CPHM News

Lili He, professor and head of food science, and Yuzhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher, have created a smartphone-based technology to detect bacteria contamination on surfaces such as food processing plants, hospitals and other public environments.

Ivan Lee, associate professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and IALS translational cohire, and Juhyeon Lee, PhD candidate and first author, published their findings in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering which was recognized with a Featured Article Award.

Karen Giuliano and Juan Jiménez won honorable mention in the 2025 Team Innovation Award category.

New research led by Wouter Hoogkamer and his team shows that super spikes, scientifically described as advanced footwear technology (AFT) spikes, can give runners about a 2% edge in middle-distance track races, like the 800- and 1,500-meters.

More than 80% of stroke survivors experience walking difficulty, significantly impacting their daily lives, independence, and overall quality of life. Now, new research from UMass Amherst pushes forward the bounds of stroke recovery with a unique robotic hip exoskeleton, designed as a training tool to improve walking function. This invites the possibility of new therapies that are more accessible and easier to translate from practice to daily life compared to current rehabilitation methods.

Health Tech for the People (HT4P), funded by IALS/CPHM, is a new thrust focusing on the ethics of technology and accountable, human-centered design, evaluation and translation of health monitoring technologies for the public interest. This research foci incubates interdisciplinary and community-led teams and technologies in the domains of aging care and reproductive health.

The new device is built of two critical components, explains lead author Hongyan Gao, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at UMass Amherst. The first is a three-dimensional cardiac microtissue (CMT), grown in a lab from human stem cells under the guidance of co-author Yubing Sun, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UMass Amherst.

Dmitry Kireev and his team have received an award to develop a new type of sweat monitor that can be applied to the skin just like a temporary tattoo and assess the molecules present, such as cortisol. The tattoos will ultimately give individuals better insight into their health and serve as a tool for researchers to discover new early indications of diseases.

IALS is excited to announce the inaugural one-year translational Graduate Student Fellows for 2024! 

We define translational research as work that aims to inform or to develop product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being.

Four UMass Amherst faculty scholars representing a range of disciplines in the natural and health sciences have been recognized nationally and globally in Research.com’s 2023 list of top scientists and also earned high rankings in their specific fields of research. All four of these researchers are affiliated with an IALS Research Center, with all three Centers being represented on this list.

Virtual reality and augmented reality (AR/VR) smart glasses, automobile Lidar, cell phone camera lenses, night vision, terrain mapping, and facial recognition — all are technologies dramatically improved by metalenses. Metalenses are extremely thin optical structures that combine multiple functions of traditional and bulky curved optics into an ultracompact package and are key to enabling a wide range of next-generation products in consumer, health care, aerospace, and defense markets.

Researchers at IALS have pushed forward the boundaries of biomedical engineering one hundredfold with a new method for DNA detection with unprecedented sensitivity.

Jinglei Ping, member of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring and assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has been awarded the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health.

According to the United States Census, the population of adults over age 65 has spiked in the past decade, reaching more than 55 million people—or over 1 in 6 people in the country—in 2020. The vast majority of older Americans would prefer to stay in their homes as they age, but for many, chronic illness, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias, make this out of reach without substantial support.

T. Leo Liu, assistant professor, mechanical and industrial engineering and IALS, will receive $400,000 over three years to investigate a topic that is exploratory, developmental, proof of concept or high-risk/high-impact.