Department Calendar of Events

Dr. Dennis Clegg 
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology 
University of California, Santa Barbara 

One promising option for the treatment of ocular disease is to develop cellular therapies using RPE and neural retinal cells derived from pluripotent stem cells. One strategy for treating dry age related macular degeneration is to implant differentiated, polarized monolayers of hESC-RPE or iPS-RPE on an extracellular matrix-based scaffold, whereby cells are provided with a supportive substrate to stimulate cell survival, differentiation and function. We describe recent efforts to develop tissue constructs to replace ocular tissue and translate them to the clinic. A phase 1/2A clinical trial is currently underway to assess the safety of an implant consisting of a monolayer of H9 hESC-RPE on a synthetic scaffold.

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Dr. Clegg earned his BS degree in biochemistry at UC Davis and his PhD in biochemistry at UC Berkeley, where he used emerging methods in recombinant DNA to study the sensory transduction systems of bacteria. As a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSF, he studied neural development and regeneration. He has continued this avenue of research since joining the UCSB faculty, with studies of extracellular matrix and integrin function in the developing eye. His current emphasis is in stem cell research, with a focus on developing therapies for ocular disease. Dr. Clegg is the recipient of the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award in the Physical Sciences, the Pacific Coast Business Times Champions in Health Care Award, the National Eye Institute Audacious Goals award, and served as Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from 2004-2009. He has been a Frontiers of Vision Research Lecturer at the National Eye Institute, a Keynote Lecturer at the Stem Cells World Congress, and a TEDx speaker. He is founder and Co-Director of the UCSB Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering, and has served on advisory boards for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the National Institutes of Health Center for Regenerative Medicine. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of The California Project to Cure Blindness, a multi-disciplinary effort to develop a stem cell therapy for Age-Related Macular Degeneration.

Solid waste is the great unwanted byproduct of our modern society. Every Canadian is responsible, directly or indirectly, for creating about one tonne of solid waste per year. Solid waste is variable, heterogeneous, complex, and difficult and costly to manage by any means other than landfill. So, generally, government regulations or incentives are needed to drive innovation and make waste processing affordable.  In Canada these tend to be weak and inconsistent. One result is that Canadians still send 8 million tonnes per year of untreated organic solid waste to landfill. But all is not lost. This presentation is based upon the premise that organic solid waste can be anaerobically digested, using a process which is robust, versatile, and commercially realizable, despite the lack of supporting regulations. The products are digestate which can be composted, and biogas which can be converted into renewable energy. The critical steps are the elimination of almost all forms of mechanical pretreatment, and the employment of solid state anaerobic digestion. The technology, its origins, its performance at lab scale, its economic prospects and plans for commercialization are all described.

Nigel Guilford is a senior executive with a background in science and engineering and more than forty five years of experience, both domestic and international, in the development and commercialization of technology, and the development and operation of companies, both large and small, primarily in the environmental sector. His particular obsession is garbage, and extracting value from it in the form of renewable energy. Research for his Ph.D., completed in 2017, centred on new ways to anaerobically digest organic solid waste. For the past 26 years he has worked through his own consulting firm, Guilford and Associates Inc.

Smart materials, also known as stimuli responsive materials, are drawing significant research attention due to their improved reliability, performance, flexibility and miniaturization compared to their traditional counterparts. Electroactive polymers (EAPs) and thermoactive polymers (TAPs) are classes of smart materials that undergo deformation in response to electrical or thermal stimuli. The long-term objective of this program is to develop a hierarchical manufacturing platform  for smart materials with tailored multi-functional behaviors (i.e., electro-mechanical, thermo-mechanical, and electro-thermal). The proposed research aims to bridge the gap between the structure of electrically conductive polymers ECPs and 1D and 2D nanoparticles and their manufacturing methodologies. Designing and tailoring the properties of EAP sensory and TAP actuation elements requires a bottom-up approach from self-assembly to a macroscopic hierarchical dual sensor/actuator system through which this smart materials manufacturing platform will be developed. A major application of EAPs/TAPs hybrid is in electronic skins (e-skins), which are flexible, stretchable, and conformable substrates with sensing/actuation capabilities.

Hani Naguib is a Professor at the University of Toronto, and director of the Toronto Institute for Advanced Manufacturing. His major expertise is in the area of manufacturing of programmable material systems including: smart materials, metamaterials, and nanostructured materials. Naguib is the recipient of many honours and awards such as the Canada Research Chair, the Premier’s Early Research Award of Ontario, the Canada Foundation of Innovation, and the faculty Early Teaching Award. He is a Professional Engineer in Canada, a Chartered Engineer in U.K., a Fellow of the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining IOM3, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME, the Society of Plastics Engineers SPE, the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers CSME, and the International Society for Optics and Photonics SPIE. Naguib is serving as Associate Editor for the IOP Journal of Smart Materials and Structures, Journal of Cellular Plastics and Cellular Polymers. The main goal of his research program is to develop sustainable and transformational materials and manufacturing for the health care, energy management and transportation sectors.

