Boston University’s tenth annual Science and Technology Day showcased a dizzying array of diagrams, boards and scientific know-how from some of the best minds doing graduate work at both the Charles River and Medical Campuses.
The Metcalf Hall in the George Sherman Union last Tuesday was packed with future Einsteins, Heisenbergs, and Bill Gates. But only the ten most ingenious projects were recognized and awarded by various departments within the university.
From intermediaries to sensory systems, the College of Engineering award went to a group project called ‘Smart Acoustic Sensor System based on Auditory Models.’
No, it’s not your average hearing aid; it is much more high-tech.
‘It’s a sensory system for localization of pattern and sound recognitions but is unique in that it has real time applications for low frequencies,’ said Christian Karl, a second-year doctoral student and one of six in the group.
‘Something like this exists in theory but has never been built,’ he continued. ‘The system size is smaller than one cubic inch and you can’t get something so compact these days.’
The group’s project received substantial backing and funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, a central research and development organization for the Department of Defense.
‘It was a high-risk grant and we had a lot of pressure,’ Karl said. ‘The entire process took about two years and we’ve basically spent the $3 million grant.’
But the investment could garner high returns as Karl and his group’s entrepreneurial spirits are now looking into the possibility of starting a company to sell such sophisticated equipment.
‘We think we may be able to sell it to the military. This system can be used as sniper detectors and can also be useful in this war against Iraq,’ Karl said. ‘We just need some venture capital to start the company and chip manufacturing.’
This group consisted of both masters and doctoral students, who conducted part of their research in the Photonics building with the help of Allyn E. Hubbard in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department.
‘We are not sure how to split the profits yet if we do start the company,’ Karl said. ‘We’ll hopefully stay around Boston though.’
Karl’s sensory system may be useful given the state of current events, but Magued B. Nasr’s project may be of more practical value.
Winner of the Community Technology Fund award, Nasr, a doctoral student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, presented a project called the ‘Quantum Optical Coherence Tomography,’ which is basically an improvement on the current technique for scanning biological tissues to look for diseases.
‘The current technique suffers from dispersion,’ Nasr explained. ‘So if two lines are close together, you can’t tell that it’s two.’
To solve that problem, Nasr found a way to double the resolution without dispersion by using entangled photons.
‘We don’t really know about specific photons, so we assimilate its path using very sensitive detectors,’ Nasr said. ‘It’s not trial and error. The data needs to be studied and well documented.’
The idea of such an undertaking was detailed in a theoretical paper by Ayman F. Abouraddy. But it was Nasr who did all the experimental work.
‘The experimental process took about a year,’ Nasr said. ‘Now I hope to have my paper published in Nature. You really need to have some innovative ideas to get into that magazine. I have my fingers crossed.’
Sushimita Lahiri snagged the School of Medicine award and much pride. Her project, titled ‘Structure of a Pentavalent Phosphate Intermediate of an Enzymetic Phosphate Transfer Reaction,’ was a scientific breakthrough.
‘People who do chemistry have hypothesized about the intermediate for a long time but no one was able to capture it because it appeared and disappeared so fast,’ Lahiri said. ‘We were actually able to capture and see an enzyme intermediary for the first time.
‘But the most important part is that once you know the intermediary, you can design drugs based on it.’
The project, a part of her doctoral dissertation, is included in a lengthy paper she co-wrote with her advisor and has already been accepted by Science, the New Yorker of the scientific world.
According to Lahiri, the entire process took about a year and a half and she had encountered difficulties.
‘We needed very high resolution images that required very intense beams,’ Lahiri said. ‘So we made use of the Synchroton facilities in Chicago to give us the beams we needed. We also collaborated with a group in New Mexico that provided the proteins for the study.’
After collecting the data, it took Lahiri said it took her two more months to solve the structures.
‘We are also testing to see if we can see the intermediary in room temperature,’ Lahiri said. ‘We also have another project in which we design images of the intermediary without knowing what it is in the first place.’
A fourth-year graduate student in the department of Physiology and Biophysics, Lahiri said she has always held an interest in the sciences and becomes demonstrably giddy as she talks about the fruits of her project.
A native of India, Lahiri does have plans to return there after her graduation to conduct more research.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
