The end of 2020 brought a pleasant surprise to Dr. Yasemin M. Akay, an instructional associate professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Cullen College of Engineering, as she was notified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that she was promoted to Senior Member status.

UH Professor to Create Ultrafast 3D Clinical Imaging System

LASIK eye surgery – a laser reshaping of the cornea to improve vision – is one of the most popular elective surgeries in the United States, and a University of Houston professor of biomedical engineering intends to improve upon it by giving surgeons more information about the cornea before they begin.  

A research paper earlier this year from the Akay Lab biomedical research team at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering continues to make an impact, as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society noted that is the IEEE’s second most popular paper in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library as of mid-September.

Dr. Chandra Mohan, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering, has been given a $300,000 award by the Lupus Research Alliance.

With severe blood disorders, such as leukemia, doctors often rely on leukapheresis, a procedure in which large machines extract whole blood from patients to separate white blood cells from the rest of the blood, which is then returned back to the patient. This procedure is generally used to urgently reduce a dangerously elevated white blood cell count, or to collect various white blood cell subsets for therapeutic purposes. 

UH Research Team Examines Eye Disease with $2.5 Million Award

Four words you never want to hear from the eye doctor are retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Both are genetic disorders that can cause loss of vision and neither has a cure. A team of biomedical researchers at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering is now tackling both eye diseases by exploring a protein in the retina that links them: peripherin2 (prph2).

Research from the Das Laboratory for Imaging Innovations at the University of Houston was recently highlighted in Nature Reviews Physics in a feature article titled “X-ray images in full color.”

Finding Could Lead to Better Clinical Disease Monitoring

University of Houston researcher Chandra Mohan is reporting in Arthritis Research and Therapy that clotting proteins, both those that promote blood clots (pro-thrombotic) and those that work to dissipate them (thrombolytic), are elevated in the urine of patients who suffer from lupus nephritis (LN).

Findings Could Help Seamlessly Integrate Prosthetics

A University of Houston engineer is reporting in eNeuro that a brain-computer interface, a form of artificial intelligence, can sense when its user is expecting a reward by examining the interactions between single-neuron activities and the information flowing to these neurons, called the local field potential.