Honors & News

(Left to right): Kris Billiar, BMES Chair of the
Student Affairs Committee, Cassie Gorman,
URBMES chapter member, and
Dr. Richard Waugh, BMES President.

The URBiomedical Engineering department was well represented at this year's Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting in Hartford, Connecticut. In attendance were 5 faculty members, including Dr. Richard Waugh (BME Department Chair and BMES President), 5 graduate students, 2 staff members, and 24 undergraduate students, who presented posters and spoke about their research.

The event was highlighted with the URBME Student Chapter being awarded the Student Chapter Mentoring Program Award. This award recognized the URBME mentoring program, established in 2010 by Ben Freedman BME '11. The program pairs upperclassmen and graduate students with freshmen and sophomores and encourages communication between class years and the passing of knowledge about classes, workloads and in the future, networking opportunities.

Professor Richard Waugh, Ph.D., BME Department Chair, delivered the Sigma Kappa Tau endowed lecture at the City College of New York on May 18. The engineering social fraternity was established at CCNY during the post-Depression years to help students deal with some of the stress and pressure of the times. The Waugh Lab's research centers on the deformability of blood cells and how blood cell deformability plays a role in health and disease.

As any weekend warrior knows, an errant elbow or a missed ball can put a crimp in an afternoon of fun. The bruising and swelling are painfully obvious, but the processes occurring under the skin remain full of mystery. What is known is that leukocytes, or white blood cells, mobilize to protect injured body tissue from infection. What is not understood is why some leukocytes - but not others - are attracted to damaged tissue.