I began my work here at the Beckman Institute almost ten years ago. My specific area is
medical imaging; I came from biomedical engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
I began to develop small types of contrast stages for medical imaging purposes.
And I began to realize that they would be good agents to deliver compounds to improve health.
The early work that I did here at the Beckman Institute involved the creation of nanoparticles.
Some of which have been patented by the university and subsequently I developed other types of
nanoparticles for the delivery of compounds and treatment of health.
I did a lot of work imaging particularly of the brain, here within the Institute because
of our really advanced magnetic resonance imaging facilities. I began to look at brain and neurofiber mapping
I was beginning to map corpus callosum fibers connecting one side of the brain with the other.
I realized that there was a real need to understand traumatic brain injuries. When you take all this together,
it really is a body of work that addresses health and attempts to monitor health, particularly
brain health and delivery of compounds to improve health.
I got into working with combat helmet because of a call from the congressionally directed
medical research program. To try to identify traumatic brain injury in battle field personnel.
I proposed to them that we develop a combat helmet, my combat helmet. And I proposed we
embed health monitoring technologies into the pad structures along with a computer chip
that does all the work. So, at this point I started to combine my work with Nano sensing
technologies and brain imaging to try to develop a real time battle helmet that could identify,
perhaps the onset of the traumatic brain injury. Not diagnose it, just identify it when soldiers may be in trouble.
That is kind of the whole purpose of what
we do here in the Institute. And that is to try to expand our knowledge to be able to
identify advanced technologies that actually can help somebody. It would be a real thrill
to be able to do that. I am currently talking with the government to try to advance this
helmet with more stuff. As an addition, I really have a lot of colleagues within the
university that work with me on this, including Ravi Iyer who is our vice chancellor for
research a lot of other members of the Coordinated Science Lab.
If one is able to take some of these advanced technologies and really make them diagnose
or help treat individuals with various types of disorders, especially for me, chronic
diseases, then it is fun for me. And I enjoy the work and hopefully it can be translated
into something that would help people.