In the Media

Collin Stultz, faculty member of both the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has lead a recent study of one of the proteins associated with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Using computational modeling, Stultz has proposed solutions to a controversy over the structure of alpha synuclein that could lead to development of new more effective treatments. Read more...

Professor Peter Szolovits has been named the recipient of the 2013 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence. The award is presented annually by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in honor of Morris F. Collen, a pioneer in the field. According to the ACMI, the award is the "highest honor in informatics that is presented by the American College of Medical Informatics to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to biomedical informatics has made a lasting impression on healthcare and biomedicine.”

Timothy Lu, MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering working with members of the Synthetic Biology Group in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), has successfully created new synthetic biology circuits that combine memory and logic allowing potential control over production of cells to generate biofuels, drugs or other useful compounds. Read more...

Gregory Wornell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) has teamed with former RLE member Dr. Maryam Shanechi, who has recently earned her doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Prof. Emery Brown of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and neurosurgeon Dr. Ziv Williams at Massachusetts General Hospital to develop the first instance of an "intelligent" Brain-Motor Interface, which uses specially designed advanced neural decoding algorithms to decode in advance a sequence of planned movements from neural activity in the premotor cortex.

CSAIL researchers and members of the Clinical Decision Making Group including the group's director Peter Szolovits, professor of computer science and engineering and postdoctoral researcher Anna Rumshisky have developed a new system for disambiguating (distinguishing between several meanings) the senses of words used in doctors’ clinical notes. Read more...

As reported by the Champalimaud Foundation, the 2012 António Champalimaud Vision Award was given to several researchers including Professor James G. Fujimoto, Research Laboratory of Electronics affiliate Eric A. Swanson for the creation and development of optical coherence tomography (OCT). Fujimoto, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering, Swanson, and their collaborators were recognized for the major role that OCT now plays in the diagnosis and treatment of the most important blinding diseases of the industrialized world: macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. Currently, it is estimated that more than 40 million OCT diagnostic procedures are performed worldwide annually.

Polina Golland, associate professor in the MIT EECS department and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), working with EECS graduate student Archana Venkataraman has developed an algorithm which can aid in deciphering what regions of the brain are involved in certain diseases ultimately enabling drug companies to develop more effective treatments for the disease that specifically target these regions.

Tim Lu, assistant professor of electrical engineering in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, principal investigator in the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has been working with colleagues at Boston University (BU), Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to build genetic circuit components in living cells to ultimately perform novel functions such as manufacturing new drugs, producing fuel, or even programming suicide of cancer cells.

As reported by the MIT News Office, June 18, 2012, staff writer David Chandler, members of the the MIT Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (MEDRC) under Brian Anthony, co-director of the

“There’s a much larger patient population for whom physicians would like this measurement, but the invasiveness stops them from obtaining it,” says Verghese, whose lab focuses on using computer models of human physiology to interpret patient data.

EECS Assistant Professor, Timothy K. Lu, has been awarded the the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization, a two year award which supports promising young MIT professors in

Adalsteinsson and Goyal developed an algorithm that cuts MRI exposure time from 45 minutes to 15.