Principal Investigator for the project is David Umulis, the Dane A. Miller Head of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of agricultural and biological engineering and of biomedical engineering. For his proposal to the NSF, Umulis developed a multidisciplinary team to identify how cells organize to fight attack and ensure robustness and survivability at scales from single cell responses all the way up to tissues and wound closure. EMBRIO will leverage strengths in engineering simulation and artificial intelligence approaches to tackle integration across scales in a new way.

The EMBRIO team leverages strengths across four colleges at Purdue — Engineering, Science, Agriculture and Polytechnic. Umulis also utilized his existing collaborations with Indiana University — with which the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue has a 30-year relationship — as well as the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania. New collaborations at Morehouse College in Atlanta and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, also were established.

EMBRIO is a response to the NSF’s solicitation of proposals for its Biology Integration Institutes (BII) program, which cites the need “to bring researchers together around the common goal of understanding how the processes that sustain life and enable biological innovation operate and interact within and across different scales of organization, from molecules to cells, tissues to organisms, species, ecosystems, biomes and the entire Earth.”

The institute initiative officially begins on Sept 1, and the grant is renewable after five years.