Research Team Highlights

Auciello Awarded Honorary Professorship
Orlando Auciello has received a rare honoris causa professorship from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, for his contributions to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Artificial Retina Project.

As one of the project’s principal investigators, Auciello is developing an ultrathin, biocompatible coating for the artificial retina. The thin-film coating is based on an R&D 100 Award-winning ultrananocrystalline diamond technology. His group also is exploring bioinert oxide films to serve as an alternative encapsulating coating and to enable high-energy storage capacitors. Embedding these capacitors into the artificial retina will bring it a step closer to full miniaturization.

Auciello is a senior scientist with Argonne National Laboratory’s Interfacial Materials Group and Argonne’s new Center for Nanoscale Materials.

Greenbaum, Humayun Receive Grant from National Academies
Elias Greenbaum, a principal investigator in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Artificial Retina Project, and Mark Humayun, the lead investigator, were awarded a 2006 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAFKI) grant in April. The grant will provide seed funding for the development of a smart prosthetic device that delivers oxygen to ischemic tissue. Such a device could help people suffering from diabetic retinopathy, a complication of diabetes caused by changes in the blood vessels of the retina. This eye disease is a leading cause of blindness in adults and also may have application to other ischemic diseases. Each year, the competitive NAFKI seed grants provide funding for critical research on bold new ideas. Their objective is to stimulate interdisciplinary research that could yield significant benefits to science and society.

Greenbaum is a corporate fellow and leader of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Molecular Bioscience and Biotechnology Research Group. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the University of Tennessee’s Genome Science and Technology program. Humayun is a professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). He is also associate director of research at USC’s Doheny Eye Institute. Together, they founded DOE’s artificial retina program, which is aimed at restoring sight to people who are blind from age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

Lazzi Tapped To Head IEEE Journal
Gianluca Lazzi, a prinicipal investigator on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Artificial Retina Project, has been selected to serve as editor-in-chief of the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters for the term 2008-10. Lazzi is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. His group performs electromagnetic and thermal modeling on the DOE retinal prosthesis to help determine how much energy can be used to stimulate the remaining nondiseased cells. They also identify induced electromagnetic fields and temperature increases generated when the device is operating.

New Book in Press
Artificial Sight, a book based on talks and posters presented at the Second DOE International Symposium on Artificial Sight (2005), is scheduled to be published in October by Springer. Editors of the book are M. S. Humayun, J. D. Weiland, G. Chader, and E. Greenbaum. The book will appear in the series Biological and Medical Physics–Biomedical Engineering (www.springeronline.com/series/3740).