With more than $1 million in external research grants that he’s won, Ying Sun, M.S. ’82, continues to shape URI’s biomedical engineering program.
His first feats of engineering involved bending slender lengths of bamboo and cutting sheets of rice paper into a 50-foot-long, centipede-shaped kite. At the time Ying Sun, M.S. ’82, professor of electrical and computer engineering, was in the fourth grade.
“I just wanted to make something work,” Sun recalls. “In the process there would be some sort of innovation and some sort of design.”
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Today, the director of URI’s biomedical engineering program is still busy with inventions. The materials he’s using range from high-tech: computer software to simulate damaged cardio-vascular systems, to decidedly low-tech: pond snails, TV remote controls, and PVC pipes.
With more than $1 million in external research grants that he’s won for URI in his 20 years here, Sun continues to shape the young biomedical engineering program by conducting increasingly diverse research. He’s also noted for giving undergraduates a chance to conduct high-level research by forging interdisciplinary partnerships with the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Human Science and Services, and Pharmacy, as well within the College of Engineering’s various departments.
This year, three undergraduate women helped the department earn its first U.S. patent. Under Sun’s supervision, Kerri-Anne Lachance, Kerri Pinnock, and Kaylen Haley built the EZ-Puff, a device that enables quadriplegics to use their mouths to control a myriad of appliances, from wheelchairs to call buttons to VCR remote controls, through an electronic circuit box they activate with a puff of air.
Other inventions created through the Assistive Technology Lab include a voice-activated nurse calling system. A New York company is marketing and manufacturing a finger switch created in the same laboratory for people who have limited range of motion. Other students have helped Sun develop light-activated devices for people who must communicate with a simple nod of their heads.
“I feel very rewarded, especially with assistive technology,” Sun said. “There’s a great demand.”
About 20 percent of Americans have documented disabilities, and those with severe physical handicaps are unable to work. Many of these adults can’t afford specialized equipment, which companies don’t find profitable enough to mass produce. And even if they did, lack of insurance reimbursement make customized devices too costly.
Sun’s program works with the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation, and Hospitals; the Eleanor Slater Hospital in Cranston; and the Zambarano Hospital in Pascoag to identify patients for whom students can build customized equipment.
Emily Santurri is one of Sun’s undergraduates who enjoys applying her school work to solve problems that have beset the disabled. The junior worked with three other students to create mouth-operated devices for people who can’t use regular on-off switches.
“One lady was really happy because we hooked her device up to a fan so she could turn it on without having to call a nurse,” Santurri said. “It makes you feel good to do something to give back to the community.”
Currently there are about 100 undergraduates in the biomedical engineering program, which was jump-started back to life in 1996 after it was shut down for a dozen years because of a lack of faculty.
“He is the leader of our biomedical engineering program, the fastest growing program in the College of Engineering over the past five years,” Dean Bahram Nassersharif said of Sun. “He deserves a lot of credit for creating that program and the research environment that attracts students to URI’s College of Engineering.”
Sun says the program is flourishing, in part because of the research and teaching partnerships it has with other departments. Last spring, the success of the interdepartmental teamwork paid off when a page-turning device created by students enrolled in a joint engineering and business course was featured at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance conference. The invention was one of just 14 featured at the San Diego gathering.
Afterwards, the collapsible page-turner began to turn heads. A manufacturer of specialized medical equipment began discussing its commercial potential with the URI lab. The students had created a business plan for the page-turner to ensure that the prototype could one day be profitable.
Sun and some former graduate students also earned a U.S. and international patent for a camera that can both sense and track a moving object. The technology is expected to have practical applications for security surveillance, video conferencing, homeland defense, and border patrols.
Sun says he had no idea he would immerse himself in the biomedical engineering field when he entered college at National Taiwan University. A native of Taiwan, Sun initially wanted to study zoology: “But I didn’t like it. It was old-fashioned taxonomy. Memorize the names of every bone in the frog. Then memorize every muscle in the frog.” A year later, he switched his major to electrical engineering because he liked building things as much as he loved studying animals.
Today, Sun’s research with graduate students and faculty collaborators combines his interests in biomedical engineering and, in a small way, the animal kingdom.
Floating in two 10-gallon fresh-water tanks in Sun’s office are dozens of tiny pond snails raised for his research in neuroengineering, an offshoot of biomedical engineering. He chose these snails to study how neurons in muscle tissue react when stimulated by electrical currents. Why use snails? They’ve got much bigger neurons than mammals, making them easier to study.
With the tiny mollusks, Sun has developed a digital processor that can show how neurons communicate with each other; the so-called “universal clamp” has a patent pending. Developments in neuroscience eventually lead to new treatments and equipment related to neurological diseases.
In collaboration with Frederick Vetter, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and cardiologist Salvatore Chiaramida of the Medical University of South Carolina, Sun is currently developing computer simulation software that will one day help doctors know exactly how much muscle tissue should be removed in cardiac-vascular surgeries.
So, what does this busy inventor do when he’s not in his Kelley Hall laboratory? The husband of Vatchara Sun and father of two invents some more.
His hobby of playing classical guitar evolved into building travel-ready guitars a dozen years ago when he was on sabbatical in Sweden. “I missed my guitar and I was looking for a travel guitar,” he recalled. Not finding one to his liking, he decided to build his own.
Nine hand-made guitars later, Sun has only sold two to guitar-playing friends. In fact, he finds it hard to part with his creations: “Each one is like one of my children,” he explains.
By Chris Poon, M.A. ’05Photo by Nora Lewis
