Payne, Shapiro Join BioE Faculty

• Shapiro

The Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) is pleased to welcome its two newest full-time faculty members, Professor Gregory Payne and Associate Professor Benjamin Shapiro. Both previously held affiliate appointments with the department.

Payne, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1984, was formerly appointed to the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, where he was the director of the Center for Biosystems Research. His research interests include studying and applying biofabrication approaches in the construction of devices at the nanoscale, with a specific focus on biofabricating with stimuli-responsive biological polymers (especially polysaccharides) and enzymes (especially tyrosinase and transglutaminase). His research group's goals include creating the means to interface biology with electronics to produce devices that can diagnose disease at the point of care, detect pathogens at the market, and discover drugs in the lab; and exploring biocompatible approaches for personalized therapy, regenerative medicine, and less-invasive surgery. Payne has been a long-time collaborator with Clark School faculty, including BioE Professor and Chair William Bentley. He is currently one of the five co-PIs of the Biochip Collaborative, an interdisciplinary effort to "translate" the communication between biological and microfabricated systems to create biofunctionalized devices. He has served on the international advisory boards for numerous conferences on chitin and chitosan in Asia, Europe and North America, and is currently a member of the editorial board of the new journal Biofabrication.

Shapiro, who received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1999, joins us from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. He holds joint appointments with the Institute for Systems Research and the Maryland NanoCenter, and is affiliated with the Applied Math and Scientific Computation Program. As the director of the Control of Miniaturized Systems for Mechatronic, Biological and Clinical Applications Laboratory, his research is focused on all aspects of miniaturized-system control, from initial determination of the dominant physics, to model development, control problem statement and algorithm design, to experimental verification. His current projects include controlled delivery of chemotherapy to deep tissue tumors using magnetic nanoparticles, the control and sorting of individual cells in lab-on-a-chip devices for complex sample preparation, flow and structure modeling, and the spatial mapping of genetics in tissue samples. Shapiro is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. He has filed 16 patents based on his research, two of which were awarded 1st and 3rd places in the university's annual Office of Technology Commercialization's Invention of the Year competition.

Published May 21, 2010