For more information regarding attending a specific event, contact BME Education Coordinator Denise Perea.
Upcoming Speakers | Seminar Archive
Every semester, the Marquette University and Medical College of Wisconsin Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering brings together biomedical engineers from across the United States for a series of speaking engagements describing ongoing research and novel contributions to this dynamic and engaging field.
Seminars will be held at alternating Marquette and MCW campus locations and are open to all students, faculty, and staff from both institutions.
Dr. Jared Cregg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the principal investigator of the Cregg Lab, which investigates the organization of brainstem motor circuits linking higher brain functions to spinal movement control. Their research aims to uncover insights that could lead to new treatments for movement disorders.
Motor control is organized across echelons of the mammalian nervous system, including both cortical and subcortical levels. In particular, the brainstem acts as a gate between higher brain functions and motor execution by spinal networks, and thus represents a critical bottleneck in sensorimotor processing. A key advance has been the recent identification of brainstem “command lines” which coordinate specific movements, including locomotor speed and stop. It has therefore become evident that sensorimotor processing across the brain converges onto descending brainstem command lines with labelled function. In the first part of this seminar, I will present our recent discovery that Chx10-lineage reticulospinal neurons represent the primary descending command for turning gaits in mammals. In the second part of this seminar, I extend these findings to show how the basal ganglia recruit left/right movements via brainstem circuits. Using deep brainstem Ca2+ recording and intersectional viral screening, we uncovered the principal basal ganglia-spinal cord pathway for left/right gait asymmetries: basal ganglia → pontine nucleus oralis → Chx10 Gi neurons → spinal locomotor networks. Modulating the restricted brainstem PnO → Chx10 Gi pathway restored turning competence in mice with striatal dopamine depletion, suggesting that dysfunction of this pathway contributes to debilitating turning deficits observed in Parkinson's disease. Together, our work has revealed the stratified circuit architecture underlying a critical motor program—the ability to move left or right. Our current line of research aims to reveal the full diversity of brainstem motor control elements, including circuits for pitch and roll, and how these brainstem circuits are recruited in context of complex behaviors like navigation.
Elizabeth Asma is a Senior Research Engineer at Rice University's Institute for Global Health Technologies, whose mission is to innovate affordable healthcare solutions and train future leaders to improve global health through problem-based learning and research.
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In Africa, over one million babies die every year from preventable causes. Appropriate NICU technology is often too expensive and cannot withstand conditions in low-resource hospitals including high humidity, dust, frequent user turnover, complex maintenance, lack of stable power, or difficulty sourcing expensive consumables. Engineers at Rice360 design affordable and robust medical devices for newborn and maternal health in low-resource settings, including a low-cost bubble CPAP, point of care bilirubinometer for diagnosis of jaundice, continuous temperature monitor for identification of newborn hypothermia, thermal warming mattress with baby-controlled feedback loop and low-cost respiratory rate monitor for apnea of prematurity. This presentation will cover how our team of engineers and clinicians bring prototypes to design for manufacture, supporting clinical studies and regulatory submission towards device commercialization as well as how our partnerships through NEST360 support sustainable care for small and sick newborns in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Chantal Darquenne is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is the principal investigator of the Darquenne Lab, which investigates the fate of inhaled aerosols, lung ventilation, and upper airway dynamics in health and disease, contributing to numerical modeling, human studies in altered gravity, and in-situ imaging techniques.
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Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is characterized by recurrent partial or complete airway closure during sleep and has important clinical implications ranging from disruption of sleep with daytime sequelae of excessive sleepiness and poor quality of life to adverse cardiovascular or metabolic outcomes. While polysomnography and studies based on measurements of airway pressures and resistance have provided a wealth of information on upper airway physiology, they are unable to assess the three-dimensional anatomy of the upper airway and its conformational changes during breathing. This talk will discuss recent efforts in the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to quantify upper airway dynamics in healthy and OSA subjects, both during sleep and while awake. It will also highlight how characterizing the conformational change of the upper airway during tidal breathing can provide a new means of identifying geometrical abnormalities that lead to airflow obstruction.
Dr. Raffegeau (she/hers) earned her MS in Health and Kinesiology at Purdue University, her PhD in Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of Florida, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Utah with the Cognitive-Motor-Neuroscience group. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology in the Sports Medicine Assessment Rehabilitation and Testing lab and a core faculty member in the Center for Advancing Systems Science and Bioengineering Innovation (CASSBI).
