Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering

Prospective Faculty Seminar

Monday, February 21, 2022

9:30-10:20am

MJIS 1083 or Via Zoom:

https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/94147441278?pwd=RXo4NEFhRkZOL1dkMnVnejZxaEg2QT09

Craig Forest

Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Professor of Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Tech

Automated single-cell analyses of neurons in the living brain

Abstract: Whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology enables the recording of electrical events in cells with great precision and supports a wide diversity of cellular morphological and molecular analysis experiments. However, high levels of skill are required in order to perform patching clamping, especially in the living brain, and the process is time-consuming and painstaking. Automated patching robots would not only empower a great number of neuroscientists to perform such experiments, but also open up fundamentally new kinds of experiments enabled by the resultant high throughput. In the past decade, in collaboration with Ed Boyden’s lab, we discovered that in vivo blind whole cell patch clamp electrophysiology could be implemented as a straightforward algorithm, and developed an automated robotic system capable of performing this algorithm. Our robot achieves yields, cell recording qualities, and operational speeds that are comparable to, or exceed, those of experienced human investigators, and is simple and inexpensive to implement.   We have extended this technology in many directions, including include coupling patch clamping to optogenetics, pharmacology, brain organoids, automatically recording multiple neurons simultaneously and serially, and patch clamping deep structures including mouse thalamus and brain stem.

Bio: Craig Forest is a Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. He conducts research on miniaturized, high-throughput robotic instrumentation to advance neuroscience and genetic science. Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a research fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He obtained a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in June 2007, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2003, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2001. He is cofounder/organizer of one of the largest undergraduate invention competitions in the US—The InVenture Prize, and founder/organizer of one of the largest student-run makerspaces in the US—The Invention Studio.  He was a Fellow in residence at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle WA; He was named Engineer of the Year in Education for the state of Georgia and was a finalist on the ABC reality TV show "American Inventor.” 

~BME Host: Hugh Lee~