UPDATE (Aug. 2, 2024): A previous version of this story misstated Paul Kinahan’s name.

Fifteen faculty members at the 91̽�� have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 36 scientists and educators from across the state . Selection recognizes the new members’ “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement, and their willingness to work on behalf of the academy to bring the best available science to bear on issues within the state of Washington.”

Twelve 91̽��faculty members were selected by current WSAS members. They are:

• , associate professor of epidemiology, of health systems and population health, and of child, family and population health nursing, who “possesses the rare combination of scientific rigor and courageous commitment to local community health. Identifying original ways to examine questions, and seeking out appropriate scientific methods to study those questions, allow her to translate research to collaborative community interventions with a direct impact on the health of communities.”
• , the Shauna C. Larson endowed chair in learning sciences, for “his work in the cultural basis of scientific research and learning, bringing rigor and light to multiculturalism in science and STEM education through STEM Teaching Tools and other programs.”
• , professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, “for her sustained commitment to community-engaged, science-driven practice and policy change related to the prevention of suicide and the promotion of mental health, with a focus on providing effective, sustainable and culturally appropriate care to people with serious mental illness.”
• , the David and Nancy Auth endowed professor in bioengineering, who has “charted new paths for 30-plus years. Her quest to deeply understand protein folding/unfolding and the link to amyloid diseases has propelled her to pioneer unique computational and experimental methods leading to the discovery and characterization of a new protein structure linked to toxicity early in amyloidogenesis.”
• , professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, of global health, and of emergency medicine, who is “a global and national leader at the intersection of climate change and health whose work has advanced our understanding of climate change health effects and has informed the design of preparedness and disaster response planning in Washington state, nationally and globally.”
• , professor of bioengineering and of radiology, who is “recognized for his contributions to the science and engineering of medical imaging systems and for leadership in national programs and professional and scientific societies advancing the capabilities of medical imaging.”
• , the Donald W. and Ruth Mary Close professor of electrical and computer engineering and faculty member in the 91̽��Clean Energy Institute, who is “recognized for his distinguished research contributions to the design and operation of economical, reliable and environmentally sustainable power systems, and the development of influential educational materials used to train the next generation of power engineers.”
• , senior vice president and director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Joel D. Meyers endowed chair of clinical research and of vaccine and infectious disease at Fred Hutch, and 91̽��professor of medicine, who is “is recognized for her seminal contributions to developing validated laboratory methods for interrogating cellular and humoral immune responses to HIV, TB and COVID-19 vaccines, which has led to the analysis of more than 100 vaccine and monoclonal antibody trials for nearly three decades, including evidence of T-cell immune responses as a correlate of vaccine protection.”
• , professor of political science and the Walker family professor for the arts and sciences, who is a specialist “in environmental politics, international political economy, and the politics of nonprofit organizations. He is widely recognized as a leader in the field of environmental politics, best known for his path-breaking research on the role firms and nongovernmental organizations can play in promoting more stringent regulatory standards.”
• , the Ballmer endowed dean of social work, for investigations of “how inequality, in its many forms, affects health, illness and quality of life. He has developed unique conceptual frameworks to investigate how race, ethnicity and immigration are associated with health and social outcomes.”
• , professor of chemistry, who is elected “for distinguished scientific and community contributions to advancing the field of electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, which have transformed how researchers worldwide analyze data.”
• , professor of bioengineering and of ophthalmology, whose “pioneering work in biomedical optics, including the invention of optical microangiography and development of novel imaging technologies, has transformed clinical practice, significantly improving patient outcomes. Through his numerous publications, patents and clinical translations, his research has helped shape the field of biomedical optics.”

Three new 91̽��members of the academy were selected by virtue of their previous election to one of the National Academies. They are:

• , professor of atmospheric and climate science, who had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences “for contributions to research and expertise in atmospheric radiation and cloud processes, remote sensing, cloud/aerosol/radiation/climate interactions, stratospheric circulation and stratosphere-troposphere exchanges and coupling, and climate change.”
• , the Bartley Dobb professor for the study and prevention of violence in the Department of Epidemiology and a 91̽��professor of pediatrics, who had been elected to the National Academy of Medicine “for being a national public health leader whose innovative and multidisciplinary research to integrate data across the health care system and criminal legal system has deepened our understanding of the risk and consequences of firearm-related harm and informed policies and programs to reduce its burden, especially among underserved communities and populations.”
• , division chief of general pediatrics at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a 91̽��professor of pediatrics, who had been elected to the National Academy of Medicine “for her leadership in advancing child health equity through scholarship in community-partnered design of innovative care models in pediatric primary care. Her work has transformed our understanding of how to deliver child preventive health care during the critical early childhood period to achieve equitable health outcomes and reduce disparities.”

