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VEISHEA project could be first answering machine

Posted on | Emily Benda
Mitchell currently holds 40 patents with another 12 pending.
Mitchell currently holds 40 patents with another 12 pending.

ECpE alum, James Mitchell (EE ‘82), may have created the world’s first digital outgoing telephone message machine during his time at Iowa State University.

Mitchell displayed a working prototype of the digital outgoing message with a taped incoming system at the Iowa State University VEISHEA Engineering Open House in April 1982. Using 35 integrated circuits (16 memory chips) and the digital and analog experience from his courses, Mitchell created his project in just three weeks.

“I saw the open house as an opportunity,” Mitchell said. “I wanted to do something as profound as I could possibly do.”  He added that he had to develop his own a Analog to Digital converter and encoding process, as these were not readily available commodities during that time.

Mitchell displayed a working prototype of the digital outgoing message with a taped incoming system at the Iowa State University VEISHA Engineering Open House in April 1982.
Mitchell displayed a working prototype of the digital outgoing message with a taped incoming system at the Iowa State University VEISHA Engineering Open House in April 1982.

The project won a Gold award, the highest of the three levels, from David T. Stephenson faculty advisor and J.O. Kopplin the department chair of the time.

In Mitchell’s award letter, Stephenson and Kopplin state that his phone-answering system was “a particularly interesting exhibit for the many visitors who have some knowledge of digital techniques and who have ever found themselves ‘talking to a machine.’”

Mitchell credits the VEISHEA Open House with helping him receive his position at Rockwell Collins after graduation. He was offered the job after his VEISHEA demonstration and continued to stay with Rockwell Collins for the next 33 years until retiring last December.

Although Kazou Hashimoto holds the patent for a digital answering machine, he did not invent the machine until 1983, a year after Mitchell’s presentation of his digital answering machine.

Mitchell may also hold the title for the first created LED television display in 1977. His monochromatic model was displayed at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) expo in Anaheim Ca. 1978 and won awards from NASA, General Motors Corporation and Westinghouse.

Currently, Mitchell holds 40 patents with another 12 pending, the majority related to aircraft and satellite communication. He lives in Cedar Rapids with his wife.    

Research discovery helps cancer prevention

Posted on | Emily Benda
This type of chip offers 50-100 fold more sensitivity compared with the traditional ELISA for detecting biomarkers for prostate cancer.
This type of chip offers 50-100 fold more sensitivity compared with the traditional ELISA for detecting biomarkers for prostate cancer.

Prostate Cancer (PC) is the second most common cancer and the sixth leading cause of cancer death among men worldwide. The worldwide PC burden is expected to grow to 1.7 million new cases and 499 000 new deaths by 2030. ECpE’s Dr. Long Que and his laboratory have created a chip that may help combat against this prominent illness.

Que’s laboratory recently developed an optofluidic chip-based diagnostic system. This type of chip offers 50-100 fold more sensitivity compared with the traditional ELISA for detecting biomarkers such as prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and neuroendocrine marker (NEM) for prostate cancer (PC).

By testing clinic samples using this type of chip along with the assistance of Que’s collaborator Dr. Girsh Shah, it appears that combined NEM+PSA test can significantly improve reliability of PC detection and significantly reduce the number of diagnostic biopsies.  

This type of chip not only can be made disposable thereby avoiding any possible cross-contamination during the test, but also can offer many advantages such as elimination of the labeled antigen, the need of the sophisticated equipment and the highly trained individuals. These advantages make the technology suitable for point-of-care application to screen elderly male populations for PC and to monitor the progress of patients undergoing PC treatment. As early detection is essential for good PC prognosis and treatment options, this chip will assist in proactive PC prevention.

Que’s biomedical technology has been featured in publications such as World Biomedical Frontiers and Uro Today. For more information, visit the feature on Uro Today.

Best Student Paper Award at Photonics West 2016

Posted on | Emily Benda
SEM image of the PDMS patterns. The nano-cones are formed from the negative of replication of nano-pits on the PC master pattern.
SEM image of the PDMS patterns. The nano-cones are formed from the negative of replication of nano-pits on the PC master pattern.

This year’s Best Student Paper Award in the Microfluidics, BioMEMS, and Medical Microsystems section of  SPIE Photonics West (BIOS) was presented to Iowa State graduate students and faculty for their presentation, “Transfer molding processes for nanoscale patterning of poly-L-lactic acid (PLLA) films.”

This is a collaborative project being performed in ECpE and the Microelectronics Research Center (MRC) by Rabin Dhakal, Akshit Peer, Rana Biswas and Jaeyoun Kim. The team’s presentation was selected out of 48 total oral and poster presentations in the conference held Feb. 13-18 in San Francisco.

The goal of the team’s project is to find novel bio-medical applications of periodically patterned polymeric nano-structures. The group investigated how the surfaces of cardiac stents made of bio-degradable poly-L-lactic acid (PLLA) can be engineered to control and slow down the release of certain drugs, such as anti-coagulant, coated on them.  They developed a soft lithographic method for imprinting intricate periodic nano-patterns onto these stents and demonstrated that large area arrays of nano-cones or nano-cups with pitch of ~700 nm could be effectively nano-imprinted onto the bio-degradable polymer films. The team is currently studying the release dynamics of drugs coated on these patterned surfaces of PLLA- an area that has much promise for applications to treatment of cardiac disease.

Faculty members, Biswas and Kim said they were grateful for the opportunity and glad to have been recognized for their work. 
For more information about the SPIE conference and awards, click here.

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