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This Fall (2009), East Tennessee State University (ETSU) and Georgia Technological University are cooperating in an unprecedented curricular experiment.  The Institute for Quantitative Biology (IQB) at ETSU is offering a course in Predictive Modeling which is coupled with a Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, under the direction of Dr. Esfandiar Behravesh.  

 

Students in the two courses are working together to address a critical issue in Biomedical Engineering, that of why females are 4 to 6 times more likely to suffer Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injuries than male athletes, and how this difference might provide insight as to why ACL injuries occur so frequently among both genders.  Students in the predictive modeling course at ETSU, under the direction of Dr. Jeff Knisley and with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, developed five models targeting possible factors in ACL injuries.  On September 28, 2009, 10 students from the predictive modeling class traveled to Georgia Tech to present the models to approximately 80 biomedical engineering students.  The biomedical engineers subsequently formed teams charged with designing the experiments and collecting the data necessary for model prediction and validation. 

 

Throughout the ACL injury project, students act as consultants for one another.  ETSU mathematics students are required to produce models that lead to experiments and meaningful data, with feedback from students at Georgia Tech as the models are being implemented.  Georgia Tech Engineering students are required to design experiments that implement the mathematical models and collect data that can be used to estimate parameters in those models, with feedback from ETSU students as the experiments are being carried out.  Indeed, this experiment in course coupling exemplifies how students from different disciplines and institutions can collaborate and even instruct one another while addressing an important problem in quantitative biomedicine. 




Trip Pictures:


L-R: Arash Mehraban, Philip Davis, Dr. Jeff Knisley


Dr. Esfandiar Behravesh


Stephanie McMahon


Mark Hainsworth


Hamilton Scott


Denise Koessler


Hamilton Scott


L-R: Katie Schiermeyer, Stephanie McMahon