A Message From the Director

Welcome to the first in a series of quarterly E-news letters presenting the latest news and developments in the Institute for Computational Medicine. Chartered in 2005 as an institute in both the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, the mission of the Institute is to understand the mechanisms, and to improve the diagnosis, prediction and treatment of disease through the development of mathematical and computational models of disease processes. The Institute is located in the new Computational Sciences and Engineering Building located at the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. The Institute is comprised of two centers, the Center for Imaging Sciences and the Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling. There are currently 14 Institute core faculty.

ICM research and training is focused in three areas. These are computational anatomy and medical imaging, mathematical bioinformatics, and modeling of biological systems. Computational Anatomy is the mathematical and computational discipline of how to describe anatomic shape and function, as measured using medical imaging techniques, and how to detect shape/function changes in image data that are characteristic of disease. It is a discipline which is poised to have a profound impact on many different areas of medicine by enabling discovery of anatomic markers that are highly predictive of disease. Mathematical bioinformatics is a discipline that addresses the problem of how best to discover biomarkers in multi-scale biomedical data sets that are highly predictive of disease risk, presence/absence, disease sub-type and therapeutic approach. It provides the analytical approaches that will be the basis of the coming era of “personalized medicine”. ICM researchers are creating novel mathematical and computational approaches that will lead to the development of new assays for estimating risk of, detecting, evaluating progression of, and treating disease. Modeling of Biological Systems addresses the question of how to develop computer models of disease that can be used to understand disease mechanisms and to test “in silico” approaches for treating disease. Such models will provide a quantum leap forward in development of new therapies by enabling biomedical researchers, for the first time, to test novel approaches on the computer, select those that are most advantageous and that are predicted to pose the least risk, before testing these approaches in clinical trials. ICM researchers have been pioneers in developing “in silico” methods for understanding and guiding new therapeutic development in heart disease.

In this news letter, we welcome three new Institute core faculty. Dr. Rajat Mittal is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He received the B. Tech. degree in aeronautical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, the M.S. degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1991 and the Ph.D. degree in applied mechanics from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1995. He joined the Center for Turbulence Research Stanford University, Stanford, CA, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1995, where he conducted research in the area of turbulent flow simulations. Subsequently, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Florida where he taught from 1996 to 2001. Before coming to JHU he taught at George Washington University from 2001 to 2009 where he also founded the GW Center for Biomimetics and Bioinspired Engineering. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, biomedical engineering, bioinspired engineering and flow control. He is recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel Award from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, the 2006 Lewis Moody Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dr. Feilim Mac Gabhann received a BE (Chemical Engineering) from University College Dublin in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2006. He went on to work as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Virginia. Feilim's new position is Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Institute for Computational Medicine. His research takes a combined experimental-computational approach to generating novel therapeutic strategies to major human diseases, including cancer, peripheral artery disease, and HIV. In particular, he develops metrics (proteomic, genomic or morphological) to differentiate patient subgroups that respond differently to therapies. By identifying the most suitable therapy for groups of patients, personalized medicine promises to decrease R&D costs and increase positive outcomes. Dr. Mac Gabhann is a recipient of a K99/R00 NIH Pathway to Independence Award, as well as an Award for Outstanding Research by a Graduate Student from the Biomedical Engineering Society and the Zweifach Student Award from the Microcirculatory Society. Dr. Sridevi V. Sarma received a BS (1994) from Cornell University and an MS (1997) and PhD (2006) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Sri is now an Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include control of constrained and defective systems (applications in neuroscience) and large-scale optimization. Sri is president and cofounder of Infolenz Corporation, a Marketing Analytics company. She is a recipient of the GE faculty for the future scholarship, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, a L’Oreal for Women in Science National fellow, and a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Careers at the Scientific Interface Award.

This issue also highlights the work of Dr. Joseph Greenstein. Joe is an Assistant Research Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, with primary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is known internationally for his work on integrative modeling of cardiac muscle cell function. His work has provided important, new insights on the molecular basis of arrhythmia in heart disease.

Institute faculty are constantly growing their base of collaborators in both the School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering. Faculty have ongoing collaborations with researchers in the Division of Cardiology, the Departments of Radiology, Neurology, and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, the Kimmel Cancer Research Center, and the Kennedy Krieger Institute. We look forward to sharing the exciting scientific findings of Institute faculty and their collaborators with you in subsequent editions of this news letter.

With my best wishes,

Raimond L. Winslow

Director, Institute for Computational Medicine

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