Three students in Professor Riyi Shi's laboratory have received awards in the Sigma Xi Graduate Student Research Poster Award competition, and will be honored at a banquet on April 16. Jianming Li earned First Place (engineering science) for his poster "Novel three-dimensional polymeric scaffolds for neural tissue engineering." Hui Ouyang received an Honorable Mention (engineering science) for her poster "Functional deficit of spinal cord white matter after decompression is proportional to the strain and duration of sustained compression during injury." Kristin Hamann earned First Place (life sciences) for her poster "Acrolein Scavengers as Potential Treatment for Spinal Cord Injury." Please join us in congratulating them on these awards.

Professor Pedro Irazoqui has been selected to receive the Marion B. Scott Award in ceremonies to be held March 30, 2008. The award is presented annually by the Indiana Alpha Chapter of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society to a member of the Purdue faculty chosen for their dedication to teaching excellence. Please join us in congratulating him on this honor.

MED Institute, a research and development subsidiary of Cook Group, Inc., has dedicated a new facility in the Purdue Research Park. Founded and led by Purdue Biomedical Engineering (BME) alumnus Neal Fearnot, MED Institute was established as a resource for Cook Group companies to identify and develop new medical product concepts.

Professor Charles Bouman has been selected as a Fellow of SPIE "for specific achievements in the areas of electronic and biomedical imaging." Dr. Bouman has been active in SPIE for many years, and runs a conference for the optics and photonics society.

Richard Borgens, the Mari Hulman George Professor of Applied Neurology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, has been appointed honorary professor at Chongqing University in Chongqing, China. Borgens, who has a joint appointment in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, will present graduate seminar lectures several weeks a year and work with graduate student committees. Borgens is the founder of Purdue's Center for Paralysis Research, where he leads teams of researchers to discover treatments for central nervous system injury and disease.

February 1 is the deadline for undergraduate students to apply for new NSF-funded scholarships for the Purdue Program in Quantitative Physiology. These needs-based scholarships will assist qualified students to explore the dynamic interface between biology, medicine, mathematical analysis and computational analysis and modeling.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health has highlighted CARS imaging being done at the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. The work by Ji-Xin Cheng's team focuses on demyelination in nerves.