Principal Investigator:
Andrew D. McCulloch, Professor of Bioengineering, UCSD
Collaborating Investigators:
Jeffrey H. Omens, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine and
Bioengineering, UCSD
Don Sutton, Assistant Scientist, SDSC
Leon Axel, Professor of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania
Julius Guccione, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering,
Washington University
Larry A. Taber, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Washington
University
James B. Bassingthwaighte, Professor of Bioengineering,
University of Washington
Alan Garfinkel, Associate Professor of Physiological Science,
UCLA
The Cardiome is the description, in quantitative, testable form, of the functioning of the normal heart and its responses to intervention. The Cardiome Project is a large-scale multidisciplinary, multi-center effort to develop computational models of the heart that integrate electrophysiological, hemodynamic, metabolic, and mechanical functions and that span scales of biological organization from gene to organ system.
The specific objectives of our project are:
The principal investigator and collaborators at NPACI partner institutions and other centers are working on the major aspects of this project, and undergraduate students from many disciplines are actively involved in these efforts, which are sponsored by several sources including two resources based at SDSC: the National Biomedical Computation Resource and the BioNOME Resource.
At UCSD alone, at least a dozen undergraduate student per year are involved in the computational and experimental aspects of this research. Many of them participate in the many campus outreach programs such as the Faculty Mentor Program, The Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Program and the School of Engineering's STEP program. Students are teamed with a graduate student or Professional staff member and together with the PI an independent project is identified. They attend group meetings every Friday morning where they present and discuss their work. The meetings also provide a forum for students to rehearse presentations for events such as the annual UCSD Undergraduate Research Conference. Most earn academic credit for independent research (199). About half the students in the group are Bioengineering majors and the rest come from a wide array of other departments including AMES, Biology and Computer Science. Summer students often come from other institutions; for example, Jon Silva from Johns Hopkins is supported this summer by the SDSC REU program.
By maintaining close ties with campus outreach coordinators like Darlene Salmon, Kathy Kennedy and Glynda Jackson, we have been highly successful in recruiting minority and women students to the research project. This summer, three minority undergraduate students, Mary Kay Mascarenas, Imani Gardner and Luis Rodriguez are engaged in research projects. Many of the students go on to graduate studies at UCSD and other schools. Three of the Ph.D. students currently in the PIs group did undergraduate research projects in his lab including UNCF scholar, Sonya Summerour.
In summary, we have the projects and resources, personnel, track record and student interest to host as many undergraduates as can be supported. We can easily fill at least six summer positions per year. We propose specifically to use funds from this REU program to support students engaged in collaborative research with partner institutions including several NPACI partners. The availability of summer positions at UCSD will be advertised among the engineering and biology undergraduate programs at the collaborators' institutions, and we will recruit UCSD students who have worked on 199 research during the academic year to conduct summer research at SDSC or the other partner institutions.
Although the Cardiome project is not a specific NPACI thrust it is closely related to the Interaction Environments activity (Art Olson), and it is directly related to the research of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (Peter Arzberger).
Andrew McCulloch, Professor Dept of Bioengineering mailto:amcculloch@ucsd.edu Univ of California San Diego Tel: 619-534-2547 9500 Gilman Drive Fax: 619-534-6896 La Jolla, CA 92093-0412 Asst: Elise Louie, 619-822-1253 http://cmrg.ucsd.edu mailto:elouie@bioeng.ucsd.edu