Professors Win Nearly $8M in Grants

The National Institutes of Health has renewed a $2.8 million grant over five years for Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, professor of biomedical engineering. Her colleague Paul Sajda, an associate professor in biomedical engineering, has won more than $3 million grants for two research projects.

 

Jingyue Ju, professor of chemical engineering and Director, Center for Genome Technology & Biomolecular Engineering, Columbia Genome Center, has won a $1.8 million three-year grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute.

 

Vunjak-Novakovic and Professor David Kaplan from Tufts University were awarded a competitive renewal of their NIH Tissue Engineering Resource Center (TERC), for another five years. The unifying mission for the TERC is to engineer human tissue systems for medical impact. This grant brings $2.8M to each the Bioreactor Core at Columbia University and the complementary Biomaterials Core at Tufts University.

 

The Bioreactor Core faculty includes Clark Hung, Elisa Konofagou, Helen Lu, and Jeremy Mao. TERC will continue to support advanced research into functional tissue engineering, stem cells, and study of disease. The focus will remain in two critical areas: (a) skeletal systems and (b) cardiovascular systems, while progressing toward new fundamental and translational strategies. Building off of its mission, TERC will continue to foster service, dissemination and collaborative research for the scientific and technological community.

 

Her research on growing human tissue was explored in the Fall 2009 issue of Engineering News.

 

 

One of professor Sajda’s project is a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s initiative to map decision-making in the brain. Sajda’s project will use state-of-the art simultaneous EEG and fMRI to map the neural networks underlying decision making in the human brain. The goal is to both shed light on basic neuroscience questions related to decision making in humans, as well as to develop a better understanding of cognitive deficits and neurological disease in which decision making is affected. Truman Brown, the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of radiology (Health Sciences), is a co-Investigator on the project.

 

In addition, Sajda has been awarded an $1.5 million, 18-month phase 3 contract from DARPA for his project entitled "Cortically coupled computer vision  (C3Vision) Phase 3."  The goal of the project is to use real-time analysis of electroencephalography (EEG), coupled with state-of-the-art computer vision, to triage massive amounts of imagery and video for improving visual search and annotation. This is the first time a university has been awarded a Phase 3 DARPA effort, with the other two Phase 3 participants being large commercial defense contractors. Columbia's team will collaborate with Neuromatters LLC, a company which Prof. Sajda co-founded. Columbia will perform basic research and Neuromatters will build a prototype system for testing by DARPA.  Prof. Shih-Fu Chang, chairman of electrical engineering, is a co-Investigator on the Columbia project.

 

Sajda’s research on capturing the “aha!” moment was explored in the Fall 2009 issue of Engineering News.

 

 

Professor Ju’s $1.8 million, three-year award is for research on “Single Molecule DNA Sequencing by Fluorescent Nucleotide Reversible Terminators.”

 

Ju said, “The ability to sequence a human genome with high accuracy and speed, and at low cost, is critical to the emerging field of personalized medicine. In response to this demand, our research team developed the novel method of DNA sequencing-by-synthesis (SBS) on a solid surface, which has been recognized as a successful new paradigm for deciphering DNA sequences.”

 

In this grant, Ju and his team will use molecular engineering approaches to take their successful SBS strategy to the next level by adapting it for single molecule sequencing using fluorescent reversible terminators.

 

According to Ju, “Template DNA molecules will be attached to a glass surface modified by covalent attachment of PEG-primers under conditions where as many as 1 billion clearly separated single molecules are attached to the slide and their location registered by the presence of a cleavable fluorescent moiety. SBS will then be conducted using reversible blocked nucleotides with an appropriate set of cleavable fluorophores. We will modify a TIRF microscope to create a device with an enhanced microfluidic flow cell platform to permit large-scale detection of single molecules during each cycle of SBS. With a billion DNA templates immobilized on a chip at single molecule resolution, even 30 to 50 base reads will cover the entire human genome at good coverage on a single chip.”

 

His research on reducing the costs of DNA sequencing was also explored in the Fall 2009 issue of Engineering News.