Team:Cornell/team/bios

Dr. Lars Angenent - Biological and Environmental Engineering

Lars Angenent is interested in converting organic materials with undefined mixed cultures, defined mixed cultures, or pure cultures of microbes to generate specific products, such as the energy carriers – methane; carboxylates; electric current; n-butanol. Pretreatment of the biomass may be necessary to increase the conversion rates, and therefore Lars Angenent is also interested in physical/chemical (e.g., dilute acid method), thermochemical (e.g., slow pyrolysis), and biological pretreatment steps. In regards to bioprocessing steps, Lars Angenent studies anaerobic digestion, anaerobic fermentation, bioelectrochemical systems, syngas fermentation, and ABE fermentation. Other areas of interest are biosensors and biocomputing devices that are based on bioelectrochemical systems (BESs); and photobioreactors.

For organic waste conversion into bioenergy, Lars Angenent is promoting the carboxylate platform as an important platform in biorefineries because water and nutrients must be recycled while bioenergy yields must be maximized. This platform is based on microbial conversions with undefined mixed cultures that can handle the complexity and variability of organic wastes. Therefore, Lars Angenent is interested in the microbial community dynamics in engineered systems. For this reason, his lab utilizes second-generation sequencing platforms in combination with powerful bioinformatic tools and ecology theory.

Dr. Shivaun Archer - Biomedical Engineering

Dr. Shivaun Archer is a Senior Lecturer in charge of the Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Instructional Laboratories. She designs and teaches undergraduate instructional labs for five biomedical engineering courses: BME 131, BME 301, BME 302, BME 401, and BME 402. The labs are designed to illustrate the course material and bring research to undergraduate education whilst exposing students to cutting edge technology and research methodology. A significant emphasis in all the labs is biomedical nanotechnology. Each of the five courses has a hands-on lab module that focuses specifically on nanobiotechnology. Overall, the lab modules enhance the hands-on training of Cornell students in the areas of microfabrication, microfluidics, biosensors, nano/microbiotechnology, and drug delivery. In recognition of her efforts in undergraduate education, Dr. Archer has received a prestigious College of Engineering Teaching award.

Before coming to Cornell, Dr. Archer worked for five years at Lynntech, Inc. a small research company specializing in biotechnology, biomaterials, chemical and biological sensors, medical biotechnology, and environmental remediation. Her work on wastewater treatment for long term space missions resulted in her receiving two NASA Inventions Space Act Awards. She also holds a joint appointment as a Research Associate in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Her research interests include nanobiotechnology and tissue engineering.

Dr. Matthew DeLisa - Chemical Engineering

Matthew DeLisa received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and did postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2003 and was promoted to associate professor in 2009. He recently served as a Gastprofessur at ETH Zürich in the Institut für Mikrobiologie.

Professor DeLisa's research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis -- folding and assembly, membrane translocation and post-translational modifications -- in the complex environment of a living cell. His contributions to science and engineering include the invention of numerous commercially important technologies for facilitating the discovery, design and manufacturing of human drugs and seminal discoveries in the areas of cellular protein folding and protein translocation. DeLisa has received several awards for his work including an NSF CAREER award, a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator award, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award, and a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award. He was also named one of the top 35 young innovators (TR35) by MIT's Technology Review in 2005 and was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang award, which honors a distinguished young researcher in this field. Most recently, he was honored with a Cornell Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship and was the recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society's BIOT division.

Dr. Jeff Gralnick - Microbiology, University of Minnesota

Jeffrey Gralnick has extensively studied the physiology of Shewanella, a species of gram-negative bacteria found throughout the world in aquatic environments. By understanding the molecular mechanism that enables this species to respire a diversity of compounds - including insoluble minerals - he hopes to engineer strains that can generate power in microbial fuel cells or react against certain toxic metals in the environment.

Working in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Bond, Gralnick made a key discovery about how bacteria can convert organic compounds into electricity. It was observed that riboflavin (commonly known as vitamin B-2) was responsible for much of the energy produced by Shewanella bacteria growing on electrodes. Riboflavin produced by the bacteria was able to carry electrons from the living cells to the electrodes, and rates of electricity production increased by 370 percent as riboflavin accumulated. This finding has major implications for the development of scaled-up microbial fuel cells using similar bacteria.

Gralnick is developing strains, tools and techniques for increasing the robustness of using Shewanella for metabolic engineering and downstream applications in both Bioenergy (microbial fuel cells), Bioremediation and Biocatalysis.

Dr. Bruce Land - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Bruce Land is a Senior Lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell. He teaches three courses in ECE and advises masters of engineering projects in ECE and Biomedical Engineering. When time allows, he does some neural modeling and spike train analysis. He has been in this position since 1998.

Land received a BS in physics from Harvey Mudd College in 1968 and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Cornell University in 1976 . He was a Muscular Dystrophy Association postdoc in NBB at Cornell for three years, then a lecturer in NBB for seven years. During this time he worked with Miriam Salpeter on the coupling of activity at the vertebrate neuromuscular junction, both experimentally and by computer modeling. In 1987 he moved to the Cornell Theory Center as a computational research associate, then started supporting graphics and animation. He was visualization project leader at the CTC from 1989 to 1998. From 1992 to 1998 he taught an introductory computer graphics course in Computer Science at Cornell. From 1998 to 2007 he taught computer programming and electronics courses in NBB and was a Senior Research Associate in Neurobiology and Behavior.