Viterbi professors named to MIT’s list of innovators

Three professors from the Viterbi School of Engineering were named on MIT’s list of “35 Innovators Under 35” last week for contributions in their respective fields.

Those honored on the list were nominated by either the public or editors of the MIT Technology Review. Other judges, such as professors from top universities and innovation experts, analyzed the originality and impact of honorees’ works.

Professor George Ban-Weiss from the civil and environmental engineering department was named for his research in the field of air pollution and climate change.

“It’s quite an honor and it kind of took me by surprise,” he said. “I don’t think about these distinctions very much. I just tend to focus on the work that I like to do without thinking about the prize at the end.”

Ban-Weiss is concerned about finding the sources of pollutants, as well as reducing public exposure to them.

“I’m interested in pollution that comes from combustion, especially particles in the atmosphere, and understanding the sources of those particles,” he said.

Ban-Weiss also works on potential ways to counteract what is known as the urban heat island effect, a type of climate change effect that causes cities to become significantly warmer than other, less populated areas. He looks to modify roofs, pavements, walls and other areas to reduce urban temperatures and other impacts of climate change.

“It’s extremely impressive, especially for his young age,” said Trevor Krasowsky, a second-year doctoral student in environmental engineering. “He brings an energy to the department that is unparalleled in my opinion and he finds time to make connections with his students and he couldn’t be a more personal guy, and he is one of the smartest people I know.”

Krasowsky recently finished a project with Ban-Weiss as his adviser, in which he developed fuel-based emission factors from non-road sources to better characterize black carbon as a climate-forcing agent.

Megan McCain, the Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was also named on the list for her revolutionary innovations in personalized cardiac medicine.

“We take stem cells and put them on our custom environments and hopefully convert the stem cells into functional tissue,” McCain said. “We use hydrogel, which is squishy and thus mimics human tissue and we can kind of define the proteins that the cells can grow on and we can define the topography of the surface that they grow on and the stiffness of what they grow on.”

Her ultimate goal is to build human tissues tailored to certain patients in the lab and utilize those tissues to test drugs in a high throughput, low-risk way.

Her research focuses on using tissue engineering to understand diseases and why they happen in the heart. Her project, ‘heart-on-a-chip’, is a part of the larger ‘organs on chips’ idea that tries to build micro-scale mimics of human tissues in a chip format.

“Organs-on-a-chip is exciting because it is a way for tissue engineering to really have an impact on medicine in the very near future, versus growing a new organ, which is really far away,” she said.

Students working in McCain’s lab share her enthusiasm for new developments in growing tissue.

“It’s a privilege to work in her lab and more an honor now that she has such a [distinguished] award,” said Jasper Hsu, a second-year graduate student majoring in biomedical engineering.

The third Viterbi professor to be named on the list is Professor Maryam Shanechi, a faculty member from the electrical engineering department. She was chosen for the list based on her research in using control theory to build better interfaces to the brain. Control theory seeks to explain dynamical systems in engineering and mathematics that utilize feedbacks and inputs.

Shanechi was not immediately available for comment to the Daily Trojan due to her attendance at a conference this week, but she spoke of her work in the MIT Technology Review.

“We know nothing about the signatures of neuropsychiatric disorders in the brain,” Shanechi told the MIT Technology Review. “We need to discover those. I am really excited, because there is so much we don’t know.”

She gave further explanation of her work using control theory to MIT Technology Review.

“My work takes a lot of insight from control theory. Say you reach for a glass of water — your brain wants that to happen in a certain time frame, and it’s getting visual feedback, and you can adjust the speed. The brain acts as a ‘feedback controller,’ and I have built models for how that works,” she told the magazine.