The Taplin Awards symposium will feature research talks by the four new Taplin Faculty Fellows next Wednesday, May 22 at 10 a.m. in Room E25-119.
The Taplin Awards recognize and support faculty and students in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology's programs in biomedical engineering, physics and chemistry. The work of the Taplin Fellows enhances the effectiveness of HST's contributions to understanding the causes, prevention, treatment and cure of disease.
Martha L. Bulyk will give a talk on "Experimental and Computational Approaches for Studying Transcriptional Regulatory Networks." Bulyk (S.B. 1993) has focused on integrating functional genomics with bioinformatics. Through her Taplin fellowship, Bulyk is working to integrate bioinformatics into HST's pathophysiology curriculum. She is a member of the faculty of HST and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Hugh M. Herr will talk about "Conservation of Angular Momentum in Human Movement." Herr's research involves the development of human-assistive technologies and investigations into mammalian locomotive control, tissue engineering and robotics. Herr (S.M. 1993) is using his Taplin fellowship to investigate a virtual wheel model that characterizes limb axial and rotational behavior in bipedal walking that could later be used to design leg orthoses and prostheses. He is a member of the faculty of HST, an instructor in physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, and an instructor of health sciences and technology at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Leonid A. Mirny will give a talk on "Understanding Complex Biological Networks." Mirny's research focuses on protein structure prediction, bioinformatics and structural genomics. His multidisciplinary approach combines physics with the analysis of biological systems. Mirny has devoted his Taplin fellowship to developing a computational biology subject for HST that will interest biology and chemistry students, as well as computer science and physics students. He is an assistant professor of health sciences and technology and physics at MIT.
Fiona E. Murray will talk about "Education in Biomedical Enterprise: Understanding When Good Science is Good Business." Through her Taplin fellowship, Murray is coordinating a new joint HST-Sloan School curriculum in biomedical enterprise. The core subjects will focus on entrepreneurship in the biomedical sciences. A member of the affiliated faculty of HST, Murray is also the Michael M. Koerner Career Development Assistant Professor of Management of Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Sloan.
The Taplin Faculty Fellows Awards program was established in 1977 with a $2 million endowment from John (S.B. 1935) and Virginia Taplin. Since that time, 13 Taplin Faculty Fellows have been supported.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 15, 2002.
