2011 MCASTA Annual Symposium -- Keynote Speakers

Keynote speaker of 2011 MCASTA Annual Symposium

工研院 生醫所所長, 邵耀華 博士 

Dr. Shau received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is currently a professor at Institute of Applied Mechanics at National Taiwan University, and has experience in teaching the courses of Bio-fluid Dynamics, Biomedical Engineering, Experiments in Electronics and Applied Mechanics.  During 2000-2003, he had been an associate researcher at the National Taiwan University Hospital.  Also, he has been consulting Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ministry of Justice since 2000. He joined Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in August 2005 as the director of Medical Engineering Division, BMEC and was promoted to general director of Medical Electronics and Device Technology Center in Jan. 2006 that responsible for assisting Taiwanese medical devices industrial development.

In July 2010, he was named as Vice President and General Director of Biomedical Technology and Device Research Laboratories, ITRI. Dr. Shau has been elected as the chairman of point-of-care technology industrial alliance since 2007, chairman of Taiwan Biotech Association and chairman of Small Molecule Drug industrial alliance since 2011.

Dr. Shau’s research interests include medical instrumentation, healthcare devices, bio-sensors, medical ultrasound and biophysics of tumor angiogenesis and diabetics.

2011 MCASTA Outstanding Scholar Lecture 1

Dr. Da-Ren Chen (陳大仁 ) is a professor of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering (EECE) and Director of Graduate Studies in EECE of Washington University in St. Louis.  His expertise in aerosol instrumentation is noteworthy and his innovations have led to commercialization of instruments that are used to measure nanoparticles across the globe.

Dr. Chen received his BS degree in 1985 and MS degree in 1987 from National  Tsing-Hua University and his Ph. D. from University of Minnesota in 1997.  Dr. Chen specialized in aerosol research.  Dr. Chen filed more than 10 patents, and worked on numerous projects related to aerosol generation/synthesis, instrumentation, characterization, processing and control, most with industrial applications when he was at the University of Minnesota. Some aerosol instruments he had worked on now are commercially available and widely used by the aerosol research community.

 Dr.  Chen joined Washington University in St. Louis in 2001.  His collaboration with Dr. Ming You, MD, Director of the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center, resulted in an aerosol administration of potent agents aimed at preventing lung cancer tumor growth.     Dr. Chen received the Big Fish Award from the Association of Graduate Engineering Students as the best graduate teacher and mentor of students in 2009.  Dr. Chen received R&D 100 Award from R & D magazine in 2009 and Space Act Award from NASA in 2010,

 One of Dr. Chen’s research areas focuses on how to make particles of desired sizes from potential chemoprevention agents and encapsulate them along with biodegradable polymers in some case.  By targeting only the lung with aerosols, his research findings could potentially bypass side effects that are likely to occur via ingestion or injections, which distribute the drug throughout the body

Dr. Chen also studies how to load drugs on stents — small mesh tubes that are used to treat narrowed or weakened arteries in the body — for cardiac patients; the drugs inhibit tissue from growing over the stent, necessitating surgery a year or two later to replace the stents. The drug-loaded stent has potential to deliver a therapy that can repair the artery itself. A company has licensed this technology.

Dr. Chen is a very productive scholar and has published six books, 13 US patents, and 85 research papers.   He is a member of American Association for Aerosol Research, American Filtration and Separation Society, American Society of mechanical Engineering, and Chinese Association for Aerosol Research in Taiwan.

2011 MCASTA Outstanding Scholar Lecture 2

Dr. Yie-Hwa Chang has held a strong passion for the life sciences as long as he can remember, deciding by middle school that he wanted to dedicate his career to forging stronger connections between chemistry and biology. Dr. Chang has enjoyed a varied career that has spanned research and entrepreneurship, particularly focusing on proteomics, angiogenesis and new horizons in biosensor technology. He holds a B.S. in Chemistry (National Taiwan University) and a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology (California Institute of Technology), and undertook his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Over the past few decades, Dr. Chang’s research has contributed to important new discoveries in drug development and basic research. At Caltech, he created a new enzyme activity through protein engineering for the first time in this field, via swapping the active site of two enzymes. At Harvard Medical School, he discovered a novel signal peptide for a cytosolic protein. This finding later led to major expansion of our knowledge in an important cellular event, namely autophagy. In addition, he discovered the first eukaryotic methionine aminopeptidase which performs a key role in protein processing conserved from microbes to humans. At Saint Louis University Medical School, he continued his work on methionine aminopeptidase and discovered a second type of this important enzyme. This new enzyme turned out to be essential for angiogenesis. This discovery was licensed to 11 major pharmaceutical companies. Currently, drugs targeted to this enzyme have entered into Phase II human clinical trials for anti-angiogenesis and anti-obesity. 

Over the years, Dr. Chang developed a strong desire to apply his broad training in biochemistry and molecular biology towards research that could produce outcomes of immediate and practical benefit to society. This led him establish Mediomics LLC in 2001. He began to license technologies that had been invented in his own laboratory, Dr. Tomasz Heyduk’s laboratory and Dr. David Waisman’s laboratory, in hopes of unlocking a wider range of their potential applicability. In the past 10 years, under his leadership, Mediomics has successfully competed for numerous government grants/contracts to further develop these platform technologies. For example, Mediomics is one of the two companies in the U.S. that received a contract from the National Cancer Institute to develop in-process analyzers to monitor the production of biologics. It is the only one company in the U.S. that received a contract from the CDC to develop biosensors to detect early HCV infection. Patient with early HCV infection has a 98% cure rate. Mediomics is also the only one of two companies in the U.S. that received a NHLBI contract to develop PINCER™-based aptamers as high affinity reagents for detecting cardiovascular diseases. Beyond the exciting technological boundaries, he has led a team to push with new variations and expansions of the platforms and he believes that these simple sensor designs (essentially “mix and measure”) will significantly increase access to these sorts of sensors in the future, especially in the contexts of healthcare.  It is also worth noting that Mediomics received the Spirit of Saint Louis Award from the Saint Louis City Mayor and the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Project Award from NIH/IRS in 2010.

In summary, Dr. Chang envisions that these platform technologies will help revolutionize the biosensor field, as well as the protein drug field, by significantly improving the performance of sensors and/or therapeutic drugs at highly accessible costs.

2011 MCASTA Service Award: Mr. William Li

Mr. William Li also actively participates in the community events. Mr. Li served twice as the President of the Chinese Culture Association, was the Vice President for Global Alliance for Democracy and Peace – St. Louis Chapter, and is a Vice Chair for the Republic of China (Taiwan) National Day Celebration Committee in St. Louis. He participated in the Taiwan Heritage Week events, and has served as the Steering Committee Chair for the Midwest Chinese American Science and Technology Association (MCASTA) since 2004. Furthermore, William loves Taiwan, so in December of 2009, he founded Taiwan Benevolent Association of St. Louis (TBASL), a local chapter of the Taiwan Benevolent Association of America (TBAA) to follow its mission of serving American residents from Taiwan. William Li has been the President of TBASL since 2009, and has just been newly appointed in the annual convention to serve as the 34th Secretary General of TBAA.