The Phantom Patient
We had a special guest on campus last week. Wall Street Journal reporter Shirley Wang made the trek from New York City to Troy to speak with a few Rensselaer professors about their research. The above...
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Innovative Ideas at 5105 Feet Above Sea-Level
Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson and three of our leading scientists and engineers have just completed their “IdeasLab” presentation at the World Economic Forum out in Davos, Switzerland. They...
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Ligands of Renown
Congratulations are in order for chemical engineering professors Steven Cramer and Shekhar Garde, who recently had their research featured on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. The...
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Research Doodles: Pushers and Pullers
Here’s an obvious statement: science and engineering research topics can be challenging to understand. When you drill down deep into a discipline, the concepts, lingo, and implications can get very...
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3° with Ryan Gilbert
Ryan Gilbert is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who recently received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award. We ask Ryan about his work: Q: You’re endeavoring to create new...
View ArticleControlling Prosthetic Limbs With Your Mind
In the short video above an adorable little monkey is eating marshmallows. What is exceptional about this little monkey is not his love of sticky sweets, but the way he is grabbing them. This...
View ArticleIf Bones Could Talk
Health reporter Benita Zahn from the local NBC affiliate visited our own Eric Ledet recently to talk about his biomedical engineering research. Professor Ledet created an implantable sensor that can...
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Viewpoints: Making Medicine Personal
(Below is an opinion piece by our own Jonathan Dordick on the need for personalized medicine. Dordick is the Howard P. Isermann Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Director of our...
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A Remote Control for Your Body
This will be my last post on The Approach. Thank you to all of our readers who have taken this little research blog and helped it to grow into what it is today. I leave Rensselaer for a new position,...
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3° with Glenn Monastersky
June 22 marked a special milestone for scientific and medical research on the Rensselaer campus, with the opening of the New York State-funded Rensselaer Center for Stem Cell Research. The new...
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Stranger Visions
This self portait of artist Heather Dewey Hagborg was created from genetic material. Photo credit: Dan Phiffer. The emerging genre of bio-art explores new frontiers of life made possible through...
View ArticleFilamins, Formins, and the Original Cell Phone
When President Obama lifted the regulations on embryonic stem cell research, the collective research community did the scientist’s equivalent of stretching their hamstrings. The jury is still out on...
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3° with Ravi Kane
Ravi Kane (This is the first of many 3° – a new, ongoing feature at The Approach in which we will ask researchers to explain their work in their own words. Feel free to write us with requests or...
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1 × 10^3 Words: Capacitation
M. Platt When The Clovers crooned about “Love Potion Number 9” back in 1959, they may have been closer to the mark than they knew. In the picture above, glowing in green is the protein Fatty Acid...
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Guest Blogger: Shawn Lawson
(Professor Shawn Lawson wrote this excellent post for The Approach – enjoy!) I’m Shawn Lawson , an assistant professor of computer visualization in the Department of Arts. During 2008, I was in an...
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Sugar Splits (not as delicious as it sounds)
By now, all of us at RPI are very familiar with a tiny glycosaminoglycan named heparin. If not, bone up on your RPI research knowledge here, here, and here. But, for those who pay a little bit more...
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1 × 10^3 Words: Ubiquitin
Director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Core in the Center for Biotechnology and Insterdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) Scott McCallum used the massive research machines to develop this...
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What Could Be Better Than Wine and Chocolate?
We are all familiar with those news articles that wax poetic about the health benefits of previously unhealthy fare such as red wine and chocolate. Believe it or not, there is actually some science...
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Rensselaer Research From 1,500 Feet
It’s not often I get to mix my off-hours pursuit and use of Bernoulli’s principle with my day job of communicating the great things happening here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – especially...
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Killer Plants
The human immune system is a marvelous machine. Bacteria enter the body (perhaps through those nasty, chalky mints at the local diner that you simply could not resist diving in to). Above is a gross...
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