India-Purdue Collaborative Lecture Series in honor of Professor CNR Rao

Pedro P. Irazoqui - Electroceuticals

Dr. Irazoqui received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire, Durham in 1997 and 1999 respectively, and a Ph.D. in Neuroengineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2003 for work on the design, manufacture, and packaging of implantable integrated-circuits for wireless neural recording.

He has been at Purdue University since 2005, where he currently serves as Reilly Professor of the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director of the Center for Implantable Devices. His group develops wireless implantable devices for various potential applications including monitoring and suppression of epileptic seizures; prosthesis control for injured military personnel; modulation of cardiac arrhythmias; treatment of depression, and gastroparesis, a partial paralysis of the stomach; and monitoring and therapeutic modulation of intraocular pressure for glaucoma.

He has received numerous awards for research and teaching, taught over a thousand students in his classes and mentored over a hundred in research in his lab. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has been serving as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering since late 2006 and Associate Editor of the Journal of Neural Engineering since 2016.

Keynote Summary

The pharmaceutical industry has been operating at scale for over a century, producing synthetic drugs to prevent and cure illnesses and alleviate symptoms. Recently, a modern device-driven alternative has emerged: electroceuticals. Electroceuticals are therapeutic agents that target the neural circuits of organs. Wireless implantable devices deliver such therapy utilizing targeted electrical impulse for behavior modulation in subjects, including in humans, and have captured the interest of the scientific community. New research suggests that implantable wireless technologies may allow for the treatment of patients with certain biological and physiological disorders, including glaucoma and epilepsy with fewer side effects than traditional therapies. These technologies are also being increasingly tested in complex chronic behavioral experiments, thanks to advances in continuous monitoring.

As a novel wireless implantable platform technology, the Bionode has broad applicability across target organ systems and disorders. Built upon proprietary, state-of-the-art, neural-control and related technologies, the Bionode platform is the most capable device of its kind, presenting an alternative to conventional therapies and solving many of the issues and limitations in existing neuromodulation devices. Developed at the Center for Implantable Devices (CID) at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, the Bionode represents a significant enhancement in both the range and therapeutic efficacy of neuromodulation-based treatments of a number of disorders. The Bionode can be implanted, or worn externally, can record physiological activity, or deliver therapy. Ultimately, the Bionode, and electroceuticals in general, are a new frontier in personalized medicine.

Ramaswamy Balasubramanian

Professor Ramaswamy Balasubramanian is a professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University and Director of the Bindley Bioscience Center. Dr. Balasubramanian has a Master’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. From 1992-2000, he worked at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala for eight years before joining the faculty of the University of Iowa as a professor of Biochemistry and Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from 1992-2000. Dr. Balasubramanian was also involved as an administrator in the role of Asst. Dean for Research. In 2009, he moved to India and was the founding dean of the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine and the founder and first CEO of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Platforms until his departure for Purdue in 2019.

Vijay Raghunathan

Vijay Raghunathan is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University and the Director of the Embedded Systems and IoT Lab, which he founded in 2006. His team investigates the design of new hardware and software architectures for next-generation embedded systems, Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, and wearable/implantable electronics, with an emphasis on ultra-low power design, micro-scale energy harvesting, edge analytics, and secure system design. Vijay also holds an appointment as the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

Read more

Vijay is most well-known for his contributions to the area of energy-harvesting embedded systems and is considered one of the pioneers of this field. In 2019, he was awarded the Under-40 Innovators Award by the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC). He is also the recipient of several best paper and best design awards and has presented numerous keynotes, invited talks, and tutorials on the above topics. Several of the technologies and systems developed in his lab have been used in academia and industry. He has chaired multiple premier ACM and IEEE conferences in the area of embedded systems and has served as an Associate Editor of two leading journals, the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) and the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN). He also serves on the board of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the largest international consortium on Industrial IoT, fog, and edge computing with over 250 member organizations. At Purdue, he serves as the founding Director of the Professional MS program in the School of ECE. Vijay received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from UCLA and his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, India.

Pooja Rajdev

Dr. Pooja Rajdev is a Director at Optum Advisory Services, working closely with healthcare clients to solve business challenges using analytics and machine learning techniques. She has over a decade of experience in the healthcare space, with seven years in analytics consulting and another five years as a scientific researcher. She specializes in strategic transformations on data usage, innovation and automation to accelerate research advances and allow organizations to meet the demands of the changing healthcare landscape. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University, where her advisor was Prof. Irazoqui.