A researcher in the Michigan State University College of Engineering will use a National Science Foundation, or NSF, Faculty Early CAREER Award to develop bioelectric tools to diagnose and treat digestive and neurological disorders.
Jinxing Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, received a five-year, $500,000 grant to advance the monitoring of gastrointestinal physiology using soft bioelectronics.
NSF CAREER Awards support early-career faculty members who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. They are among NSF’s most prestigious national honors.
“The gut is widely regarded as the human 'second brain' due to its abundant neurons, its bidirectional communication with the brain, and its ability to produce a lot of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin that can influence our mood, appetite, sleep, and so on,” Li said.
“The complex interplay between the gut’s biochemistry and biomechanics constitutes the fundamental physiology of the gastrointestinal system. Studying the complicated inter-regulation of soft, stretchy, long, and twisting organs — that have a variety of motility patterns - has been a long-standing challenge.”
Li’s project seeks to fill a critical technology gap by developing a soft multisensory bioelectronic device that enables both biochemical and biomechanical sensing during continuous gut motion. The information will spur more understanding of gut physiology, serotonin dynamics, and gut motility, and potentially how the gut communicates with the brain, he added.
Li’s NSF award brought the College of Engineering’s annual combined CAREER Award total to $2.2 million. Other 2024 CAREER Awards were presented to:
- Zhichao Cao, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, to support research into the relationship between data collection and precision agriculture. Cao is also a faculty affiliate of AgBioResearch at MSU.
- Shaoting Lin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, to investigate the movement of particles in soft materials and explore how stretching them could improve technologies for drug delivery, water treatment, and biosensing.
- Sijia Liu, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, to work on practical solutions that close the gap between foundational research and real-world AI challenges.
In all, the College of Engineering has received 29 NSF CAREER Awards in the past six years.
This story was originally uploaded to engineering.msu.edu.
