Joseph Tranquillo

Bucknell University · Biomedical Engineering

The business and entrepreneurship education communities have embraced the concept of the one-page canvas as a way to help students explore new ventures and teach entrepreneurial thinking. The movement toward the canvas approach was sparked by Osterwalder’s (2004) decomposition of business ventures and subsequent publication of Business Model Genera...

Faculty are continually seeking new methods to help students develop characteristics associated with an entrepreneurial mindset. Recently, games have emerged as a popular tool to foster an entrepreneurial mindset through experiential based learning. This article provides an overview of the development of a workshop designed to teach faculty about g...

Our institution has recently committed to develop five new entrepreneurially-minded elective courses called “IDEAS studios”. The entrepreneurially-minded aspects of IDEAS studios include close interaction with industrial partners and an emphasis on topics such as value proposition, opportunity recognition, intellectual property, and customer engage...

Economic trends and a changing job market for college graduates have generated significant interest in graduating more engineers who possess entrepreneurship skills and an entrepreneurial mindset. This has led to significant growth in the delivery of entrepreneurship courses to engineering students; however, research shows that such courses are typ...

Civil engineering projects inherently require the contribution of many sub-disciplines within engineering. However, current civil engineering undergraduate curricula include limited opportunities for civil engineering students to participate in interdisciplinary design experiences that involve students or topics from other engineering programs (mec...

Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the Achaians, and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips; then goes on, well-pleased, knowing more than ever he did; for we know everything th...

Integrating entrepreneurial thinking into engineering education is a growing area of interest. Existing programs have created content for courses offered during the normal semester where traditional modes of assessment, such as grading, have been used to evaluate learning. Within this research the authors explore another style of offering entrepren...

The KEEN Winter Interdisciplinary Design Experience (K-WIDE) is an immersive co-curricular program that exposes students to authentic open-ended design inductively. K-WIDE occurs outside of the curriculum and does not bear any credit. Students do not receive any pay for the program, and their only motivation is to learn about design. We believe tha...

It's winter break at Bucknell University and 23 first and second year engineers are tackling the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge, Restoring and Improving Urban Infrastructure. They have immersed themselves for 130 hours over 10 days, for no credit, and no pay. Their interdisciplinary teams have been challenged to identify their own...

Product archaeology refers to the process of reconstructing the lifecycle of a product to understand the decisions that led to its development and has been used as an educational framework for promoting students' consideration of the broader impacts of engineering on people, economics, and the environment. As a result, product archaeology offers st...

Biomedical Signals and Systems is meant to accompany a one-semester undergraduate signals and systems course. It may also serve as a quick-start for graduate students or faculty interested in how signals and systems techniques can be applied to living systems. The biological nature of the examples allows for systems thinking to be applied to electr...

As a result of economic and workforce trends, there is a strong interest among policy makers and educational stakeholders in graduating more engineers with entrepreneurship skills and an entrepreneurial mindset. Given the role that ABET accreditation takes in shaping undergraduate engineering curriculum, wide adoption of entrepreneurship education...

In recent years, the life sciences have embraced simulation as an important tool in biomedical research. Engineers are also using simulation as a powerful step in the design process. In both arenas, Matlab has become the gold standard. It is easy to learn, flexible, and has a large and growing userbase. MATLAB for Engineering and the Life Sciences...

The curvature of the cardiac geometry has a major impact on regional wall stress, but most computational models lack detailed curvature representations. A surface with continuous second-order derivatives is required to model continuous curvatures. The goal of this research was to develop a mouse epicardia1 geometry model with quantitative surface c...

The curvature of the cardiac geometry has a major impact on regional wall stress, but most computational models lack detailed curvature representations. A surface with continuous second-order derivatives is required to model continuous curvatures. The goal of this research was to develop a mouse epicardial geometry model with quantitative surface c...

We have previously shown in experimental cardiac cell monolayers that rapid point pacing can convert basic functional reentry (single spiral) into a stable multiwave spiral that activates the tissue at an accelerated rate. Here, our goal is to further elucidate the biophysical mechanisms of this rate acceleration without the potential confounding e...

Many physical systems are composed of multiple oscillators which when coupled tend to synchronize. In many systems, coupling is assumed to be bidirectional and diffusive, which in phase space acts to strongly attract limit cycles to one another. Our simulations explore the impact of other forms of coupling, such as synaptic, phase and transient cou...

One computationally important feature of a neuronal network is the ability of each neuron to dynamically adjust its impedance to external signals. We simulated synaptically coupled Hindmarsh-Rose neurons and found that a bursting neuron can switch a neural oscillator into a temporary period of quiescence, before switching it back to native oscillat...

Two findings in homogeneous reaction-diffusion media are that a single spiral may break into multiple spirals and that rapidly rotating spirals push slowly rotating spirals to domain boundaries. These two findings together fail to explain how cardiac tissue can support multiple stable spirals with different periods of rotation. Numerical simulation...

Studies of coupled oscillators often use diffusive connections to ensure that the coupled quantity is conserved. Signals between neurons, however, are not diffusive and may propagate unattenuated throughout a network. We compare diffusive and synapse-like coupling of Hindmarsh-Rose (HMR) oscillators through numerical simulations. HMR parameters are...

