Dale Callahan, PE, Ph.D., Named Associate Dean
Longtime faculty member Dale Callahan, Ph.D., has been named Associate Dean for Professional Programs and Industry Relations for the School of Engineering. In this new role, Callahan will provide guidance to the Master of Engineering Program and will be the school’s primary liaison with industry partners.
“Over many years, Dr. Callahan has distinguished himself as an educator, administrator, and entrepreneur,” says SOE Dean Iwan Alexander, Ph.D. “Since 2000, he has led the Information Engineering and Management track in the MEng program, and his business savvy makes him an ideal person to help us develop stronger ties to the business community.”
Callahan spent 13 years in the telecom industry before leaving to start his own business. Over a period of several years he launched a number of entrepreneurial ventures in the areas of wireless communications, video games, real estate, and more. He became an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2000, in addition to IEM director, and was promoted to associate professor in 2008.
In his new role, Callahan says he hopes to marshal the strengths of individual MEng tracks to find ways to improve the overall program. “All of our tracks have had great success over the years, and the new tracks that have come online in the past couple of years have great potential,” Callahan says. “I will work with the directors to leverage resources so they can continue to grow.”
Presidential Innovation Summer Fellows Wrap Up Summer of Collaboration
BME Students Team Up with Clinicians to Solve Real Medical Problems
Four UAB biomedical engineering students spent this summer as a part of an interdisciplinary team working with clinicians to translate ideas into improved patient care and outcomes.
The students—Brody DeSilva, Allaire Doussan, Ali El-Husari, and Paige Severino—are among UAB’s five participants in the inaugural UAB Presidential Innovation Summer Fellowship program.
The program was created to address challenges encountered by working nurses and clinicians. These health-care professionals devote their lives to patient care, during which they sometimes come across processes or products that could be improved. While they have little time to give to moving a solution to the problem forward, their experience with patients on a daily basis makes them adept at identifying opportunities for improvement.
That is where the student innovators from UAB’s Solution Studios™ come in.
The purpose of UAB Solution Studios™ is to accelerate the translation of clinical innovation by training clinicians and STEM students — those studying science, technology, engineering and math — to collaborate and think creatively around solutions to clinical problems.
Solution Studios™ is a partnership among the UAB Honors College Science and Technology Honors Program, and the UAB schools of Engineering, Medicine and Nursing.
The four BME students were joined in the inaugural program by biology student Hira Munir. All five students are members of the Science and Technology Honors Program students in the UAB Honors College.
NASA Contracts with EITD for New Orbiting Hardware
Iceberg Project Is Latest in a Line of High-Tech Freezers
This photo from 2012 shows astronauts transferring samples into the MELFI freezer. More photos and information can be found at nasa.gov. NASA has a plan for the future of space research, and it is counting on UAB engineers to help make it a reality.
The UAB Engineering Innovation and Technology Development (EITD) research group recently received a contract worth $6.2 million over the next three years to design and build a new set of freezers for the International Space Station (ISS). The freezers will replace the MELFI (Minus Eighty-degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS) units, which have been on board the ISS since 2006.
“MELFI was created by the European Space Agency in the early 2000s,” said EITD scientist Daniel Connor. “Now coming up on 12 years in orbit, the units are getting pretty close to their run time. NASA is looking ahead to continuing scientific experiments through 2024 and beyond, so they were looking at options for a long-term replacement.”
Rather than enter a new contract with the ESA to create a replacement system, NASA looked to the EITD—an award-winning team with extensive experience in exactly this type of project. For more than a decade, the EITD team has designed, built and maintained several models of high-tech space freezers for the ISS, including the MERLIN, Glacier, and Polar units. “Glacier and Polar were designed to be transport devices,” said Senior Mechanical Engineer Lance Weise. “This new unit will be permanently in orbit on the ISS. We’ll use some aspects from those previous projects, but this will be a whole new system.”
New NIH Grants Boost BME Research
Researchers in the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) recently secured two substantial grants from the National Institutes of Health, putting the department in position to further strengthen its standing as one of the nation’s premier BME programs.
Department chair Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., recently received a four-year $2.5 million grant to examine integration and therapeutic potential of a prefabricated myocardial tissue patch (hCMP). This grant is in addition to a seven-year, $8-million consortium grant (JZ , contact PI) that is currently supporting development and preclinical testing of different types of hCMP.
Also this summer, Gangjian Qin, M.D. professor of BME who recently moved to Birmingham from Northwestern University in Chicago , received a four-year $2.3-million grant to study persistent hypertension. Qin intends to establish a previously unrecognized role of E2F2, a classic oncogene, in the regulation of arterial contractility and blood-pressure homeostasis. This study will likely provide the missing link between the results of large-scale genome-wide association studies and the pathogenesis of human hypertension. Persistent hypertension is a major risk factor for stroke, heart attack, heart failure, and arterial aneurysm; even moderately elevated arterial blood pressure shortens life expectancy. This study may help identify novel strategies for treating this critical health problem.
