Professors Lin, Hone and Simaan receive grants from NSF, NIH and SAIC
09/30/2009
Professor Qiao Lin has been awarded a three-year grant of $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Integrated Selection of Thermally Responsive Aptamers for Specific Purification and Enrichment of Biomolecules." The major goals of this project are to develop a microfluidic system for automated and integrated isolation of aptamers, i.e., nucleic acids that recognize biomolecules with specific affinity binding. The isolated aptamers will have predefined temperature-dependent binding characteristics and will be used to demonstrate highly selective purification and enrichment of biomolecular analytes.
The National Institute of Health awarded a team from Mt. Sinai and Columbia a five-year, $6 million grant from its Transformative Research Projects (T-R01) program for "Dynamics Underlying Tissue Integrity." Professor James Hone is a co-Principal Investigator in the project. His group will construct three-dimensional environments that will allow the team to study how tissues maintain the complex shapes required for many functions.
Dr. Nabil Simaan and Dr. Peter Allen (Computer Science) won
a $1,152,000
award from Science Applications International (SAIC). This 27 month research grant is part of a
larger research consortium for a DARPA-funded proposal titled "COBRA:
Cooperative Bio-inspired Remote Manipulator Architecture." The aim of this
research project is to investigate the feasibility of integrated user interfaces,
vision feedback, and cooperative sensory feedback control for enabling
underwater dual-arm micro assembly. Dr. Simaan's lab leads the effort of design
and modeling, integration, and low level control of flexible underwater
tele-manipulation slaves. Dr. Allen's lab leads the visual sensory feedback
algorithms and the grasping aspects of this project.