Professor Christof Holliger
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Chlorinated solvents such as per- and trichloroethene (PCE/TCE) are among the most frequently encountered groundwater pollutants due to their widespread use in industry and dry cleaning of cloths. Bacteria able to use these pollutants as terminal electron acceptor in an anaerobic respiration process, so-called organohalide-respiring bacteria (OHRB), are present in many natural environments. They can convert PCE and TCE to ethene by reductive dechlorination, however, the intermediate vinyl chloride often accumulates in aquifers where spontaneous dechlorination occurs, a compound which is much more toxic than the parent compounds PCE and TCE. The genomes of several OHRB have been sequenced and show that they can contain multiple genes encoding putative reductive dehalogenases. The genomes also contain numerous genes encoding putative regulatory enzymes involved in expression of reductive dehalogenases. We try to unravel the substrate spectrum of these enzymes with an innovative biochemical approach creating hybrid proteins containing unknown and known parts of these regulatory enzymes. In addition, we also investigated how present knowledge on OHRB and reductive dehalogenases can be used to explain intermediate accumulation phenomena observed in different aquifers, and how one could even envisage reductive dechlorination as bioremediation process in source zones where acidification by fermentation and dechlorination is a major drawback for organohalide respiration to decontaminate such zones.

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Christof Holliger is at present full professor of environmental biotechnology at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. After obtaining a PhD from University of Wageningen, The Netherlands, in 1992, he worked as a group leader at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag, 1992-1998) before joining EPFL as assistant professor. Being originally trained as biologist, his research is mainly directed towards the microbial aspects of environmental biotechnology, however, not forgetting the applicability of the microbial processes and systems involved. Two main topics characterize the research activity, reductive dechlorination of chlorinated solvents such as per- and trichloroethene by anaerobic bacteria and wastewater treatment by aerobic granular sludge. In the former topic, the biochemical and physiological characteristics of the bacteria involved as well as their ecology are investigated. In the latter topic, research concentrates on the influence of wastewater composition on the most interesting ecosystem with its many different niches due to the redox gradients created in the granular biofilm.

In this presentation, an overview of recent advances in self-healing coatings is provided. The talk focuses on the microencapsulation of active compounds used mainly in the polymer coatings. Various preparation methods of microcapsules and their advantages and shortcomings will be discussed. In addition, some recent activities in my research group relate to the preparation of ethyl cellulose (EC), urea-formaldehyde (UF), and polyurethane (PU) microcapsules will be described. Self-healing performance of these microcapsules for enhancing the mechanical properties, barrier performance and corrosion resistance of coatings will be presented.

Mojtaba Mirabedini is a University Professor at the Iran Polymer and Petrochemical Institute (IPPI) and head of Color and Surface Coatings Department.  He is recently invited as a visiting Professor at the Eastern Michigan University. Dr. Mirabedini received his PhD in Corrosion Protection Coatings from the University of Manchester (UMIST) in 2000, working under supervision of late Professor David Scantlebury and Proferssor George Thompson. He specializes in smart polymeric coatings, nanocomposites coatings and adhesives. His current research focuses on developing novel smart functional coatings, self-healing coatings, thread locking adhesives, self-cleaning coatings, and advanced pavement markings. Dr. Mirabedini has been collaborating with Prof. Farnood on the microencapsulation of active materials for smart coating applications since 2010.

Join IEEE Canada Women in Engineering (WIE) and IEEE Toronto WIE Group for the “Engineering Gateways: Communicating for Success as Women in Engineering” Panel at the IEEE Professional Communication 2018 (ProComm’18). Diverse perspectives will be brought to this panel on topics such as communications, self-promotion, professional branding, and strategies for intervention.

