Special Events
NorthEast BioEngineering Conference (NEBEC) ‘23 Special Satellite Event with CogSIMA
The Technologies Needed to Advance Personalized Medicine
April 1, 2023
1 pm – 4 pm (Papadakis Integrated Science Center, Drexel University, Room 120)
This event is FREE for all NEBEC’23 Attendees and CogSIMA patrons
Chair and Moderator:
Kirstie L. Bellman, Ph.D.
Speakers and Panelists will include:
Brian Athey, Ph.D.,
Ken Baclawski, Ph.D.
Kirstie Bellman, Ph.D.
Jeffrey Galpin, M.D.
Christopher Landauer, Ph.D.
Milt Louie, M.D.
Scope: Technology supports modern medicine in diverse and increasingly important ways, ranging from wearable devices and prosthetics to haptic surgery and epidemiological models to name a few. However, many of these areas emphasize methods to characterize the general properties of disease progressions across different populations. This special joint virtual and in-person NEBEC and CogSIMA (Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management) event focuses on the technologies needed to support better medical decisions about individual patients.
In recent years we emphasized the differences in the computational support needed by the epidemiologist and the medical clinician during a pandemic, with a special emphasis on COVID. For the epidemiologist, the situation that needs tracking is the number of disease variants, the rate of spread among different populations, the alternative public health policies in place, and similar critical questions. The medical clinician, while depending upon relevant epidemiological information, needs to overlay COVID on top of
other clinical conditions within an individual patient, and make decisions accordingly. The pandemic is a critical context, but the situation needing models and monitoring, prediction and analysis is within the individual patient, and the decisions needing to be made over drugs and treatment options for that individual patient. In this year’s event, we are broadening the comparison of clinical medicine to many different areas of medicine and biomedical research and including the personalization of additional
technologies.
In this event clinicians will address what is needed in clinical medicine vs. other areas of medicine and research. Then several technologists will address the challenges of building individual patient models over time and personalizing other key technologies needed by clinicians, such as dynamic adaptive ontologies, explanation, statistical methods and more.
Speaker information
Brian Athey, Ph.D.
Michael Savageau Collegiate Professor and Chair, Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical School
Ken Baclawski, Ph.D., NEU
Prof. Emeritus, Editor, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences
Kirstie Bellman, Ph.D.
Dr. Kirstie Bellman started programming at seventeen and funded her way through college with programming numerical analysis programs for mathematicians and developing algorithms with others. She received her PhD in Neuropsychology from the University of California, San Diego, while consulting with Salk Institute. With NIH Postdoctoral fellowships, she did her post-doctoral work in Neuroscience at UCLA, as well as working on mathematical models at the Crump Institute for Medical Engineering.
Dr. Bellman recently retired as a Principal Scientist from the not-for-profit FFRDC (a federally funded think tank) in the Computers and Software Division of The Aerospace Corporation to become the lead for the research team at PULSER, LLC. When she returned to the Aerospace Corporation after four years as a Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager in 1997 (one of the first women Program Managers), she started the Aerospace Integration Sciences Center. The center developed advanced system and model integration methods, new analytic techniques, and evaluation tools for assessing the impacts of new technologies for the Department of Defense and other government agencies. She also advised NIH on several programs to improve the use of mathematical and computer science approaches for medical research and served as the Chief Scientist for a large DARPA program that focused on new design methodologies and formal methods.
Upon completion of her term at DARPA as a Program Manager for the Domain Specific Software Architectures program, Prototech, Formal Foundations, and the large Computer-Aided Education and Training Initiative (CAETI), she received a special award from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for excellence in her programs. During her years at DARPA, she had the honor of working with NATO, the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, DoD, and a wide range of other government agencies. She received the 2008 Award in Technology from the Telluride Technology Festival joining past awardees including Vint Cerf, Murray Gellman, Charles Townes, and Freeman Dyson. Recently with both national and international partners, Dr. Bellman has been applying the above experiences and methods to theoretical work and experiments on cyber-medicine applications, bio-computation, and “biologically-inspired” architectures and operating systems.
Jeffrey Galpin, MD
Dr. Jeffrey Galpin began his experience in medicine in another pandemic – as an eight-year-old riding out polio in an iron lung and serving as a March of Dimes Poster Child in Chicago. Despite this, he was awarded full academic scholarships through college and medical school at the University of Illinois. In college he was distinguished not only for his academic scholarship but also as a student athlete in wheelchair track, basketball, football, and Ping-Pong.
Today Dr. Galpin is an internationally respected clinician/researcher whose background includes Board Certification in Infectious Disease and Internal Medicine, as well as training in molecular biology and immunology. His ‘firsts’ are too numerous to list here, but include Amgen’s first PI’s developing the use of erythropoietin, uses of HIV drugs like DDC and Hydroxyurea; successful Hepatitis C protocols, several of the key therapeutic modalities used today in HIV therapy, and patents for the first defined use of DNA hybridization for purposes of clinical microbiologic diagnosis.
Notably, Dr. Galpin was PI for the first gene therapy ever approved for study in man (Viagene, Inc.) by the NIH DNA Advisory Board, the prestigious committee of the NIH that has define all milestones in Gene Therapy. CBS television followed this work for a year and aired a one-hour special on ‘48 Hours’ nationally to report the clinical investigations that he conducted that set the precedent for all other human gene therapies. Not surprisingly, as an infectious disease expert, he has been used by the CDC and other task forces during pandemics, such as Ebola in Africa. He is currently a full time practicing physician and on a number of COVID task forces.
Christopher Landauer, Ph.D.
Leading research in mathematical applications, Ph.D. in Mathematics from CalTech.
Milt Louie, M.D.
Specialty infectious disease and acute care, currently national task forces on pandemic.