We propose a mechanism by which wave fronts emanating from a spiral may break far from the spiral core due to intrinsic spatial inhomogeneities. A series of computer simulations are presented to demonstrate how coupling domains, which on their own would not cause breakup, may cause a single spiral to break into many spirals.

The Grassberger-Procaccia method is revisited in this paper with a modified approach to compute the correlation integral through a Euclidean distance measure normalized by the embedding dimension. The performance of the suggested modification is assessed using three different types of signals, including Lorenz attractor, mechanical vibrations of he...

Quantitative Neurophysiology is supplementary text for a junior or senior level course in neuroengineering. It may also serve as an quick-start for graduate students in engineering, physics or neuroscience as well as for faculty interested in becoming familiar with the basics of quantitative neuroscience. The first chapter is a review of the struct...

Over the past several decades, the mouse has gained prominence in the cardiac electrophysiology literature as the animal model of choice. Using computer models of the mouse and human ECG, this paper is a step toward understanding when the mouse succeeds and fails to mimic functional changes resulting from disease states and drug interactions.

Editorial Comment Syncope and sudden death resulting from Torsade de Pointes (TdP) are very uncommon but major adverse drug effects. Prolongation of the QT interval is the most widely used marker of this potential. Minimal prolongation of the QT interval has been the basis for termination of drug devel- opment programs, the imposition of significan...

Some mutations of the sodium channel gene Na(V1.5) are multifunctional, causing combinations of LQTS, Brugada syndrome and progressive cardiac conduction system disease (PCCD). The combination of Brugada syndrome and PCCD is uncommon, although they both result from a reduction in the sodium current. We hypothesize that slow conduction is sufficient...

Attempts to terminate monomorphic tachycardia by rapid pacing occasionally lead to acceleration of the tachycardia rate followed by fibrillation. Previous experimental studies have shown that rapid pacing can convert a single-wave functional reentry into a stable multi-wave reentry with accelerated rate, but only when the single spiral rate is sign...

Although the transgenic mouse has become an important new tool in the study of human diseases and the design of new therapies, a complete picture of cardiac electrophysiology in the mouse, from genome to body surface, is lacking. A computational model of the mouse heart is presented, which is used to study the impact of ion-channel and structural m...

Extracellular potentials are often used to assess the activation and repolarization of transmembrane action potentials in cardiac tissue under a variety of experimental conditions. An analytical model of the extracellular potentials arising from a planar wavefront propagating in a three-dimensional slab of cardiac tissue with a variably thick adjac...

Computer models have been used to study cardiac conduction since the late 1970s. 1 At that time, computational power limited investigations to simple geometries corresponding to single fibers or monolayer sheets of cells. With the evolution of computer technologies, computational models of the heart have become three-dimensional and increasingly mo...

The extracellular potential at the site of a mechanical deformation has been shown to resemble the underlying transmembrane action potential, providing a minimally invasive way to access membrane dynamics. The biophysical factors underlying the genesis of this signal, however, are still poorly understood. With the use of data from a recent experime...

Monophasic Action Potential Genesis.Introduction: Despite widespread use of the contact electrode for recording monophasic action potentials (MAPs) in both clinical and experimental research, the mechanism underlying the genesis of the contact MAP remains unproven. The “Franz hypothesis” assumes that the MAP is driven by a current source originatin...

Monophasic action potential (MAP) measurements have been used to characterize the in vivo electrophysiology of the heart. The extension of this technique to the murine heart has raised questions about the sources underlying the MAP and the effect of tissue properties on the time course and amplitude of the MAP. A 3D bidomain model of the murine rig...

This paper reflects a study to explore the chaotic behavior of respiration signals. The correlation dimension is used to identify the presence of strange attractors and estimate dimensions. The Grassberger-Procaccia algorithm and the embedding method of Takens were used for computation of the chaotic measure. Preliminary results show the presence o...

One of the goals of the authors' lab is the development of quantitative measures of normal brain maturation. In this paper the authors discuss some preliminary studies using bispectral techniques as a measure of nonlinear interactions between and within the hippocampal subfields CA1 and the dentate gyrus during normal development

Bispectral analysis is used in this paper to examine the status of quadratic phase couplings in developing neuronal interactions of two hippocampal subfields, CA1 and the dentate gyrus. It was found that the frequency bands where active quadratic phase coupling occurs gradually shift from a low theta range (5-7 Hz) for animals of 15 days of age to...

Since one of the goals of our lab is the identification of new quantitative measures of normal brain function, this paper presents the preliminary results obtained using the attractor and the correlation dimension (an indicator of randomness) on EEG from CA1, a subfield of the hippocampus responsible for the generation of theta rhythm. Data were co...

The Bioelectric Problem Solving Environment (BioPSE) is a flexible software architecture, specifically designed for the interactive investigation of large-scale bioelectic field problems. CARDIOWAVE is a high-performance software system designed for the simulation of cardiac propagation. By bridging together the BioPSE and CARDIOWAVE software syste...

University JOSEPH V TRANQUILLO is an assistant professor of biomedical and electrical engineering at Bucknell University. Dr. Tranquillo teaches courses primarily in bioinstrumentation. His research focuses on theoretical and computational models of electrical activity in the heart.