After a stroke, the brain is left with a cavity long thought impossible to repair. See how Tatiana Segura and her team transformed that "toxic wasteland" into a regenerative environment using an injectable biomaterial that recruits the body's own immune cells.

Dear Colleagues,

It may be summer break, but the heat hasn't slowed Duke BME down. I'm thrilled to share some of our community's recent successes and achievements, including several prestigious awards for Timothy Dunn, Emma Chory, and Blake Wilson, as well as timely commentary from Jessilyn Dunn and her lab about the changing federal guidance surrounding wearable devices. 

This newsletter also highlights our department's most recent collaborative and interdisciplinary research, with impressive work spanning biomaterials, biomedical imaging, regenerative medicine, and neural engineering. 

I invite you to read through this issue to learn more about the latest progress from our department. May the remainder of this summer bring you rest, renewed energy, and new ideas. 

Sharon Gerecht, PhD
Chair of Biomedical Engineering, Paul M. Gross Distinguished Professor

Every night, your brain is hard at work flushing out debris to remain healthy. How this glymphatic system is affected by aging and disease, however, has remained murky. Check out new cover-worthy research from Junjie Yao and Pengfei Song that is giving researchers a real-time look.

In work that appeared in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Sharon Gerecht and her team used induced pluripotent stem cells to grow specialized blood vessels and restore retinal function in mouse models. See how this work shows promise for new therapies for vision loss. 

From engineering to medicine, Duke has an incredibly powerful community of researchers focused on neural engineering. Get an inside look at the impact of their wide-ranging portfolio through the lens of the inaugural Neural Engineering Symposium.

In commentary published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Jessilyn Dunn and her lab discussed gaps in the existing FDA guidance surrounding the validation and clinical use of wearable devices. Find out how these changes affect the data from your own smartwatch.

These prestigious award will support Chory as she uses her bespoke robotic platforms to drive cellular evolution Find out how.

Dunn and his team will use a database of over 140 million full-body poses to identify similar behaviors across different animal models of autism. Find out why this work could help improve autism studies. 

Wilson is among five scientists and engineers named 2026 laureates for their pioneering technology that has brought hearing to more than a million people around the world. Read more about their impact.

See how Emma Chory and her lab are creating bespoke liquid handling robots that other scientists can use and adapt for their own research.  

A team of students from John Hickey's lab are spending the summer building virtual models to see how the human body fights diseases. 

Interested in seeing more updates from Duke BME? Follow us on LinkedIn!

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