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Every second, an older adult suffers a preventable fall in the US, and the rate of deaths from falls is rising annually. Older adults who experience a fall lose their independence, develop a fear of future falls, and subsequently have a worse quality of life. Up to 80% of older adults report poor balance confidence, which may be key to understanding cognitive-motor function during walking in older adults at fall-risk. Dr. Tiphanie Raffegeau investigates the interactions between cognitive processes and anxiety during walking across the lifespan. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to study the influence of cognitive functions (e.g. executive function, speech production) and mobility-specific anxiety (e.g. anxiety about falls) on everyday mobility behavior. Dr. Raffegeau will discuss her approach to understanding the clinical implications of the ‘Anxiety-Balance-Cognition’ triad, and how she is using virtual reality to study the effects of mobility-specific anxiety on cognitive-motor behaviors.
Dr. Chris Olsen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is the principal investigator of the Olsen Lab, which focuses on advancing the understanding of how environmental factors influence addiction through research. The lab investigates drug-seeking behaviors, the impact of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on addiction, and the effects of sleep restriction on stress responses and opioid seeking, collaborating with experts across various fields.
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Ismael Seáñez, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neurosurgery. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (2010) from the University of Texas at San Antonio and an M.S. (2013) and Ph.D. (2016) in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University with a specialization in rehabilitation at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Before joining Washington University in St. Louis, he spent four years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as a postdoc. His current work focuses on developing neuro-rehabilitation tools and programs that promote the active use of residual mobility to maximize recovery and improve the quality of life of people with neurological disorders. He has expertise in spinal cord injury, rehabilitation, motor control and motor learning, spinal cord stimulation, and brain- and body-machine interfaces. Dr. Seáñez is the recipient of multiple fellowships and career development awards from the NSF (2010), NIH (2013, 2021, 2022), and the Whitaker Foundation (2016).
Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a life-altering event that leads to long-lasting motor impairment, and currently, there is no cure for paralysis. In this talk, I will introduce our previous work combining invasive epidural spinal cord stimulation (SCS) and activity-based training as a rehabilitation strategy to restore movement in people with SCI. I will then present recent advances by our group toward (i) exploiting the neuroanatomical distribution of leg muscle motoneuron pools in the spinal cord to enhance the recruitment selectivity of non-invasive, transcutaneous SCS (tSCS), (ii) understanding the neural recruitment mechanisms behind kilohertz-frequency waveforms used in tSCS in the lumbar and cervical spinal cord, and (iii) using studies in sensorimotor cortex control of locomotion in non-human primates to develop a non-invasive brain-spine interface for people with SCI. Together, this work can facilitate the development of novel neurotechnologies that allow us to improve motor function through a better understanding of the neural mechanisms behind SCS.
Dr. Nick Semenkovich is a physician-scientist at the Medical College of Wisconsin who specializes in endocrine and metabolic diseases. He also serves as an Assistant Professor in MCW's Data Science Institute, where he researches liquid biopsies, including cell-free DNA, as biomarkers for rare and understudied conditions.
Learn more about Dr. Semenkovich
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Kim Bassindale is the Assistant Director fo the Neuromotor Control Laboratory (NMCL) within Marquette University and the Medical College of Wisconsin's Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering. Led by Dr. Robert Scheidt, the NMCL studies how the brain uses sensory information to control movement and develops therapies to improve motor performance, focusing on neural injuries like stroke and concussion.
Upper limb impairment is one of the most common and functionally limiting consequences of stroke, yet many patients receive low dosages of upper limb task training during the early stages of recovery. In this talk, I will share the development of a wearable technology created by the Neuromotor Control Laboratory in collaboration with the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Medical College of Wisconsin. This system is designed to encourage use of the more-affected upper limb post-stroke, while minimizing caregiver burden.
I will present findings from a feasibility study evaluating stroke survivors’ experiences using the wearable system in an inpatient rehabilitation setting. I will also highlight future directions, including enhancements in activity recognition using machine learning. Finally, I will share insights from my interdisciplinary work with biomedical engineers and clinicians.
View recently past speakers of the Marquette University and Medical College of Wisconsin Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series.
