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Spring 2006 Departments
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Foundation News
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Exploring the Inner Frontier
Professor Bharat Doshi is working to turn science fiction into science fact
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—Faye S. Wolfe
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Professor Bharat Doshi (photo by Ben Barnhart) |
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OVER THE YEARS, HOLLYWOOD HAS sent Raquel Welch, Dennis Quaid, and Homer Simpson on fantastic voyages into human bloodstreams. Bharat Doshi, the first Dev Gupta Professor in the School of Engineering, www.ecs.umass.edu thinks nanodevices, miniscule instruments smaller than a white blood cell, are a much more viable means of diagnosing and monitoring medical conditions.
“Things are going on in biology, in imaging for the body,” he says, that could result in the design of “nanodevices that either travel through the body or stay in one place and that act as sensors to regulate physical processes or communicate to someone outside for medical purposes.” Wireless communications technologies, one of Doshi’s areas of specialization, will enable the devices to relay and receive information. Doshi is eager to do research toward making those fantastic-seeming communication technologies a reality.
Equally mind-boggling is research being done into creating what Doshi calls “prostheses for the brain.” Comparing them to cochlear implants for the hearing-impaired, Doshi explains that these prostheses will take over for damaged parts of a brain or spinal cord, so that, for example, a quadriplegic can move his wheelchair just by thinking. Electrical engineers will play a major role in devising these mechanisms, which are still in the early stages of development; this is another field of inquiry that Doshi plans to be involved in. And he will continue his research in fundamentals of communications and networking, especially in pervasive wireless communication.
Doshi comes to UMass Amherst from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. www.jhuapl.edu There, he was a researcher involved in such projects as building a global information grid for defense communications. Before that, he spent 22 years at legendary Bell Labs www.bell-labs.com (since its founding in 1925, 11 scientists have received the Nobel Prize for their work there). With degrees in electrical engineering and operations research (applied mathematics), Doshi has moved back and forth from academia to industry in his pursuit of answers to “problems in products that don’t yet exist,” as an article once described his work at Bell Labs. His investigations have resulted in more than 40 patents to his credit. “For me what is very important is the formulation of problems, investigating uncharted territory,” says Doshi.
“Very exciting things have happened in the last ten years,” Doshi notes, in the fields of telecommunications and information technology. Having had a hand in some of those developments, he’s excited about what uncharted territory lies ahead for him at UMass Amherst.
“When you do things in industry and government,” he says, “it is at a pace that permits them to deploy it fast. An academic setting offers room for more long-term work, time to sit down and see what can be done at a more fundamental level.” Also attractive to Doshi is that “there is the chance for interdisciplinary collaboration with such fields as biology.” The Dev Gupta Professorship offers him, he says, “the opportunity to take bigger risks,” and the flexibility both to teach and to do research.
When he endowed the professorship, Dev Gupta ’77, himself an expert in wireless communications technology, had in mind just this kind of optimal arrangement. “In a strong economy, the talent in our leading academic faculties may be tempted to leave the classroom to work in industry. My hope is that establishing this professorship will provide an incentive to keep these talented individuals in the classroom, so that future generations can benefit from their expertise.” |
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Exploring the Inner Frontier
Exploring the Inner Frontier: larger image
1863 Society
Passing the Baton
Passing the Baton: larger image
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