this project, noninvasive clinical tools will be developed based on enabling photoacoustic imaging technology that will allow for the ‘real-time’ visualization of the epileletogenic focus during a seizure. These tools will aid in seizure onset zone identification and in the understanding of interictal spike propagation, thus aiding the interpretation of difficult cases, where the actual onset location may be in doubt. The development of these methods will provide a competitive advantage over existing technologies, none of which are known to include the feature set that is proposed in this project. These features include innovative and novel imaging methods for the identification of the seizure onset zone and epileptogenic networks.

J. Crayton Pruitt Family Professor Dr. Mingzhou Ding has recently been elected a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for major contributions to the development of advanced computational methods for the analysis of functional brain networks.