Engineering and Medicine

The focus of this presentation, targeted for a broad audience, is on developing tools to understand several neurological disorders and their relation. As a primary example of an understudied disorder, the focus will be on Alzheimer’s and its relation to the glymphatic flow. The glymphatic network serves as the “front end” for waste clearance in the brain, and is connected downstream to human’s lymphatic network. Disruptions in Glymphatic flows will compromise protein clearance from the brain and contribute to the etiology of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), hydrocephalus, and several other neurological disorders. These links between glymphatic flow and several disorders call for new portable and non-invasive mechanisms of measuring Glymphatic flow as well as stimulation through which the brain function can be improved while mitigating a number of neurological disorders through improved waste clearance. The impact of developing non-invasive, wearable systems to measure and in turn enhance the flow is immense with tremendous clinical applications. 

Behnaam Aazhang

J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Rice University on September 29, 2023 at 10:15 AM in EB3 2207
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Behnaam Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively. From 1981 to 1985, he was a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois. In August 1985, he joined the faculty of Rice University, Houston, Texas, where he is now the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Director of Rice’s NeuroEngineering Initiative, and co-Director of Houston Methodist/Rice Center for Translational Neural Prosthetics and Interfaces. He was the Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice 2004-2014. From 2006 till 2014, he held an Academy of Finland Distinguished Visiting Professorship appointment (FiDiPro) at the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. Dr. Aazhang is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Communication Society. He received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Oulu, Finland (the highest honor that the university can bestow) in 2017.

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!