jdpastor

About jdpastor

http://www.research.vt.edu/resmag/

John Pastor turns big words into little ones, telling stories about science and the people who make Virginia Tech the No. 23 public research university in the nation. Formerly the communications director for the University of Florida Genetics Institute, the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute, and the UF&Shands news division, he became the director of research communications at Virginia Tech in 2012.

Posts by John Pastor:

Impressive photography

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landscape gove

We at @VTResearch are continually impressed by the panoramic “slider” photos on the Virginia governor’s website.

This hit home when browsing through the site news and coming across a fantastic shot from the Let’s Fly Wisely event, where Virginia Tech oversaw some important unmanned aircraft research flights. Virginia Tech President Timothy D. Sands was in the midst of what amounts to a gigantic media flash mob at the normally sedate Lonesome Pine airport. Scroll through and you can see it.

This is the best image yet to capture the scene. We can’t really do it justice here with our screen grab.

Most of us who have to freshen Web pages know that art can be a big challenge. But the state site makes it look easy.

How @GovernorVA are you nailing these shots?

A moment to bask in an aviation accomplishment: It’s not a commercial delivery yet, but it won’t be long

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wisefour

With the reassuring whirr of drones still in our recent memories, a couple of thoughts on Friday’s medical transport flights in Wise, Virginia.

First, the research flights proved that commercial delivery of medications and products in the right circumstances is indeed possible. In many respects it was a Kitty Hawk moment.

But it is important to note, the flights were research flights, not commercial deliveries — no transactions took place.

As Rose Mooney, the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership at the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, said: “This was a very controlled research environment, and of course there are many logistical and safety concerns that would need to be resolved before these deliveries could become routine. But today’s flights show the capabilities of this technology and its value to the public.”

But nothing speaks to the sheer excitement of the event better than the video and still images that came from Wise County on Friday.

The Weather Channel’s Cantore has date with a tornado at ICAT

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“Those are sounds that you never, ever want to hear.”

When The Weather Channel meteorologist Jim Cantore stepped into an EF-5 tornado re-created in 3-D in a four-story immersive installation at Virginia Tech, his perspective was that of someone 7,000 feet tall.

Beneath him was the landscape of Moore, Oklahoma. Around him was the storm that killed 24 people in May 2013 … the whole thing is depicted on The Weather Channel. And if you want to learn more about how this walk through a tornado in The Cube at Virginia Tech, take an early look at the news story that will be coming out Monday on Virginia Tech News.

Combining two passions leads to great discoveries

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Nanoparticles

Lissett Bickford had been interested in cancer research ever since she was a teenager, when her brother’s best friend was diagnosed with leukemia. But when she got to college and decided to become an engineer, she assumed she’d have to abandon the idea of studying cancer.

Graduate school made her realize otherwise. Bickford, now an assistant professor in both the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, earned her doctorate at Rice University, where she worked with clinicians at M.D. Anderson to optimize gold nanoparticles for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

When she arrived at the University of North Carolina for a postdoc, she started working on a project designed to treat pancreatic cancer by delivering chemotherapy directly to typically difficult-to-treat tumors. The technique used a small device that, by generating an electric field, propelled chemotherapy drugs into targeted areas. The device could be implanted adjacent to a tumor or placed over the skin, delivering the drug exactly, and only, where it was needed.

Bickford, recalling her graduate research experiences, had an idea.

“I thought a local delivery strategy would be compelling for inflammatory breast cancer,” Bickford explained. Inflammatory breast cancer has a dismal prognosis and is hard to treat surgically, because the cancer cells invade the surrounding tissue, including the skin. A device placed directly on the skin could target those malignant cells directly.

At Bickford’s suggestion, the team added inflammatory breast cancer to its research platform in two studies. The first used nanoparticle fabrication technology developed by her principal investigator, Joe DeSimone, to create dissolvable microneedle patches for transdermal drug delivery. Those promising results were published about a year ago in Advanced Materials.