In addition, Dr. , president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and of the Cancer Consortium — a partnership between the UW, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Fred Hutch — was elected to the academy for being “part of a research effort that found mutations in the cell-surface protein epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which plays an important role in helping lung cancer cells survive. Today, drugs that target EGFR can dramatically change outcomes for lung cancer patients by slowing the progression of the cancer.”

the Boeing-Egtvedt endowed professor and chair in aeronautics and astronautics, will join the board effective Sept. 30. Morgansen was elected to WSAS in 2021 “for significant advances in nonlinear methods for integrated sensing and control in engineered, bioinspired and biological flight systems,” and “for leadership in cross-disciplinary aerospace workforce development.” She is currently director of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, co-director of the 91̽��Space Policy and Research Center and chair of the AIAA Aerospace Department Chairs Association. She is also a member of the WSAS education committee.

“I am excited to serve on the WSAS board and work with WSAS members to leverage and grow WSAS’s impact by identifying new opportunities for WSAS to collaborate and partner with the state in addressing the state’s needs,” said Morgansen.

The new members to the Washington State Academy of Sciences will be formally inducted in September.

The team — led by , a 91̽��professor of bioengineering and of ophthalmology — combined a smartphone-case modification with image-processing methods to illuminate bacteria on images taken by a conventional smartphone camera. This approach yielded a relatively low-cost and quick method that could be used at home to assess whether potentially harmful bacteria are present on skin and in the oral cavity.

“Bacteria on skin and in our mouths can have wide impacts on our health — from causing tooth to decay to slowing down wound healing,” said Wang. “Since smartphones are so widely used, we wanted to develop a cost-effective, easy tool that people could use to learn about bacteria on skin and in the oral cavity.”

Bacteria aren’t easy to see using conventional smartphone images. Smartphone cameras are “RGB cameras,” said Wang. They essentially funnel all the different wavelengths of light in the visual spectrum into three different colors — red, green and blue. Every pixel in a smartphone-generated image is a combination of those colors. But bacteria emit many colors beyond red, green and blue, which a typical smartphone camera misses.

Wang’s team augmented the smartphone camera’s capabilities by attaching a small 3D-printed ring containing 10 LED black lights around a smartphone case’s camera opening. The researchers used the LED-augmented smartphone to take images of the oral cavity and skin on the face of two research subjects.

“The LED lights ‘excite’ a class of bacteria-derived molecules called porphyrins, causing them to emit a red fluorescent signal that the smartphone camera can then pick up,” said lead author Qinghua He, a 91̽��doctoral student in bioengineering.

Other components in the image — such as proteins or oily molecules produced by our bodies, as well as skin, teeth and gums — won’t glow red under LED. They’ll fluoresce in other colors, He added.

Many bacteria produce porphyrins as a byproduct of their growth and metabolism. The porphyrins can accumulate on skin and in our mouths where bacteria are present in high amounts, according to co-author Yuandong Li, a 91̽��postdoctoral researcher in bioengineering.

“Generally, the more porphyrins you see on skin surface, for example, the greater difficulty you see with wound-healing and acne,” said Li.

The LED illumination gave the team enough visual information to computationally “convert” the RGB colors from the smartphone-derived images into other wavelengths in the visual spectrum. This generates a “pseudo-multispectral” image consisting of 15 different sections of the visual spectrum — rather than the three in the original RGB image. Obtaining this visual information up front would have required expensive and cumbersome lights, rather than using the relatively inexpensive LED black lights, Wang said.

With their greater degree of visual discrimination, the pseudo-multispectral images clearly resolved porphyrin clusters on the skin and within the oral cavity. In addition, though they tailored this method to show porphyrin, Researchers could modify the image-analysis pipeline to detect other bacterial signatures that also fluoresce under LED.

“That is the beauty of this technique: We can look at different components simultaneously,” said Wang. “If you have bacteria producing a different byproduct that you want to detect, you can use the same image to look for it — something you can’t do today with conventional imaging systems.”

This initial study’s success could form the basis of new home-based methods to assess basic skin and oral health, the researchers said — providing users with information about whether they need to see a dentist, for example, or consult a doctor about certain types of skin conditions. Their visual system and image-analysis pipeline may also help identify potentially problematic bacteria in other medical contexts, such as wound healing on other parts of the body.

