Collaborations driven by the McKelvey School of Engineering have led to major advances in positron emission tomography, medical applications of ultrasound, application of computers to hearing research and development of heart valve flow simulators.
Collaboration across the University is a hallmark of biomedical engineering at Washington University at St. Louis.
An interdisciplinary center housed within the engineering school, the Cardiac Bioelectricity & Arrhythmia Center works to develop new tools for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias — a major cause of death and disability.
Through an interdisciplinary effort, CBAC investigators apply molecular biology, ion-channel and cell electrophysiology, optical mapping of membrane potential and cell calcium, multi-electrode cardiac electrophysiological mapping, electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) and other noninvasive imaging modalities, and computational biology (mathematical modeling) to study mechanisms of arrhythmias at all levels of the cardiac system.
The Center for Science & Engineering of Living Systems (CSELS), is an interdisciplinary center that supports researchers from engineering and basic sciences who focus on the cell.
Our goals are to model, design and manipulate cells and cellular matter at multiple scales in order to understand how cellular level phenotypes come about as the result of coordinated, regulated, collective interactions at the sub-cellular and extra-cellular levels. This will require innovations in technology and computation; it will also enable engineering and design and the single cell, single molecule and all scales in between. Innovations and insights generated through synergies among CSELS members are leading to technological advances and a better understanding of cellular-level phenotypes that have an impact on modeling complex diseases and the development of novel materials based on active living matter.
