RESEARCH
Biomedical engineering is a broad field and includes virtually any application of engineering to medicine, biology or health care. UT Dallas has chosen to focus its biomedical research in the following areas:
- Electronic sensors and devices
- Neuroscience and engineering
- Surgical procedures and interventions
- Bio/nano applications to materials and medicine
- New technologies for cancer detection, control and treatment
- Advanced imaging research
Faculty research interests include:
Dinish Bhatia
- Reconfigurable and adaptive computing
- Architecture and CAD for field programmable gate arrays
- Design automation for VLSI systems
- Ultra-low-power sensor networks and applications
- Energy scavenging and power management for wireless networks
- Graph theory and applications in VLSI
Wireless sensor networks have the potential to impact many aspects of human life by ubiquitously sensing, processing, and transmitting information. Medical care is one such area, where Dr. Bhatia’s research group is exploring many applications in support of health monitoring and telemedicine. By outfitting patients with wireless and wearable vital sign sensors, real-time data is collected for determining the physiological status of a patient. Dr. Bhatia’s current research focus is on designing physical layer wireless nodes, network protocols, and security issues in managing patient health data.
Leonidas Bleris
Dr. Bleris’s research interests are at the intersection of synthetic and systems biology, mathematics and control theory. He is interested in theoretically analyzing, testing in silico and experimentally implementing systems that process information and perform complex functions in eukaryotic cells. The construction of such systems is largely motivated by the numerous applications they could enable when implanted in single cells and organisms, including biosensors, smart drugs, synthetic tissue formation and energy production.
Jinming Gao
The Gao Lab combines research expertise in materials science, molecular imaging and cancer biology to establish integrated nanomedicine platforms for early detection and intervention of cancer. The underlying theme of our research is to translate key advances in materials science and nanotechnology into better clinical diagnosis and therapy for cancer.
John Hansen
- Robust speech processing and recognition
- Analysis of speech and speaker traits
- Speech enhancement and feature estimation
- Robust speaker recognition
Dr. Hansen’s research projects are focusing on the modeling and algorithm development of speech and language processing methods to detect dialects of English, Spanish and Arabic. The U.S. Air Force funds this effort. Dr. Hansen’s work is focused on defining strategies for normalizing speech and feature sequences to maintain robust speech system performance in the presence of interfering background noise, speaker variability due to Lombard effect, stress, emotion, accent and dialect.
Walter Hu
- Nanoimprint, e-beam lithography, plasma etching and deposition
- Biomedical nanoelectromechanical systems (bio-NEMS)
- Nanostructured biomaterials for tissue engineering
- Photonic and molecular nanodevices and nanosystems
Several projects that deal with the nano-manipulation and analysis of DNA and other biospecies are being conducted. The work has been performed in collaboration with chemists and biologists at UT Dallas and physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Hu’s team is designing and fabricating the nanostructured biomaterials needed for artificial corneas and for tissue engineering in general. This research is being performed in collaboration with The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Philip Loizou
- Speech processing: Enhancement, compression and recognition
- Signal processing for cochlear implants
- Signal processing and adaptive signal processing algorithms
- Speech perception
Dr. Loizou’s research focuses on the development of new speech-sound processing strategies that improve the levels of speech performance for those with cochlear implants. This research includes the development of signal processing algorithms for cochlear implant processors, the development of speech coding algorithms for music, the development of noise reduction algorithms for cochlear implants, speech perception by cochlear implant patients, the fixed-point implementation of speech processing algorithms on Texas Instruments TMS320C54x DSPs and the optimization of signal processing algorithms on TMS320C6x DSP.
Raymond Ober
- Fluorescence microscopy (including single molecule microscopy) for the study of cellular dynamics
- Immunology
- Image processing
- Signal processing
- Systems biology
- Surface plasmon resonance experiments for the study of molecular interactions
Hyuntae Yoo
The primary focus of Dr. Yoo’s lab is to apply systems biology approaches – with particular interests in functional integration of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic studies – to experimental models of human disease, aiming for the discovery of novel drug targets.
Li Zhang
Dr. Li Zhang has made major contributions to understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying heme signaling in eukaryotic cells. Heme is central to oxygen sensing and utilization in virtually all living organisms. In mammals, heme is critical for erythroid, hepatic, and neuronal functions. Oxygen sensing is directly related to many fundamental physiological and pathological processes, including angiogenesis, tumor development and ischemia. Investigating the molecular mechanism of oxygen sensing and heme signaling is the main objective of Dr. Zhang’s lab. Dr. Zhang’s lab is also interested in investigating the molecular mechanisms by which common neurotoxicants act in neural cells because studies of neurotoxicants should facilitate the understanding of many neural functions and neurological diseases. Dr. Zhang’s lab combines approaches of molecular and cellular biology with genomics and computational approaches to elucidate the global molecular mechanisms underlying cellular responses to environmental stressors, including hypoxia and environmental toxicants.
