Bridging the Disciplines
Corina Drapaca is the newest member of the Center. An assistant professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, she has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and is a specialist in computational mechanics, medical image analysis, and has particular interest in mechanical brain diseases such as hydrocephalus and Chiari malformations. Says Schiff, "She embodies the core disciplinary expertise of Engineering Science and Mechanics and translates this to a better understanding of brain disease and improving treatment."
Looking ahead, Schiff, Gluckman, and their Penn State colleagues—including Drapaca, Jian Xu,
Andrew Webb, Francesco Costanzo, and Sulin Zhang, among others—will have plenty of opportunities to build bridges between neuroscience and other disciplines such as engineering, materials science and nanotechnology, just for starters.
In 2011, the Center for Neural Engineering will relocate to a custom-designed 22,000 square-foot facility in the new Materials/Life Sciences complex, under the governance of the Huck Institutes of Life Sciences. The new location will have room for about fifteen faculty members, some of whom will be drawn from within the University. "And we’re also vigorously recruiting people who will be new to Penn State," Schiff adds.
One goal: better assistive devices for patients who can’t use their bodies well anymore. "Hershey has a very, very impressive A.L.S. clinic [Lou Gehrig’s disease]," notes Schiff. "We’re working well in our current temporary laboratories, he adds, "but we look forward to having even more sophisticated facilities for optical imaging, high-energy laser research, whole animal research, and labs for behavioral testing and monitoring."
Space for a Brain-Machine Interface teaching lab is already reserved in the building plans. "In the future," says Schiff, "we are going to have a course where our students play neural ping pong as one of the laboratory exercises. We want to guide students into projects that lead into the unknown."
Credit Frederic Weber
The Center will be located near both the Materials Research Institute and the Center for Infectious Disease Research, a proximity Schiff calls "crucial to what we’ll be able to do here that’s unique at Penn State. We have, arguably, one of the best materials research programs in the world," he continues, "and we want to exploit that knowledge. The neural devices we’re creating have to survive in the brain for decades. We need to devise materials that, very gently, can pass electricity into the biological organ without generating toxic chemicals or passing too much current, which can burn a hole in the brain. We need batteries that can last a lifetime, recharged perhaps by the body’s own activity. These things are hard to do, but we feel it is extremely important to develop effective and safe neural prosthetic devices. We will make sure the devices developed at Penn State are known for extensive research and development into safety."
Better neural devices will eventually mean that the surgical process of implanting them will become much less invasive, believes Schiff, adding that they could be placed on the surface of the brain, rather than deep within it. That would be welcome news for patients like Jessica Gordon. "Nanotechnology and neural implants are fascinating," she says, "but I like to hope that some day there will be options other than invasive surgery."
For Jessica, things are looking better lately. After an adjustment of her medication, she has gone without a single seizure for eleven weeks. A recent EEG showed improvement and she looks forward to resuming her career as a nutritionist. "I have been able to start running again," she says, "and I am hoping to be able to run in a marathon within one year of my diagnosis. Life is one present moment after another; some are wonderful and others are painful. ‘This too shall pass’ is a phrase I’ve learned to repeat quite frequently," she says.
Decreasing those painful times for patients with neurological disorders is what still drives Schiff and Gluckman. "I went into neuroscience because it’s the last frontier," says Schiff. Lightly touching his fingers to his head, he adds, "The brain is the one thing we really don’t understand. In years to come, I want to look back at what we’ve accomplished at the Center for Neural Engineering and be able to say, "We didn’t rush things, we didn’t focus on making a splash in the media or making money from new inventions. We did it carefully—and most importantly, we did it right."
Steven J. Schiff, MD, Ph.D., is Brush Chair Professor of Engineering and director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering. He can be reached at sjs49@engr.psu.edu. Bruce J. Gluckman, Ph.D., associate professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, is associate director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering. He can be reached at brucegluckman@psu.edu. Corina Drapaca, Ph.D., assistant professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, can be reached at csd12@psu.edu.
