Jeffrey Siewerdsen of BME installed as a John C. Malone Professor

Jeffrey Siewerdsen, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, was installed as a John C. Malone Professor on June 21. The Malone professorships were endowed by alumnus John C. Malone to support outstanding faculty members in the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. Siewerdsen, who joined Johns Hopkins in 2009, also holds appointments in Computer Science and in the School of Medicine's departments of Radiology and Neurosurgery. As vice chair for clinical and industry translation for Biomedical Engineering, he works to facilitate new and expanded opportunities for clinical collaboration, translational research, and industry partnerships.

Siewerdsen's research focuses on 3-D imaging and registration methods for diagnostic and image-guided interventions, including cone-beam CT, deformable registration, and data-intensive image analysis. He was on the team that invented the current standard of care in image-guided radiation therapy, helped bring the mobile C-arm 3-D imaging to broad utilization in image-guided surgery, and developed the first systems for high-quality cone-beam CT in musculoskeletal radiology and orthopedics. He founded the I-STAR Lab as a collaborative endeavor connecting biomedical engineers with clinical collaborators at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and he co-directs the Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation, a multidisciplinary environment for research, education, and translation in image-guided interventions.

More from the Whiting School of Engineering

Chen Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, has been selected by the Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation for its prestigious Young Investigator Program, which provides support to promising early career faculty members in the chemical and life sciences. The $600,000 award, administered over four years, is intended to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.

With this support, Li will use an approach at the interface of biology, engineering, and physics to advance understanding of how animals move in complex natural terrains. He seeks to develop new tools that will enable experiments in lab terrains that have the complexity and scale now found only in nature. In addition to establishing the new field of terradynamics, Li's research is foundational for the ability to develop robots capable of handling complex and difficult terrains, such as those encountered in natural and other disaster settings.

René Vidal, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, was installed as the Herschel L. Seder Professor in Biomedical Engineering in a ceremony on June 13. The chair was endowed by alumnus Herschel L. Seder to support outstanding biomedical engineering faculty members. Vidal, who joined Johns Hopkins in 2004, holds joint appointments in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering. He is the director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science and the Vision Dynamics and Learning Lab, and he is also a professor in the Institute for Computational Medicine, the Center for Imaging Science, and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

Vidal's research focuses on the development of theory and algorithms for the analysis of complex high-dimensional datasets such as images, videos, time-series, and biomedical data. His lab creates new technologies for a variety of biomedical applications, including detection, classification, and tracking of blood cells in holographic images, classification of embryonic cardio-myocytes in optical images, and assessment of surgical skill in surgical videos.