April 20-26, 2020

Dr. Lance Hoffman (CS) and Dr. Jordan Selzer (GW Medical School) and their team have launched a COVID-19 educational web application aimed at equipping healthcare providers with the knowledge to manage their response to the pandemic. It includes recommendations for everything from pre-hospital dispatch guidance to ICU ventilator management. The application was created using the most up-to-date literature, community best practices, and guidelines. It is continuously updated to reflect the changes in management as the literature evolves.

NBC4-Washington featured BME PhD student Destie Provenzano and her husband, Yuan James Rao (Radiology and Neurological Surgery), in the April 15 article “DC Couple Skips Honeymoon to Help Health Care Workers During Pandemic.”

On April 7, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued notice of Patent No. US 10611983 to Dr. Stephen Hsu (MAE) for “Encapsulation of chemical agents to effect and enable prolonged friction and wear reduction, extended drain intervals, and ultra-high performance in sliding interfaces.” Dr. Jerry Comanescu (Technology Commercialization Office) facilitated the prosecution of the patent application. Researchers who have a technology commercialization idea they would like to discuss, should contact the TCO.

Dr. Matthew Kay (BME) and Dr. David Mendelowitz (SMHS) are the Multiple Principal Investigators (MPIs) on a newly awarded four-year, $2.33 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The project, “Novel Mechanisms that Restore Cardiac Parasympathetic Activity Limit Arrhythmias and Cardiac Dysfunction After Myocardial Infarction,” will use chemogenetic and optogenetic technologies to study how to control the cardiac parasympathetic neural system to protect the heart from damage during and after a heart attack. The project brings together an outstanding cross-disciplinary team of GW investigators, including Dr. Kate Schunke (BME), Dr. Christopher Spurney (Children's National Hospital), Dr. Olga Dergacheva (SMHS), and Dr. Jhansi Dyavanapalli (SMHS). Dr. Mendelowitz is the contact MPI for the project.

GW has awarded two grants to Dr. Luyao Lu (BME). He received an $18,734 University Facilitating Fund grant to work on the project “Fully implantable neural interfaces for wireless electrophysiology and optogenetics,” and a one-year, $50,000 Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund (CDRF) grant to work on developing wireless, minimally invasive, all-optical sensing and stimulation biointerfaces for probing neural activity. He will work with co-investigator Dr. Hui Lu (Pharmacology & Physiology) on the CDRF project."

Dr. Kausik Sarkar (MAE), Dr. Lijie Grace Zhang (MAE) and Dr. Raj Rao (Department of Orthopaedic Surgery) have received a one-year, $50,000 GW Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund grant for their collaborative project “Low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) and microbubbles for osteochondral regeneration in 3D printed scaffolds.”

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) has received a $150,000 grant from Booz Allan Hamilton to conduct research on a Fourier-optical processor.

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) published this invited editorial: D. A. Broniatowski, S. C. Quinn, M. Dredze, and A. M. Jamison. “Vaccine Communication as Weaponized Identity Politics,” American Journal of Public Health, 110(5), 617–618.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) has published these articles: 1) R. Amin, R. Maiti, Y. Gui, C. Suer, M. Miscuglio, E. Heidari, R. T. Chen, H. Dalir, and V. J. Sorger. “Sub-wavelength GHz-fast broadband ITO Mach–Zehnder modulator on silicon photonics,” Optica, Vol. 7, Issue 4, pp. 333-335; and 2) Z. Ma, K. Kikunaga, H. Wang, S. Sun, R. Amin, R. Maiti, M. H. Tahersima, H. Dalir, M. Miscuglio, and V. J. Sorger “Compact Graphene Plasmonic Slot Photodetector on Silicon-on-Insulator with High Responsivity,” ACS Photonics, Vol. 7, Issue 4, pp. 932-940.

In its April 15 article “To Silence Wind Turbines and Airplanes, Engineers Are Studying Owl Wings,” Smithsonian Magazine featured the animation of a model of a flying owl created by Dr. Elias Balaras (MAE) and his team. The work models the turbulence patterns that owls leave in their wake.

On April 8, Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) gave an invited panelist talk to the Stanford Cybersecurity Policy Center's online Zoom series “Digital Technology and Democracy, Security & Geopolitics in an Age of Coronavirus.” His talk was titled “Can communicating the gist combat systematic online distortions of public opinion on health topics? (with new insights from COVID19).”

On April 8, Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) gave the talk “Photonic Intelligent Information Processing” at the Optics and Quantum Electronics Seminar Series at MIT.

Dr. Guru Venkataramani (ECE) gave an invited lecture at IEEE Coolchips-23 Symposium, held virtually April 15-17. The title of his talk was “Evolving Hardware Security Landscape in the AI Era.”