Seven from BME receive Johns Hopkins Discovery Awards
Johns Hopkins University announced 32 multidisciplinary endeavors that have been selected to receive support this year from the JHU Discovery Awards program. Seven faculty from the Department of Biomedical Engineering are part of those endeavors.
Each project team includes members of at least two JHU divisions or other entities who aim to solve a complex problem and expand the horizons of knowledge. Altogether, the winning project teams—chosen from a record 222 proposals—include 120 individuals representing 12 Johns Hopkins entities.
“This year’s proposals attested to the intellectual creativity and collaborative spirit of our university,” says Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. “With these awards, faculty will have the freedom to pursue new avenues for discovery with colleagues across our community and to take up the most pressing questions we face as a society.”
The Discovery Awards are intended to spark new interactions among investigators across the university rather than to support established projects. Teams can apply for up to $100,000 to explore a new area of collaborative work, with special emphasis on preparing for an externally funded large-scale grant or cooperative agreement.
The record pool of applications also required the highest number of reviewers used to date: more than 90 faculty members from across the university were called upon for their input.
Awarded projects that involve biomedical engineering faculty include:
A Novel Method of High Flow Portable Oxygen Supplementation– Soumyadipta Acharya (Engineering) & Sonye Danoff (Medicine)
A Platform for Brain-scale Imaging and Patterned Optogenetics at Cellular Resolution– Kishore Kuchibhotla (Arts & Sciences), Joshua Vogelstein, (Engineering) & Patricia Janak (Arts & Sciences and Medicine)
Brain Light: Brain Wide Reconstruction of Neuronal Circuitry– Ulrich Mueller (Medicine and Arts & Sciences) & Michael Miller (Engineering)
Deep “X-map” for Acute Ischemic Stroke– Katsuyuki Taguchi (Medicine), Jerry L. Prince (Engineering), Nafi Aygun (Medicine), Ferdinand Hui (Medicine), Steven R. Zeiler (Medicine), Meiyappan Solaiyappan (Medicine) & Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen (Medicine)
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Regulation of Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocyte Maturation– Chulan Kwon (Medicine), Hai-Quan Mao (Engineering) & Leslie Tung (Medicine)
Integrative Systems Biology Approach to Decipher Novel Protective Mechanisms Against Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease– Alexis Battle (Engineering), Marios Arvanitis (Medicine), Emily Brown (Medicine), Stephen Chelko (Medicine), Steven Jones (Medicine) & Thorsten Leucker (Medicine)
Novel Techniques for Early Diagnosis and Monitoring of Organ Dysfunction in Critically Ill Children– Melania Bembea (Medicine) & Raimond Winslow (Engineering)
“These new collaborations exemplify the impressive work being done at Hopkins,” says Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research. “I appreciate our numerous researchers for submitting such brilliant projects, and I look forward to seeing the results unfold. These awards would not be possible without the continued support of university leadership and the reviewers’ guidance.”
The full list of recipients and descriptions of their projects is available on the Office of Research website.