RESEARCH ENTERPRISE

Facilities

Biomedical Engineering Center (Biomedical Engineering Building)

The activities of the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science (CBERS) are conducted in a number of state-of-the-art research facilities located on the Louisiana Tech campus and in the facilities of our partner institutions. These facilities include Tech’s new Biomedical Engineering Building, the world-class micromanufacturing capabilities of Tech’s Institute for Micromanufacturing (Institute for Micromanufacturing), Tech’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Information Technology (CENIT) and the University’s Technology Transfer Center.

CBERS members also have access to Louisiana’s Optical Network Initiative (LONI), one of the most advanced optical networks in the country along with the most powerful distributed supercomputer resource available to any academic community. Members also benefit from Tech’s state-of-the-art computing and information infrastructure. Tech’s Prescott Memorial Library provides the modern tools commonly used by researchers to retrieve scientific literature.

Many of the research laboratories and faculty offices for CBERS members are located in the new 52,000 square foot Biomedical Engineering Center (Biomedical Engineering Building), shown in the figure above. The building was dedicated in May of 2007 and contains CBERS administrative offices, faculty offices for CBERS membership, an animal care facility, research laboratories, a conference room, rooms for research seminars and workshops, and a business incubator. The facility and equipment are valued at over $13M dollars. The Biomedical Engineering Center is physically adjoined to the Institute for Micromanufacturing, a modern micromechanical miniaturization design, and manufacturing facility that complements the activities conducted in the Biomedical Engineering Center. Research activities within CBERS include nanoscience, cellular modeling, biotransport, phenomena, neuroscience, neural engineering, rehabilitation engineering, biomaterials engineering, tissue engineering, biomicro/nanodevices and systems, and drug delivery.

Offices and Support Facilities

Many of the CBERS research faculty and staff have offices in the Biomedical Engineering Center or the adjoining Institute for Micromanufacturing. The Administrative support staff for CBERS are located on the first floor adjacent to the main entrances to the building. The 290 square foot office includes space for the program’s administrative coordinator and our student workers. Near the program, the office is the Center’s support area which includes a FAX machine, copying equipment, faculty mailboxes, and office supplies. There is also an office in the area that is used for visiting researchers. The office of the CBERS Director (Dr.  Leon Iasemidis) is located on the second floor.

Classrooms

The following figure shows one of the classrooms within the Biomedical Engineering Building that is available for classrooms.

Research Laboratories

Most of CBERS’s research laboratories are located in the Biomedical Engineering Building or in the Institute for Micromanufacturing. They include individual faculty research laboratories and core research support laboratories containing specialized research equipment that is available for use by all CBERS members. The individual faculty research laboratories are described in the “Faculty Research” portion of this website.

Core Research Support Laboratories

The Animal Care Facility
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 129 through 148

The Animal Care Facility is a controlled-access facility located in the Biomedical Engineering building. These laboratories (Biomedical Engineering Building 129 through 148) occupy a total of 4,430 sq. ft., and the director’s office and animal-related research laboratories occupy 1,700 sq. ft. A surgical suite, a cage washing area/autoclave room, storage, a necropsy laboratory, and nine individual animal housing rooms with ventilated cage racks that have individual electronic access control occupy 2,730 sq. ft. of space. The animals are monitored on a daily basis by the director or his designated employee. The university has a veterinarian on staff who is a member of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). He and the director provide training to research animal users. The University has an arrangement with the Licensed Laboratory Animal Veterinarian at Louisiana State University Medical Center in Shreveport for specialized assistance when needed.

The Histological Techniques Laboratory (Animal Care Facility)
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 134

This laboratory contains equipment for the preparation of specimens for light microscopy including paraffin ovens, an embedding station, a paraffin microtome, a vibratome, and staining equipment and supplies. The laboratory also contains equipment for the preparation of specimens for transmission electron microscopy, including an epoxy embedding area, epoxy oven, ultramicrotome, and grid staining equipment and supplies. The room is equipped with a surgical table for a collection of specimens and a chemical hood for the safe use of toxic chemicals.

The Neuro Physiology Laboratory (Animal Care Facility)
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 132

This laboratory houses a 1′ x 7′ Faraday cage for electromagnetic isolation, an inverted microscope, and amplification equipment.

The Imaging and Nanopatterning Laboratory
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 239

This laboratory contains a Bioforce Nanoscience Nano-Enabler for patterning biological substances with nanoscale precision onto substrates. The room also contains an Olympus MTV-3 stereo microscope with a Leica DFC500 camera, three Dell Precision imaging workstations, and a Suss MicroTeck micropositioning station.

The Tissue Engineering and Cell Culture Laboratory
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 220B and 240

This laboratory has been designed to investigate the effects of hemodynamic phenomena on the behavior of vascular cells, (endothelial cells, platelets, smooth muscle cells, osteoblasts) as related to atherosclerosis, intimal hyperplasia, thrombosis, bone growth, and micromanufactured cell substrates. The laboratory includes a laminar fume hood, an environmentally-controlled flow chamber, an imaging microscope, an injection-flow apparatus (syringe pump), an incubator, a centrifuge, a refrigerator, and a plate reader. The laboratory is jointly funded by The Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science (CBERS) and the School of Biological Sciences.

The Biomedical Engineering Common Laboratory
Location: Biomedical Engineering Building 221

This laboratory houses a set of shared equipment that is available to all of the faculty and students performing research in the Biomedical Engineering Center. Major pieces of equipment in this laboratory are a PC digital image analysis workstation, two refrigerator-freezers (to ’20 ˚C), a chemical hood, a lyophilizer, a streaming potential instrument, a tensile strength instrument, a liquid scintillation counter, a centrifuge, a microbalance-scale, a pH meter, sn AKTA Prime Protein Purification System, an Advanced Chemtech Apex 396 protein synthesizer, and an upright microscope.