In the Media

Our susceptibility to disease depends both on the genes that we inherit from our parents and on our lifetime experiences. These two components — nature and nurture — seem to affect very different processes in the context of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. Read more.

Five members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of a total of eight MIT faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering including Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Anantha Chandrakasan, L. Rafael Reif and Daniela Rus. Read more.

Professor Joel Voldman, working with EECS graduate student Burak Dura and others from Whitehead Institute and Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new device that allows scientists to follow communication between immune cells. The work, reported in the Jan. 13 issue of Nature Communications, may lead to future studies of mechanisms that involve cancer and other diseases. Read more.

CSAIL postdoc and member of the MIT Computational Biology Group, Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University have reported findings on large data studies comparing song bird genomics with humans and primates. Vocal-learning birds and primates have common genes that could help pinpoint genetic disorders in humans such as stuttering or Huntington's Disease. Read more.

EECS professor Ron Weiss has teamed with Mechanical Engineering professor Domitilla Del Vecchio and students from multiple departments at MIT to create a device that allows large biological circuits that behave with predictability nearly like that of electronic circuits. The work published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, has many applications -- particularly biosensing. Read more.

Five EECS faculty and associated researchers are among the 14 MIT research teams selected to receive Deshpande research grants for fall 2014. Initiated in 2002 through the MIT School of Engineering and made possible by a gift from Desh and Jaishree Deshpande, the Center’s mission is to move technologies from the laboratories at MIT to the marketplace. Read more.

In a two pronged attack on the killer superbugs that have become nearly unstoppable, Tim Lu, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and principal investigator in MIT's Research Lab of Electronics, has not only developed a gene editing system that can selectively kill the bacteria carrying harmful genes that confer antibiotic resistance or cause disease, but also devised a way of identifying combinations of genes that work together to make bacteria more susceptible to antibiotics. Read more.

A research team from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology including Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, has developed a new way to diagnose malaria using magnetic resonance relaxometry (MRR) — a technology that the group is adapting for inexpensive field deployable usage. Read more.

Rahul Sarpeshkar, professor in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and head of the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems Group in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) is featured by the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) at MIT for his work that blends both biological (wet) and electronic analog circuits (dry) in research that could lead to newly engineered immune cells that could detect cancer cells and kill them, for example. Read more.

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) including Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, recent EECS PhD graduate Marcus Yip, EECS graduate student Rui Jin and research scientist Nathan Ickes, together with physicians from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), have developed a new, low-power signal-processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware. The implant would be wirelessly recharged -- taking just two minutes -- and would run for about eight hours on each charge. Read more.

Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) Principal Research Scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia, with members of his research group has developed a new way to perform x-rays that not only includes soft tissue, but is streamlined to portable dimension cutting the dose and overall expense typical for current x-ray machines. The Velasquez-Garcia group is presenting their work at the 13th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2013), being held Dec. 3 to 6 in London. Read more