Health

At age 5, Morris Kaunda Michael fled with his family from war-torn Sudan for a refugee camp in northern Kenya. Now he is graduating from Columbia Engineering with an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and planning to go to medical school. 

Why is a cure for cancer so elusive? Brent Stockwell, an associate professor with a joint appointment in chemistry and biological sciences and an Early Career Scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, believes the main culprit is “undruggable proteins”—the 85 percent of the proteins in the human body that are not treatable with traditional drugs. 

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School lead by Professor Elisa Konofagou have been developing a new method, Electromechanical Wave Imaging (EWI), that is the first non-invasive direct technique to map the electrical activation of the heart. 

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have established a new method to patch a damaged heart using a tissue-engineering platform that enables heart tissue to repair itself. This breakthrough, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an important step forward in combating cardiovascular disease, one of the most serious health problems of our day.