E-Day teaches kids about bioengineering
BY KIM SEGALL
Children's wildest dreams came to life at this year's E-Day as Stanford professors described launching worms into outer space to test gravity's effect on their genes, placing chips in people's eyes to correct vision loss and using robots to assist doctors in the operating room. This year, the topic was bioengineering, but the focus was on the children.
"I think it's a really exciting time to be an engineer, to be a scientist, and I think you'll get a sense of that from our faculty and students who are speaking today," said Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering. This was the school's eighth annual E-Day, which is held for alumni and their families.
Nearly 500 of the school's graduates and their children attended "Camp E-Day: Engineering from Head to Toe," held at the Arrillaga Alumni Center on July 21. Throughout the five-hour event, "campers" attended classes covering a wide array of bioengineering research and innovation currently going on at Stanford.
In his "BioRobots" lecture, Kenneth Salisbury, professor of computer science and of surgery, talked about his work in creating computer simulations that allow doctors and medical students to practice operations. Salisbury and his lab group have made a computer program that simulates a mastoidectomy, a surgical procedure to remove harmful cysts in the ear. Medical students use the simulator and mock surgical implements, which exert realistic forces and vibrations on the trainee's hands and make noises similar to the high-pitched sounds made by the drill in a real procedure.
According to Salisbury, surgical simulations are becoming an increasingly important aspect of medical training. "You'd like to have surgeons as experienced as you would your 747 pilot," Salisbury said. "Flight simulation training has become mandated and important, and I think that is eventually going to happen in surgery."
Salisbury also has worked on creating robots that assist surgeons in minimally invasive operations. These robots, though not autonomous—they still need a doctor to tell them what to do—make very small incisions, reducing trauma, scarring and risk of infection. A doctor operates the robot from a station a few feet away from the operating table.
Salisbury's 45-minute lecture was packed with technical terms and complex explanations, but the content didn't seem to fly over the heads of all the young listeners.
"It was really cool to learn about all the robotics and technology," said Ned Geeslin of San Francisco, who came to E-Day with his father, Keith Geeslin (BS '75, MS '78).
Charles Taylor, associate professor of bioengineering, also talked about simulating surgery in his lecture, "Vital Veins." Taylor and his research team have created a computer program called ASPIRE (Advanced Surgical Planning Interactive Research Environment), which doctors can use to perform certain operations in cyberspace before doing so on an actual patient. This program allows doctors to try different corrective surgeries before deciding which is the best option.
Other speakers included Stacey Bent, professor of chemical engineering, who talked about using retinal implants to prevent blindness; Jennifer Cochran, assistant professor of bioengineering, who discussed how she and her team are developing designer proteins that can heal wounds; and Karl Deisseroth, assistant professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who spoke about engineering and mental health.
Sarah Heilshorn, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, went over the basics of her field and polymers with younger members of the audience before launching into a presentation on her team's efforts to design materials capable of regenerating injured body parts.
"My job is to design materials that look more like the body, that can help our bodies heal," Heilshorn said.
Though useful in many surgeries, the industrial materials that surgeons use to replace many damaged body parts—Gore-Tex and titanium, for example—cannot replace more sensitive and complex body parts, such as heart tissue and the spinal cord. Heilshorn and her team, looking to make materials that interact with the body in a more natural way, have been altering amino acid sequences to create different types of proteins. The team can fine-tune these proteins to change their mechanical properties, degradation processes and biological interactions so that they mimic the tissue they are replacing or helping to regenerate.
Keeping both children and their more-seasoned parents engaged was no small feat. But according to E-Day attendees, the speakers pulled it off.
"I actually thought it was a remarkable balance," Keith Geeslin said. "I was impressed that they were able to keep both kids and parents involved. They did a really good job."
The younger participants agreed.
"My favorite part of the day was the talks—they were really interesting," said Sam Fossum, who came with his mother, Maureen (BS '82, MS '83). "They had slideshows and told jokes. The professors made it fun."
Kim Segall is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