“There are a lot of directions we can go here,” said Wang. “Our bodies are complex environments, and this approach has great potential to look at many types of problems.”

Additional co-authors were 91̽��visiting scholar Zhiyuan Sun and undergraduate researcher Wendy Wang. The study was funded by the Washington Research Foundation.

For more information, contact Wang at wangrk@uw.edu.

It’s rare, but sometimes things go wrong. In a matter of minutes, patients’ skin can turn red or blotchy white and the injected area becomes painful. Vital blood supply to the face is restricted and if untreated, parts of the tissue will die. That scenario is irreversible and can leave deep scars.

Physicians haven’t been able to pinpoint why this happens because until now it was difficult to see how the injected fluid, or filler, behaves in facial tissue.

New imaging technology from 91̽�� engineers allows scientists to analyze what happens within the smallest blood vessels during an injection. This finding could be used to prevent accidents during procedures and help clinicians reverse the ill effects if an injection doesn’t go as planned.

“Filler-induced tissue death can be a really devastating complication for the patient and provider,” said , a 91̽��assistant professor of ophthalmology specializing in plastic and reconstructive surgery. “This noninvasive imaging technique provides far better detail than I’ve ever seen before and helped us figure out why this is happening.”

Using this technology, Chang and her team saw that complications arose when filler was inadvertently injected into the bloodstream rather than in the intended soft tissues of the face. The gel builds up in a vessel, blocking blood movement and oxygen exchange. The team tested this in the ears of mice, which offer a model of what can happen in the blood vessels of a human face, Chang said.

She in November at the annual meeting of the showing that filler injections into blood vessels are most likely the cause of tissue death and other complications associated with the cosmetic procedure.

, a 91̽��professor of bioengineering, and his lab pioneered this fine-resolution imaging, called optical microangiography. It can turn out 3-D images of the body’s vascular network by shining a light onto the tissue without touching it or adding any fluorescent dyes.

“We can visualize how blood responds to the cosmetic filler gel, even looking at the responses of each individual vessel. No other technique can provide this level of scrutiny,” Wang said.

The optical imaging technique operates on the same concept as ultrasound, which leverages changes in sound to detect structures. This technique instead uses light to repeatedly scan tissue cross-sections, delineating unmoving pieces (surrounding tissues) from moving segments (blood cells in vessels). Researchers compare image frames and piece together the complex visual web.

This technology can see blood vessels as small as 5 microns in diameter. Capillaries, the smallest vessels in our bodies, are about 7 microns in diameter and a red blood cell is usually 3 to 5 microns wide.

“Our niche is imaging the microvascular system,” said team member , a 91̽��graduate student in bioengineering. Other applications of the technology include analyzing how wounds heal, tracking what happens during strokes and traumatic brain injuries, and imaging human eyes to study diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration.

Cosmetic filler procedures have surged worldwide in recent years, particularly in Europe and Asia. In 2012 in the U.S. about 2 million procedures were performed. Up to 800 patients reportedly suffered serious complications, including potentially permanent disfigurement.

During the procedure, a practitioner injects the gel-like solution, often a natural substance called hyaluronic acid, multiple times into a person’s face. Restriction of blood to the tissues, called ischemia, often doesn’t show up until later, when the patient develops pain and sees changes on the surface of the skin, meaning the tissue is dying.

Some practitioners suggest using massage and warm compresses to treat the area, while others tell patients to take aspirin, but the field doesn’t have a standard course of action for treating these complications, Chang said. She has been called in for several emergencies to treat other practitioners’ patients who show signs of a failed procedure. This can lead to tissue death and even blindness if the affected area is near the eyes.

With this new understanding, practitioners can try to reverse the effect of vascular blockage by injecting an enzyme that dissolves hyaluronic acid fillers. The research team is now testing all types of available cosmetic fillers to see if their results hold on each brand and evaluating new treatments for reversing procedure complications.

“Our lab is trying to develop novel and clinically useful biomedical imaging techniques for early diagnosis, treatment and management of human diseases. Using this technology to better understand facelift complications is a perfect example that fulfills this mission,” Wang said.

The research was funded in part by the organization Research to Prevent Blindness and a Latham Vision Research Innovation Award.

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For more information, contact Yousefi at siavash@uw.edu or 541-602-9592; Chang at shuchang@uw.edu or 206-897-4611; and Wang at wangrk@uw.edu or 206-616-5025.