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Grodins Symposium Carries on Proud Tradition

BME students share prizewinning research with industry
Eric Mankin
April 11, 2007 — The 11th installment of the Fred S. Grodins Symposium of student research from the Viterbi School’s Deparment of Biomedical Engineering took place on

Xiaoning Wang accepts top Grodins graduate prize from BME chair Michael Khoo.
March 31 at the Davidson Conference Center.  Michael C. K. Khoo, event and department chair reviewed the year’s highlights and awarded prizes to students.

Top prize, the Grodins Graduate Award, went to 
Xiaoning Wang for her work on  “PK/PD Modeling for Genetically Polymorphic Populations.” 


Other awards included: 

For platform presentation:
First place to  Rachel Bitton - Photoacoustic Microscopy with a 30MHz Array and Receive System;  Runners up: Leanne Chan - Biological Response of Electrical Stimulation in Normal and Degenerate Retina, and Sinchai Tsao - Incorporating Radius Features for Computer Aided Bone Age Assessment of Older Children.

For posters:
  • Mahsa Rouhanizadeh - Mitochondrial membrane potential regulation by pulsatile/oscillatory shear stress
  • Kenrick Kuwahara - Proanthocyanidin Improve Healing in Thermally Treated Collagen
  • Ronalee Lo - A Reusable In-Plane Polymer Integrated Microfluidic Interconnect
  • Madison Zitting - Design Considerations for a Fiber-optic Light Guiding System for the Excitation and collection of fluorescence marking insulin release in fl-cells
  • Bing Lu - Nonlinear Dynamic Neural Network for Text-Independent Speaker Identification without Knowing Exact Voice Print
  • Neha Parikh - Modeling a Visual-attention-based Image Processing Algorithm for a Retinal Prosthesis Using Simulink and Implementing on the TMS320DM642 (720 MHz) Digital Signal Processor
  • Joy Hsu - Animal to Human Scaling of Anticancer Drug Pharmacokinetics/Pharmacodynamics
  • Rahul Kaliki - Controlling Distal Arm Postures from Shoulder Movement During 2D Reaching and Grasping


Symposium proceedings: click on image to download pdf
The symposium organizing committee included Rachel Bitton, Joseph Munaretto, Nicholas Sachs, Chi Hyung Seo, Wenli Wang and Theodoros Zanos

The day's presentations were supported and observed by local  industrial biomed companies.

The Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California (AMI-USC) was a platinum sponsor for the event, Reichert, Inc. was golden, with Amgen Global Epidemiology, the Mannkind Corporation, and the NSF Engineering Research Center for Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES) contributing at the silver level.

Friends of the event included Advanced Medical Optics, the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, Second Sight, Amgen, and Carl Zeiss Meditec.

The Grodins website is at http://bmsrs.usc.edu/~grodins/index.html