Speakers:
Namir Anani
President and CEO of Information and Communications Technology Council

Christine Laperriere
Lead Coach and Executive Director of the Women of Influence Advancement Centre

Teresa Sing
VP Business Development, Refine Recruitment

Jennifer van Amerom
Founder and CEO, Refine Recruitment

Deborah-Tihanyi
Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Director, and Communication Coordinator
University of Toronto

Prof. Dr. Andreas Klamt, COSMOlogic, GmbH & Co KG, & Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Regensburg

COSMO-RS is an alternative approach to the a priori prediction of chemical potentials, activity coefficients and vapor pressures of almost arbitrary chemical compounds in pure liquid solvents and mixtures. In contrast to the group contribution methods COSMO-RS gets the information about the intermolecular interactions from uni-molecular quantum chemical calculations on the compounds and thus it is far less dependent on experimental data. Hence COSMO-RS is an efficient alternative to group contribution methods on the one hand and to the Monte-Carlo and Molecular Dynamics simulations on the other hand. Aside from a few disadvantages it has a lot of systematic advantages. The greatest strengths are the broad applicability and extrapolation power of the method, and the systematic physical insight into the mixture behavior of the systems, which COSMO-RS opens by its sound physical basis. Thus, complicated or rare compounds can be treated and differences between isomers can be resolved. Different comparisons and blind test challenges proofed that COSMO-RS currently provides the most accurate predictions for free energies of molecules in solution.

Beyond the basic features regarding activity coefficients, vapor pressures, and enthalpies of fluid systems, COSMO-RS can be applied to solid-liquid equilibria, to solubility in polymers, to ionic liquids and electrolytes, to pKa-prediction, to adsorption phenomena and physiological partitioning, reaction thermodynamics, micelle and biomembrane binding, chromatographic retention times, co-crystal formation probabilities, and many other problems in chemical engineering, chemistry and formulation.

COSMOplex, a brand-new extension of COSMO-RS to the self-consistent simulation of inhomogeneous, self-organizing systems, will be presented as well. It enables many the simulation of molecules at liquid-liquid interfaces, of micelle formation an even of microemulsions at simulation times 10000 times smaller than required by MD simulations.

Dr. Andreas Klamt studied physics in Göttingen and received his first degree in 1984 in theoretical metal physics. Then he moved on to the Max-Planck-Institut for Metal Research in Stuttgart, where he received his PhD in 1987 with a thesis on ‘States of small positively charged particles in metals’

Then he directly started to work at Bayer AG in Leverkusen in the area of Computational Chemistry. He specialized on solvation and physical property prediction and developed the methods COSMO and COSMO-RS which meanwhile are widely used in the computational chemistry community. After being head of the central department for Computational Chemistry at Bayer for 3 years, he left Bayer in 1999 and founded COSMOlogic GmbH&Co.KG, Leverkusen, a company for Computational Chemistry and Fluid Phase Thermodynamics, Software and Consulting, which now has 17 co-workers.

In 2005 he received his habilitation in Physical Chemistry at University of Regensburg, and in since 2012  he is honary professor, teaching courses for “Computational Fluid Phase Thermodynamics”  every October in Regensburg.

Dr. Mike Modo,
Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh

The brain is considered to only have a limited capacity to repair damaged tissue and entirely lack the potential to regenerate lost tissue. Tissue lost after a stroke is therefore not spontaneously replaced and create a cystic cavity filled with extracellular fluid. To repair tissue damage in the peri-infarct area, we are pursuing the use of fetal-derived human neural stem cells for implantation to enhance the ongoing endogenous repair process. Although this approach has found its clinical translation, the procedure still requires optimization to ensure an appropriate delivery of cells into different tissue microenvironment. Enhancing cell survival and integration using instructive biomaterials and rehabilitation strategies are investigate to inform future clinical trials and ensure therapeutic efficacy. However, this approach does not lead to a regeneration of tissue inside the stroke cavity. To promote the invasion of endogenous brain cells into this tissue void, we are therefore investigating the implantation of inductive bioscaffolds formed out of extracellular matrix. These hydrogels attract host cells and can be efficient degraded while bridging the tissue gap. We therefore propose that this approach can induce regeneration of brain tissue in the stroke cavity. It is hope that these regenerative medicine approach will provide new therapeutic horizons for patients with stroke.

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Mike Modo, a Luxembourg-native, graduated in Psychology from Royal Holloway University of London (1997), UK, and spend 1 year as an undergraduate at the Psychology Department at McGill University (1995-1996) in Montreal, Canada. He then furthered his interests in the neural correlates underlying behavioral functions during an M.Sc. in Neuroscience (1998) at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, where he also continued his research efforts leading to a PhD in Neurosciences (2001). The main interest of Dr Modo’s research lies in the restorative neurobiology following brain damage, predominantly focused on stroke, but also in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. An interdisciplinary approach is espoused that involves the use of pharmacological agents, stem cells, as well as biomaterials. A special focus lies on the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods that allow us to guide and monitor in situ tissue engineering. Our ultimate aim is to restore a functional tissue in the brain that can support behavioral recovery.

Hosted by Dr. Molly Shoichet
Snacks and Refreshments will be served