Several honors, grant awards in 2020 for Nadya Peek of HCDE

, 91̽»¨assistant professor of human centered design and engineering, received an honor in 2020 as well as several research grants. MIT Review in June named her to its annual list of , celebrating those whose work “has the greatest potential to transform the world.”

Peek leads the UW’s , a research group that uses machine precision to assist human creativity, and co-directs the .

In recent months, Peek received a from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study testing and verification of quality control strategies for manufactured products responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. She and a University of California colleague also were awarded a two-year National Science Foundation to research digital manufacturing tools for low-volume manufacturing.

Peek is a co-principal investigator on a $2 million, three-year grant from the NSF’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation Program, announced in October, to develop distributed chemical manufacturing using synthetic biology. 91̽»¨chemical engineering professor is the project lead, along with 91̽»¨chemistry assistant professor and chemical engineering associate professor .

Also, Peek and , professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, will share a three-year NSF to develop open source, customizable “co-bots,” or collaborative robots designed to work alongside humans in scientific work as well as other fields such as advanced fabrication and quality control.

Read more at Peeks’ page on the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering .

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Miranda Belarde-Lewis a new iSchool endowed faculty fellow

, assistant professor in the 91̽»¨Information School, has been named the inaugural .

Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) is an independent curator as well as a professor of North American Indigenous Knowledge with the iSchool, and her work examines the role of social media in protecting, perpetuating and documenting Native American information and knowledge.

The award comes with funds Belarde-Lewis can use to apply for grants, bring speakers to campus and the community, or help with her research.

is the former longtime director of the UW’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library and was the iSchool’s Distinguished Alumna for 2020.

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American Political Science Association honors Aseem Prakash

, 91̽»¨professor of political science, has received the 2020 from the American Political Science Association’s Science, Technology and Environmental Politics division.

(1933-2012) was a well-known American political scientist, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Prakash, who knew Ostrom and her husband well, is the Walker Family Professor for the Arts and Sciences and directs the UW-based . The award was announced in the summer.

This fall, the 91̽»¨’s annual will feature three College of Engineering faculty whose research is accelerating positive impact here and around the world. Their lectures — on assistive robots, environmental equity and disaster relief — are free and open to the public, but seating is limited and .

Building a robot butler: Toward fluent human-robot interaction

The series kicks off Thursday, Oct. 11, in Kane Hall 130. , an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, will be discussing his work on building caregiver robots. Robots with the capability to interact with humans as equals have potential to improve the daily lives of people who require assistive care, such as those with special needs. Learn how researchers are developing these robots using mathematical models and physics-based manipulation.

Updated 12/7/18 – video

Clearing the air: Environmental justice and air quality

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, in Kane Hall 130, civil and environmental engineering professor will talk about how air pollution is the leading environmental health risk in the U.S. — and is responsible for thousands of deaths each year. His research examines how air pollution impacts different groups and has revealed that, on average, people of color are exposed to more air pollution. Now he is testing solutions to reduce the exposure disparity.

Updated 12/7/18 – video

Meeting our global obligations: The Hurricane Maria energy & health project

The lecture series closes on Tuesday, Nov. 13, in Kane Hall 130 with chemical engineering associate professor , who uses nanotechnology for clean energy and healthcare applications. In September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and left its residents without power, water and sanitation systems. A group led by Pozzo initiated a combined research and service project to assess the disaster’s impact on the health of rural residents. She will discuss how this project provided emergency clean energy that helped vulnerable people in this community.

Updated 12/7/18 – video

All lectures are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Advance registration, either or by calling 206-543-0540, is required. All lectures will be broadcast at a later date on UWTV.

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In some cases, there’s not much medics can do — a tourniquet won’t stop bleeding from a chest wound, and clotting treatments that require refrigerated or frozen blood products aren’t always available in the field.

That’s why 91̽»¨ researchers have developed a new injectable polymer that strengthens blood clots, called PolySTAT. Administered in a simple shot, the polymer finds any unseen or internal injuries and starts working immediately.

The new polymer, described featured on the cover of the March 4 issue of could become a first line of defense in everything from battlefield injuries to rural car accidents to search and rescue missions deep in the mountains. It has been tested in rats, and researchers say it could reach human trials in five years.

In the initial study with rats, 100 percent of animals injected with PolySTAT survived a typically-lethal injury to the femoral artery. Only 20 percent of rats treated with a natural protein that helps blood clot survived.

“Most of the patients who die from bleeding die quickly,” said co-author , an assistant professor of who teamed with 91̽»¨ and to develop the macromolecule.

“This is something you could potentially put in a syringe inside a backpack and give right away to reduce blood loss and keep people alive long enough to make it to medical care,” he said.

The 91̽»¨team was inspired by , a natural protein found in the body that helps strengthen blood clots.

Normally after an injury, platelets in the blood begin to congregate at the wound and form an initial barrier. Then a network of specialized fibers — — start weaving themselves throughout the clot to reinforce it.

If that scaffolding can’t withstand the pressure of blood pushing against it, the clot breaks apart and the patient keeps bleeding.

Both PolySTAT and factor XIII strengthen clots by binding fibrin strands together and adding “cross-links” that reinforce the latticework of that natural bandage.

“It’s like the difference between twisting two ropes together and weaving a net,” said co-author , the UW’s Robert J. Rushmer Professor of Bioengineering. “The cross-linked net is much stronger.”

But the synthetic PolySTAT offers greater protection against natural enzymes that dissolve blood clots. Those help during the healing process, but they work against doctors trying to keep patients from bleeding to death.

The enzymes, which cut fibrin strands, don’t target the synthetic PolySTAT bonds that are now integrated into the clot. That helps keep the blood clots intact in the critical hours after an injury.

“We were really testing how robust the clots were that formed,” said lead author , a 91̽»¨doctoral student in bioengineering. “The animals injected with PolySTAT bled much less, and 100 percent of them lived.”

The synthetic polymer offers other advantages over conventional hemorrhaging treatments, said White, who also treats trauma patients at Harborview Medical Center.

Blood products are expensive, need careful storage, and they can grow bacteria or carry infectious diseases, he said. Plus, the hundreds of proteins introduced into a patient’s body during a transfusion can have unintended consequences.

After a traumatic injury, the body also begins to lose a protein that’s critical to forming fibrin. Once those levels drop below a certain threshold, existing treatments stop working and patients are more likely to die.

In the study, researchers found PolySTAT worked to strengthen clots even in cases where those fibrin building blocks were critically low.

The 91̽»¨team also used a highly specific peptide that only binds to fibrin at the wound site. It does not bind to a precursor of fibrin that circulates throughout the body. That means PolySTAT shouldn’t form dangerous clots that can lead to a stroke or embolism.

Though the polymer’s initial safety profile looks promising, researchers said, next steps include testing on larger animals and additional screening to find out if it binds to any other unintended substances. They also plan to investigate its potential for treating hemophilia and for integration into bandages.

Other co-authors are Xu Wang in 91̽»¨emergency medicine, Hua Wei in 91̽»¨bioengineering, and in 91̽»¨chemical engineering.

Funding came from the National Institutes of Health and its National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the 91̽»¨, the Washington Research Foundation, an NIH-supported 91̽»¨Bioengineering Cardiovascular Training Grant and discretionary funds from private donations.

For more information, contact Pun at spun@uw.edu or White at whiten4@uw.edu.