Results from the second study, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, were also encouraging: in mice with human inflammatory breast cancer, adding local drug delivery to IV delivery shrank tumors and extended survival time. And it didn’t substantially increase chemotherapy concentration in the blood plasma – a critical point, since chemotherapy’s side effects can force patients to postpone treatment or keep doctors from prescribing especially potent drugs.

Read more from Virginia Tech News.

Bickford was involved in everything from painstakingly fabricating individual devices by hand to shadowing clinicians who were collaborating on the project—“a truly multidisciplinary effort,” she said.

Today, as the head of the Medical Devices and Drug Delivery Lab at the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, Bickford continues to use her engineering skills and passion for translational research to make sure that her work focuses on the most promising cancer treatments. “My brother’s friend who had leukemia ended up with significant heart damage as a result of his treatment,” Bickford said. “My goal is to do whatever I can to help cancer patients by reducing or eliminating the toxic effects of existing treatments.”

By Eleanor Nelsen, communications manager, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science

Where do Virginia Tech researchers find inspiration? It’s in the air

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When Linsey Marr’s son was in day care, she said, “It seemed like we were getting a call every other week to come pick him up because he was sick.”

Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, was puzzled. On her trips to the daycare, she had seen the staff constantly wiping down surfaces, washing hands, and sterilizing any toys that ended up in a child’s mouth (no small feat in a room full of toddlers).

So why, with those scrupulously clean surfaces, were these kids still getting sick all the time?

Could it be the air?

She looked through the literature on the airborne transmission of common diseases like the flu. But she was surprised to find that there wasn’t any consensus on how much of the flu was spread through the air, or what environmental factors affected it.

So she took the question back to her lab, which already studied the way invisibly tiny particles in the air affect our health.

To learn what she found, and what she’s doing now, check out this article coming out Tuesday in VT News.

The daycare contagion conundrum wasn’t the first time Marr — who was recently featured in Popular Science — had noticed something in her world that others might have taken for granted, and turned it into a research question.

She’s an avid runner, and when she was in graduate school, she said, “I used to run by this big train depot, and I’d just be breathing that stuff — diesel exhaust — and I’m just thinking, ‘wow, am I killing myself? Is this actually a benefit for me to go running?’”

It was those questions that originally led her to study particulates in the air.

So these days, Marr is very aware — much more than the rest of us — of what’s getting sucked unnoticed into our lungs.

Has that made her nervous about, well, breathing? It’s “a little anxiety-inducing,” she admitted, but she’s been doing it for so long, she says, and she’s gotten used to it.

By Eleanor Nelsen, communications manager of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science.

Molly, Thor … Thor, Molly

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Molly Greenberg, education writer extraordinaire for InTheCapital, got “Cubed,” met Thor, and heard the story behind the DREAM vendor.

After taking in the Virginia Tech-Miami game Thursday night, @mollygreenberg relived on Friday the indescribable audio bombardment of Lane Stadium during the “Enter Sandman” bounce.

But this time, she experienced it in the Cube, the combination of a four-story black box theater and high tech laboratory shared by the Center for the Arts and the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.

Media engineer Tanner Upthegrove said the sound was previously recorded with multiple mics from the sidelines, giving the listener an auditory taste of what it is like to actually be on the field when the Hokies make their entrance. Being in the stands or seeing it on TV is plenty intense — this is amazing.

Next stop was Goodwin Hall, the research center formerly known as the Signature Engineering Building.

It was opportune timing with hundreds of researchers and students explaining their work for the official building dedication.

There stood Thor, in full operational glory.

In many ways, Thor is an answer to emergency such as the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster that befell Japan following a massive earthquake in March 2011. It is designed to do the dirty and dangerous jobs that would be fatal to human emergency responders.

Virginia Tech is at the forefront of this work, in the same breath as Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and MIT.

Later, as we moved through the building, Chris Williams, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, told us the origin story of the “DreamVendor,” a 3-D printing station pretty that operates pretty much like a snack machine. But instead of inserting money, dabblers or practitioners in the world of 3-D printing insert designs that they preloaded on an SD card.

Let the 3-D manufacturing begin.

