Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies have traditionally been designed under the assumption that BCI users are patients who no longer exhibit any significant motor control abilities, due in part to deficits resulting from neuromuscular disease. Of particular interest is the activity that occurs in motor related areas ...

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death and is a subject of intense research worldwide. Within the past few decades, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as an important arm of cancer therapies following the prominent success of immune checkpoint blockade therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies. While ...

Recognition molecules, such as antibodies, are widely useful in many applications within bioengineering, or life sciences in general. However, the high cost and variability in antibodies has led to the development of alternative protein scaffolds. While many such alternatives have high binding affinity, a range of specificities, ...

This dissertation presents improvements to both software and hardware for a marker-less optical motion detection system used in magnetic resonance imaging. Multiple devices have been developed to eliminate artifacts in MRI caused by patient movement, as motion is a common cause of artifact. Most developed devices require ...

Intracellular pathogens are a major cause of global morbidity and mortality due to their complex and intricate ability to replicate within host cells while evading the innate immune defense system. Many intracellular pathogens, such as F. tularensis and B. pseudomallei, are highly infectious and can cause severe and fatal ...

BCL2 family proteins regulate apoptosis and thus play a critical role in tissue homeostasis and development in healthy cells. A number of pathologies exploit the BCL2 family to promote artificially prolonged life or premature death. The doctoral research presented here has employed computational protein design and in vitro ...

High-throughput methods for screening protein-protein interactions enable the rapid characterization of engineered binding proteins and interaction networks. While existing approaches are powerful, none allow quantitative library-on-library characterization of protein interactions in a modifiable extracellular environment. ...

Polymeric prodrugs of ciprofloxacin for inhalation are attractive alternatives to orally-administered free ciprofloxacin and inhalable liposomal formulations. This study investigated the release kinetics of ciprofloxacin from four different polymers synthesized from two types of monomeric ciprofloxacin prodrug, HBC containing ...

Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) offer great promise for regenerative medicine, preclinical drug screening, and cardiac disease modeling applications. One of the most significant hurdles towards adoption of hPSC-CM technologies, however, is cardiomyocyte developmental immaturity. Current differentiation ...

mRNA has emerged as a potential candidate for vaccine applications in recent years as a versatile, safe, and cost-effective alternative to traditional therapeutics. Efficient delivery to antigen presenting cells and protection against rapid in vivo degradation are the two greatest challenges for mRNA vaccine development. ...