The faculty, staff, and students in our department continue to make great strides in building the research enterprise and in collaborations across the college and university. Last calendar year, the faculty in ECE submitted 174 proposals with 72 grant and contract awards received(note that some proposals written in one year are not funded until a following year). The number of active research projects, research-active faculty members, and research-active PhD students is at an all-time high. Of particular note is the announcement that the Colleges of Engineering and Human Medicine will join together to form an Institute for Engineering and Health. The institute will allow us to, develop new technologies for improved medical diagnosis and therapy, construct new pedagogical models for teaching medicine and biomedical engineering, develop technology-based approaches to reducing the cost of delivering medicine, and develop new ways of archiving information and designing patient-centered databases. ECE faculty members are active in the planning and will be active in the development of the institute.

In 2002, the department hired three new faculty members who specialize in biomedical research within the general discipline of electrical and computer engineering. Robert McGough, assistant professor; Ramakrishna Mukkamala, assistant professor; and Karim Oweiss, assistant professor, have been active in establishing their own research programs and in collaborating with other members of the university research community.

McGough received his PhD from the University of Michigan and spent several years as a research professor at Duke University. He has initiated a research program at MSU involving the use of radio frequency and ultrasound technologies for cancer therapy. He had early success at MSU, having transferred a Young Investigator Award from the Whittaker Foundation and having won a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant titled “Thermal Therapy with RF/US Arrays.”He also submitted proposals to the National Science Foundation(NSF), the United States Army, along with an additional proposal to NIH.

Mukkamala received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after a post-doctoral appointment he has initiated a research program at MSU in support of cardio-pulmonary health technologies. These technologies have the potential to predict heart problems and thereby avoid serious health consequences. He has recently been awarded two grants. The first is from the American Heart Association and is titled “Continuous Cardiac Output Monitoring by Peripheral Blood Pressure Waveform Analysis.” The second is an R21grant from NIH titled “Noninvasive Quantification of the Resistance Baroreflex.” In addition, a third proposal to NIH is being reviewed for potential funding.

Oweiss received his PhD from the University of Michigan and has initiated a program in neural monitoring technologies since joining MSU.He has submitted proposals to NSF, NIH, and the Whittaker Foundation. Particularly promising is his leadership in NIH grant writing in the area of microsystems for neural monitoring. The main objective is to embed sophisticated signal processing algorithms on application-specific hardware platforms to optimize the information transfer from high-density microelectrode arrays in the nervous system.

Further information on the ECE biomedical research faculty, as well as the rest of the ECE faculty’s research efforts, can be found on the department Web site at www.egr.msu.edu/ece.