MBM faculty have been busy over the past few months! Here are a few highlights:
Gelson Pagan-Diaz, Karla Ramos-Cruz, and Rashid Bashir found that training neurons early in their development improved their connectivity and responsivity. Pagan-Diaz is the first author of the paper published in Scientific Reports and Bashir led the research team.
Brad Sutton and colleague Fan Lam developed a new method to efficiently reconstruct MRI images which dramatically reduces memory usage and computation complexity by three orders-of-magnitude. He has also been involved in a study that used magnetic resonance elastography to compare the hippocampal stiffness in healthy individuals with those who have epilepsy.
Gabriel Popescu and Mikhail Kandel collaborated with colleague Xi Chen on a study that proposed a method referred to as Wolf phase tomography that performs diffraction tomography using partially coherent fields to reveal the 3D distributions of refractive indices of transparent structures.
Rashid Bashir was one of six people selected from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a 2020-21 President’s Executive Leadership Program (PELP) Fellow. As part of this competitive professional development program, he will broaden his understanding of higher education issues and strengthen leadership skills related to overseeing a public institution at the university or system level.
Bashir has also helped to develop a microfluidic cartridge for a 30-minute COVID-19 test. The cartridges are 3D-printed and can be manufactured quickly. Bashir is currently the Dean of the Grainger College of Engineering.
Taher Saif has collaborated on research that tested 11 household fabrics commonly used for homemade masks and found that all are effective at curbing the small and large respiratory droplets that are released when we speak, cough, or sneeze.