A Message From the Director

Welcome to this year’s first issue of the Institute for Computational Medicine E-Newsletter. I hope you are as pleased and thrilled as I am about this re-launch. This publication would not have been possible without the combined efforts of our administrative staff and the entire ICM community’s participation.

This year has been a particularly special one so far. We held our first ICM retreat, which aimed to foster research interactions within the different research groups and to build ICM visibility both nationally and internationally thru outreach. We completed our first year of the newly developed ICM Distinguished Lecture Series, bringing accomplished US scientists in computational medicine to the Institute. Finally, we saw numerous awards received by our faculty and students, a few of which we highlight in this newsletter.
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Featured Research: Myocardial mitochondrial ion dynamics and energetics.
by An-Chi Wei

The heart, as a pump, is a high-energy demand organ in which mitochondria is the cellular powerhouse. In order to study complex regulatory processes for matching energy supply and demand between mitochondria and cardiac myocytes, a detailed computational model for mitochondria is needed.
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Mitochondrial Ion Circuits

Sridevi Sarma receives $2 million National Science Foundation grant

Dr. Sridevi V. Sarma of the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation award of $2,000,000 for support of the project entitled "EFRI-M3C: Robust Decoder-Compensator Architecture for Interactive Control of High-Speed and Loaded Movements".
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Iraj Hosseini awarded Ruth H. Aranow Fellowship

Iraj Hosseini, a Graduate Student in the lab of Dr. Felilim Mac Gabhann, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computational Medicine, has been awarded the Ruth H. Aranow Fellowship. The fellowship provides $30,000 towards Iraj's graduate research, and he will be known as the Ruth H. Aranow Fellow during the remainder of his Ph.D.
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Karchin Lab releases first module of educational video games for high schools

The Karchin Lab at the Institute for Computational Medicine, Johns Hopkins University recently released the first of a suite of educational video games developed with outreach support from the National Science Foundation.
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Accolades

Awards

Hannah Carter, has been awarded a 2012 Siebel Scholarship. Students are nominated for the Siebel Scholarship on the basis of academic and research excellence and leadership activity during their graduate school career.

Claire Zhao has been awarded a Post-Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral (PGSD) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to support her project "Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Calcium Entrained Arrhythmia".

Dr. Rajat Mittal has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, recognizing his "outstanding engineering achievements."

Papers Published

Tandri H, Weinberg SH, Chang KC, Zhu R, Trayanova NA, Tung L, Berger RD.
Reversible Cardiac Conduction Block and Defibrillation with High-Frequency Electric Field. Science Translational Medicine, 2011 Sept. 28; 3(102):102ra96 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3002445

Guthrie VB, Allen J, Camps M, Karchin R. Network Models of TEM ß-Lactamase Mutations Coevolving under Antibiotic Selection Show Modular Structure and Anticipate Evolutionary Trajectories. PLOS Computational Biology 2011 Sept. 22; 7(9): e1002184. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002184

T.A. Quinn, S. Granite, M.A. Allessie, C. Antzelevitch, C. Bollensdorff, G. Bub, R.A.B. Burton, E. Cerbai, P.S. Chen, M. Delmar, D. DiFrancesco, Y.E. Earm, I.R. Efimov, M. Egger, E. Entcheva, M. Fink, R. Fischmeister, M.R. Franz, A. Garny, W.R. Giles, et al. Minimum Information about a Cardiac Electrophysiology Experiment (MICEE): Standardised reporting for model reproducibility, interoperability, and data sharing. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. 2011 Oct; 107(1):4-10

Future ICM Distinguished Seminars

November 1, 2011,
Andre Levchenko
Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering,
Johns Hopkins University
"Information Transduction Capacity of Noisy Biochemical Signaling Networks"

December 6, 2011,
Scott Diamond, UPENN
"Seminar Topic TBA"

Click here for the latest info on up-coming seminars.