Nifty fifty speaker

Franklin Institute

Frederic Bertley

Nifty Fifty Podcast: Nanobiotechnology Researcher Dr. Jordan Green

carlyo — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:24:53 +0000

Nifty Fifty Podcast: Nanobiotechnology Researcher Dr. Jordan Green

This is the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival Podcast, featuring Jordan Green, Ph.D.speaking to students at South River High School in Edgewater, MD. Dr. Green talks about his work creating innovative technologies and therapeutics that can directly benefit human health.

Read full blog and listen to the podcast by clicking here.

carlyo Thu, 04/02/2015 - 12:24

Tags

NASA's Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan Kicks Off The Nifty Fifty Program!

carlyo — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 20:53:55 +0000

NASA's Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan Kicks Off The Nifty Fifty Program!

By Nifty Fifty Host Carol Bengle Gilbert

Very often, even the host can't helped but be inspired by the Nifty Fifty talks. Monday, I listened to Dr. Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, address middle school students at the Nysmith School for the Gifted in Herndon, Virginia. The school decided to announce the science fair winners in conjunction with our event. (The kids in front of our sign in the photo are a few of the many winners.) This was a fun touch!

Her talk brought out many interesting aspects of the work NASA does, but it was a student comment that really got me thinking. Dr. Stofan had explained the importance of polar ice caps to global warming, noting how their white color reflects light; if they melt, she pointed out, that light will be absorbed, raising Earth's temperature. A girl raised her hand and asked, "Why don't we all paint our roofs white?"

Read the full blog here.

carlyo Mon, 02/16/2015 - 15:53

Tags

High-Tech Frontiers: Manufacturing New Tissue to Replace Tissue Damaged by Disease and Trauma with Dr. Jennifer Elisseef

carlyo — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 13:21:01 +0000

High-Tech Frontiers: Manufacturing New Tissue to Replace Tissue Damaged by Disease and Trauma with Dr. Jennifer Elisseef

The ‘Nifty Fifty (times 4)’, a program of Science Spark, presented by InfoComm International, are a group of 200 noted science and engineering professionals who will fan out across the Washington, D.C. area in the 2014-2015 school year to speak about their work and careers at various middle and high schools.

Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Jennifer Elisseef

Each year in medicine the low availability of donor tissue and organs for transplantation grows even more acute, but scientists -- working in an emerging, high-tech frontier called tissue engineering -- are helping to address the crisis by exploring ways to grow such tissue in the laboratory using stem cells and other bio-components.

Tissue engineering (sometimes also known as regenerative medicine) is the science of designing and manufacturing new tissue -- such as skin, bone, corneas and heart valves -- to restore impaired organs and replace body parts after disease or trauma.

While advances in tissue engineering may be new, the concept of this science is not, says Jennifer Elisseeff, a noted researcher at Johns Hopkins University who is at the forefront of regenerative medicine investigation. "Scientists have been working in this field for more than two decades exploring its possible applications," she explains.

Internationally known for her research, Jennifer is an associate professor and the Jules Stein Chair in Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, in addition to serving as Director of the university's recently-established Translational Tissue Engineering Center.

Her biomaterials and tissue engineering laboratory focuses on developing new biomaterials and minimally invasive technologies to repair and rebuild lost tissues, while investigating stem cells and novel approaches to musculoskeletal tissue engineering. In her work, she collaborates with such clinical departments as plastic surgery, orthopedics, ophthalmology, and otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat specialists).

The promise of tissue engineering is especially exciting because it enables patients' own cells to be used, and as a result, the chances of the body rejecting the new tissue or organ are greatly minimized, Jennifer explains.

This science stands to have the greatest immediate impact in the field of eye surgery, where cornea transplantation is the most common transplant procedure in medicine. In the United States alone, surgeons perform 40,000 cornea operations each year. Corneal tissue, however, is in tight supply in this country, and worldwide there is a dire shortage.

