Faculty Research
Aug 18, 2025
New Discovery on Plant Evolution Could Lead to Lifesaving Medicine
COS/BioE Professor Jing-Ke Weng and his research team traced the evolutionary history of Canadian moonseed and discovered its potential for developing new lifesaving drugs.
Aug 14, 2025
PADAM: A New Passive Imaging Algorithm Enabling Safer, More Precise Control for Focused Ultrasound Therapy
BioE Assistant Professor Tao Sun and his team have developed Passive Acoustic Dynamic Differentiation and Mapping (PADAM), a breakthrough in passive cavitation imaging that provides sharper localization and real-time classification of bubble activity during focused ultrasound (FUS) therapies.
Aug 08, 2025
Decoding the Proteins Inside Every Cell
BioE Professor Nikolai Slavov, in collaboration with EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, UK, was awarded a £2,000,000 NSF grant for “Making Single-Cell Proteomics data FAIR.”
Aug 07, 2025
NIH MIRA R35 Award to Advance Living Cellular Probes for Ultrasound Imaging and Immunomodulation Technologies
BioE Assistant Professor Tao Sun was awarded a $1.99 million NIH R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) to develop ultrasound-controllable, multimodal imaging cellular probes and complementary ultrasound imaging technologies, enabling real-time tracking and modulation of inflammation dynamics and advancing precision medicine across a range of diseases.
Aug 05, 2025
NIH Trailblazer Award for Programmable RNA Sensors for Targeted Therapies
BioE/COS Assistant Professor Lei Wang is leading a $673,600 NIH Trailerblazer Award for “Programmable RNA-Based Sensors for In Situ Cell Type Detection and Response.” By developing a new tool that uses Boolean logic to sense and combine specific RNA signals, this research aims to create more precise, targeted therapies that can accurately identify and treat diseased cells like breast cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed.
Aug 04, 2025
Uncovering Hidden Consistency in Cellular Research Models
COS/BioE Professor Meni Wanunu and BioE Associate Professor Sara Rouhanifard’s research on “Pseudouridine reprogramming in the human T cell epitranscriptome: from primary to immortalized states” was published in RNA. In their study comparing pseudouridine (ψ) profiles in primary human T cells and Jurkat cell lines, they found that while 87% of core RNA modification patterns are conserved, the remaining 13% differ in biologically significant ways, suggesting immortalized cells are a surprisingly consistent yet imperfect model for study.
Jul 28, 2025
Understanding Bone Change From Evolution To Everyday Movement
MIE/BioE Professor Sandra Shefelbine, in collaboration with Brown University, was awarded a $625,000 NSF grant for “Bones and Burrowing: Mechanoadaptation in phylogeny, ontogeny and ecology of Peromyscus.”
Jul 23, 2025
Seba’s Short-Tailed Bat Displays Distinctive Wing-Bone Morphological and Material Properties
Bioengineering alumni Xiaoxiang Ma, MS’23, and MIE/BioE Professor Sandra Shefelbine, published their research on “A proximodistal gradient in bone structure and mechanics in the wings of Seba’s short-tailed bat, Carollia perspicillata” in The Anatomical Record.