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Sasha Devore, Jianping
Fu, and Darren Whiten Named Recipients of 2007 Peake
Awards
For Immediate Release
FRIDAY, 11 April 2007
Contact: William Smith, Assistant
Director for Finance and Sponsor Relations
Phone: +1.617.253.5621
Email: whs@mit.edu
CAMBRIDGE, MA. 04.11.2007
The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announces
that Ms. Sasha Devore has been awarded the first Helen
Carr Peake Research Assistantship, while Mr. Jianping
Fu and Dr. Darren Whiten have won Helen Carr Peake
Research Prizes for 2007.
Ms. Devore, a doctoral student in the Harvard-MIT
Speech and Hearing Science Bioscience and Technology
Program (SHBT), has been awarded the Helen Carr Peake
Research Assistantship for September 2007 through August
2008. Ms. Devore's doctoral research is conducted at
the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory (EPL), under the supervision
of Dr. Bertrand
A. R. Delgutte of RLE and EPL.
Ms. Devore's research concerns the neural mechanisms
for hearing in reverberant rooms. She is the first
to systematically examine neural responses in environments
that include realistic reflections. Understanding these
mechanisms may lead to better assistive technology
for hearing impaired listeners, who often have trouble
in reverberant environments, and to better automatic
speech recognition systems, for which reverberation
is also a major problem. Ms. Devore's neural-response
data—from anesthetized cats—have been correlated
with human behavioral studies, through a collaboration
with Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham's group at Boston
University. She presented this work at the 2006 International
Symposium on Hearing. Ms. Devore is currently establishing
an experimental setup to make measurements on unanesthetized
rabbit preparations, which will obviate any concerns
about the effects of anesthesia on neural responses.
Mr. Fu is a Mechanical Engineering doctoral student
whose research has been supervised by Prof.
Jongyoon Han in RLE's Micro / Nanofluidic BioMEMS Group. Mr.
Fu's work addresses the design and construction of
nanofluidic molecular filter devices that allow efficient
size separation of proteins and DNA samples. In addition,
he studied the molecular sieving processes that are
used in these systems, connecting their performance
to first-principles physical theories. Mr. Fu's Anisotropic
Nanofilter Array, which allows continuous-flow size
separation of proteins and other small molecules, is
expected to be useful in the fractionation of complex
protein mixtures. His research has been published in
Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, and
Nature Nanotechnology. Professor Robert Austin of Princeton
University, in his introduction to Mr. Fu's Nature
Nanotechnology article on the Anisotropic Nanofilter
Array, wrote that this process "can be used to
separate a vastly wider range of materials than previous
techniques...There is significant potential for further
development... This is a powerful idea."
Dr. Whiten completed his doctorate in Health Sciences
and Technology (HST) in February 2007, with a dissertation
that was supervised by Dr. Donald Eddington of RLE
and MEEI. Dr. Whiten's research was aimed at understanding—and
predicting —the variability in cochlear implant performance
experienced across a population of patients. His dissertation
developed techniques to formulate a computational model
of deceased patients' peripheral auditory system, based
on their histologically-processed temporal bone. Using
a four-step modeling approach, he successfully predicted
the electrically-evoked compound action potential waveforms—measured
during the patient's lifetime—with his patient-specific
model. Dr. Whiten's research has, as its long-term
goal, developing patient-specific models for living
patients that will relate their anatomy/physiology
to their performance with a cochlear implant. This
would allow scientists and engineers who are engaged
in cochlear implant research and development to focus
on design changes that address specific limitations.
Dr. Whiten's research has been presented at the 2003
and 2005 Conferences on Implantable Auditory Prostheses,
and is the basis for a U.S. patent application.
The selections of the award recipients were made by
a committee consisting of Professor
Dennis M. Freeman (MIT/RLE), Professor
Jeffrey H. Shapiro (MIT, Director
RLE), Professor M. Charles Liberman (Harvard, Director
EPL), Professor
William T. Peake (MIT/RLE/EPL) and
Professor John
L. Wyatt (MIT/RLE).
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