Advances in tissue engineering are also expected to yield promising results in the future for orthopedic disease, such as arthritis, specifically in the area of soft tissue regeneration, cartilage repair and wound healing. "The science will bring new products to market to help people delay, and eventually avoid, joint replacement." Jennifer says.

Recently, she and her lab team have received international attention in their field for using hydrogels (a polymer-based material upon which cells can develop into new tissue) as a scaffold for tissue engineering in orthopedics, in addition for using such approaches to develop an artificial cornea.

"Understanding mechanisms of cellular interactions (both cell-cell and cell-material) and tissue development on scaffolds is critical to advancement of the field, particularly in applications employing stem cells." she says.

Dr. Elisseeff received her Bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University (graduating with honors), and her Ph.D. in medical engineering from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

In 2004, Jennifer co-founded Cartilix Inc., a high-tech startup venture that translated adhesive and biomaterial technologies for treating orthopedic disease. This company was, acquired by Biomet Inc. in 2009. Later that year, she founded Aegeria Soft Tissue and Tissue Repair, startups which focus on soft tissue regeneration and wound healing.

She has received numerous awards and honors, including: the Carnegie Mellon Young Alumni Award, Arthritis Investigator Award from the Arthritis Foundation, Yasuda Award from the Society of Physical Regulation in Medicine and Biology. She was named by Technology Review magazine as a top innovator under 35 in 2002 and her research was cited among the top 10 technologies to change the future. In 2008, Dr. Elisseeff was elected a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Young Global Leader in the World Economic Forum.

Click here for more information.

carlyo Tue, 11/18/2014 - 08:21

Tags

Aegeria Soft Tissue and Tissue Repair

Cartilix Inc

Dr. Jennifer Elisseef

Jennifer Elisseef

Johns Hopkins University

Nifty fifty speaker

Regenerative Medicine

Translational Tissue Engineering Center

Wilmer Eye Institute

Who Will Be the Next Academy Award Winners? Who Was the Best Basketball Player of All Time? The Answers Can Be Found in Mathematics, Says Tim Chartier

carlyo — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:52:28 +0000

Who Will Be the Next Academy Award Winners? Who Was the Best Basketball Player of All Time? The Answers Can Be Found in Mathematics, Says Tim Chartier

Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Tim Chartier

As a mathematician and researcher par excellence specializing in numerical linear algebra, Tim Chartier, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College, is known for pushing the boundaries of mathematics and its application in innovative ways. He has worked, for example, with both Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the development and analysis of computational methods targeted to increase efficiency and robustness of numerical simulation on the labs' supercomputers, which are among the fastest in the world.

However in recent years he has garnered an equally impressive reputation among students and the public for another talent: breaking down the complexity and fear of mathematics in unforgettable ways by demonstrating how math can be applied effectively in real-life situations.

These milestone demonstrations and explanations by Tim have included using mathematical principles and other data to shed practical light on numerous areas, including how to:

-- create an algorithm to predict Academy Award winners each year;

-- accurately determine the best basketball player of all time -- Lebron James, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Michael Jordan;

-- gain insight into the 4th dimension and other higher dimensional space realms depicted in the film, Sphereland;

-- create a near-perfect NCAA March Madness Bracket in college basketball.

Needless to say, his expertise in applied math and sports data analytics has attracted the attention of the New York Times, CBS, USA Today and many other national media outlets. This also includes fielding mathematical questions for the Sports Science program on ESPN, and writing for the Science blog of the Huffington Post, plus authoring key books for the lay public on mathematics and its practical applications, such as his recent popular work, Math Bytes: Google Bombs, Chocolate-Covered Pi, and Other Cool Bits in Computing.

In addition, Tim's passion for bringing the joys of math to the masses involves using his talents as a mime to explain complex math and science concepts to students and adults.

Says Tim: ¨For some, math may be something to 'beware' of -- rather than be 'aware' of.¨ He is on a mission to change the public's attitude toward the latter.