The ID behind creating the machine was to bring 3-D printing to the masses. Williams said they wanted to find a way for the hundreds of students who enter mechanical engineering and related fields to jump right into the process, without having to get proof of principle or permission from a professor.

Mission accomplished. A DreamVendor stands at the entrance of Goodwin Hall as convenient as a soda machine.

But not nearly as loud as a Thursday night game at Lane Stadium.

A toothy tale of prehistoric predators

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When is a dinosaur not a dinosaur?

When it’s a phytosaur or a rauisuchid, that’s when.

In Virginia Tech News today is a story about two important predators who preyed on each other about 210 million years ago. Since one species lived on land and the other lived in the sea, it was thought there was little interaction between the two.

College of Science paleontologists changed that thinking when they came across an unassuming bone in a museum. When they analyzed it, they found a phytosaur tooth lodged in a bone from a rauisuchid. The twain did meet (in the thigh bone, to be specific), despite longstanding ideas about there being no contact between the predators.

Probably the much bigger (more than 25 feet) rauisuchid waded where it shouldn’t have.

For those of you crying for some sort of point, it is this: It is natural to think these animals were dinosaurs, but they actually preceded the dinosaurs.
But when these critters were cruising the creeks, their younger cousins, the dinosaurs, were just getting a start in the world.

Phytosaurs resemble today’s crocodiles and alligators, although the first paleontologists thought they were plant eaters and gave them a name that literally means “plant reptile.” Later, when fossil hunters found teeth, it became obvious these animals weren’t using them to munch on salad.

Now, we know leg of rauisuchid was on the menu.

Feels good to finally say Nicole Abaid is one of Popular Science’s superstars

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PopScience

One of life’s great temptations is when you know something exciting has happened, but you can’t talk about it.

Sweet relief came this week when Popular Science named its 2014 Brilliant Ten, an elite group containing none other than Nicole Abaid, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics in the College of Engineering.

Abaid looks at how bats communicate so they don’t crash into each other as they exit a cave, for example. Radar can jam in planes, but echolocation gives bats unequaled precision, and the bats may even be sharing signals. From that biological system, Abaid will figure out how to build sensors to improve communication among robots and unmanned aircraft, commonly called drones.

Popular Science’s executive editor Jennifer Bogo said today on Morning Joe that the magazine selected candidates who are making groundbreaking changes in their careers already, and who are poised to go on to change the world in substantial ways to make it a better, smarter, safer place. If you watch, Bogo drills down on Abaid’s work at about the 3:30 time stamp.

Careful readers of the Virginia Tech Research blog @VTresearch may have noticed a hint that something cool was about to happen nestled in a routine announcement (a hint vector, if you will) and people should pay attention to Virginia Tech News today.

This time, we’ll be more direct: Look for more about bats in the fall-winter edition of Virginia Tech Research, the university’s namesake research magazine. It’ll be batty.

One last thing. This is two year’s running for Virginia Tech in the Brilliant 10. Last year, David Schmale, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was in the list. And he works with drones, too. Do we see a pattern here?

Ebola virus modeling provides urgent warning

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Ebola

The Ebola outbreak sweeping through West Africa could last more than a year and infect hundreds of thousands before it is held in check, according to a collaboration of research and informatics groups that develop computational models to understand how infectious disease agents spread through society.

“We hope we’re wrong,” computational epidemiologist Bryan Lewis told The New York Times.

Lewis, a researcher with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, has more than 10 years of experience in crafting, analyzing, and interpreting the results of models in the context of real public health problems.

While the World Health Organization predicted about 20,000 total cases in nine months, the group of scientists collaborating on Ebola modeling said that number could be reached in a month.
The researchers are part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

The ray of hope? Because of the modeling, public health workers have some forewarning and can take preventive measures to slow the spread of the deadly disease.

Last day to submit innovation to the Scientist

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science mag

The Scientist’s annual search for the best and brightest life science innovations is drawing to a close. Submit your new product or methodology before midnight today for a chance to win.

Along those lines, Virginia Tech researchers continually seem to rise to the top of the Top 10 lists. We don’t want to let any robotic fish out of any bags, but watch Virginia Tech News on Wednesday for the latest.
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