<p>FIFTH<em>ANNUAL</em>RUSHTON<em>LECTURE
UAB</em>
University Honors Program
934-3228
*
Thursday, November 14, 7pm
UAB Alumni House
1301 10th Avenue South
lecture is free and open to the public*
*
Working the Beat: Research<em>&</em>Vision<em>at the Frontier</em>
of*Human Tissue Engineering</p>
<p>Nina Tandon PhD, Electrical and Biomedical Engineer, Columbia University</p>
<p>*
Tissue engineer, TED Fellow, and visionary entrepreneur touted by<em>Fast Company</em>as one of the most creative people in business today, Nina Tandon grows artificial hearts and bones in a lab at Columbia University while brainstorming best strategies for getting them to the thousands of sufferers across the world in need of transplants.<strong>Tandon and her lab teams employ<em>a breakthrough cell model called the</em>biomimetic paradigmthat mimics the natural environments of cells so they can generate growth in the lab just as they do in our bodies.</strong>Yesterday¹s goal was to fabricate body parts that are similar to our own; today aims to construct environments in which cells themselves perform the work of creation.<strong>Tandon¹s enterprise expands our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystems of our own bodies.
With a BS from Cooper Union in electrical engineering, Tandon began a career in the telecom business (Avaya Labs) until a Fulbright scholarship took her to Italy, where she worked on an electronic nose used to ³smell² lung cancer.</strong>She then returned to academe for graduate work at MIT and Columbia (forher Ph.D. thesis, Tandon grew cardiac cells that beat like tiny hearts), where she now conducts research on the application of electrical stimulation in tissue-engineering.</p>
<p>Dr. Tandon will be speaking about her work on tissue growth and transplantation<em>and about her vision of a world-wide organ market.</em><em>Her hope will be to shine a light into the fascinating future of medical science and to inspire new expectations for human health and well-being</em>.*</p>