¨Mathematicians continue to expand the boundaries of what we know mathematically, and the field of math and its applications continue to grow,¨ he says. ¨For example, NBA [National Basketball Association] teams use mathematics to gain a competitive edge over their opponent. Will the better team with better mathematics win? It definitely helped the Oakland A's baseball team in 2002 with the math that became known as Moneyball.¨

Citing another example of how math is applied to daily life, Tim says, ¨Every day, credit card numbers are encrypted to allow for secure online transactions. Developing methods of encryption that simply cannot be broken with a faster computer comes from mathematics.¨

Studying math, he emphasizes enables one to appreciate and possibly understand its applications. ¨Mathematics teaches a way of thinking," Tim says.

Tim, a recipient of a national teaching award from the Mathematical Association of America, serves on the Editorial Board for Math Horizons, a mathematics magazine of the Mathematical Association of America and on the Advisory Board of YourMusicOn (YMO), a mobile music startup company.

He is also chairman of the Advisory Council for the Museum of Mathematics -- the first museum of mathematics in the United States which opened in 2012, in addition to being the author of numerous articles published in peer-reviewed journals in mathematics, and co-author of the seminal book Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms.

He received his Bachelor's of Science degree in applied mathematics; his Master's degree in computational mathematics from Western Michigan University, and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He held a VIGRE postdoctoral position at the University of Washington, before arriving at Davidson College in 2003.

Click here for more information.

carlyo Mon, 11/10/2014 - 14:52

Tags

Davidson College

Math and Sports

Mathematic Principles

Mathematics

Mathematics and Miming

Mime

Nifty fifty speaker

Sports Data Analytics

Meat-Eating And Other Lessons From Our Ancestors: Explore Our Evolutionary Past With Anthropologist Briana Pobiner

carlyo — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 19:21:19 +0000

Meat-Eating And Other Lessons From Our Ancestors: Explore Our Evolutionary Past With Anthropologist Briana Pobiner

Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Briana Pobiner

What does it mean to be human? Like other scientists in the field of anthropology, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist and science educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, uses this question as an important framework as she delves into the mysterious evolutionary past of the human species.

As a paleoanthropologist, Briana studies the predecessors of our own species Homo sapiens, using fossils and other remains. In this realm, her area of research is indeed an interesting one: the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), which has also included topics as diverse as cannibalism in the Cook Islands and chimpanzee carnivory.

Briana's fieldwork to investigate how and what our ancestors ate has taken her to Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Indonesia, and her studies have been supported by organizations such as the Fulbright-Hays program, the Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, Rutgers University, the Society for American Archaeology, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

So, why do we humans have a penchant for eating meat? Briana responds: ¨It's interesting -- those 'why' questions are the hardest to answer in prehistory. Some ideas have to do with potential changes in climate, where foods like fruit and different plants and other things that we may have eaten maybe became less available. Another thing is that there were big carnivores in the past that ate different kinds of animals, and there may have been a lot of meat left over in those animals. Some of our ancestors may have said, "'That's a new food resource.'"

In her work in the far-off regions of Africa and other locations, her favorite and most memorable field moments include falling asleep in a tent in the Serengeti in Tanzania while listening to the distant whoops of hyenas, watching a pride of lions eat a zebra carcass on the Kenyan equator, and discovering fossil bones that were last touched, butchered and eaten by one of her 1.5 million year old ancestors.

At the famous Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, which she joined in 2005, Briana also leads the Human Origins Program's education and outreach efforts and manages the Human Origins Program's public programs, website content, social media, and exhibition volunteer training. Additionally, she serves as an Associate Research Professor of Anthropology at the George Washington University.

Briana has a Bachelor's of Arts degree in Evolutionary Studies from Bryn Mawr College (1997), where she created her own major, and an Master's of Arts degree (2002) and Ph.D. (2007) in Anthropology from Rutgers University.

Click here for more information.

carlyo Mon, 10/27/2014 - 15:21

Tags

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History