 Still good morning. Good morning everyone. That was a wonderful start. By the way I'm the deputy head of biomedical engineering. This is my first official external duty as the deputy head. Thank you for the trust from the department and the dean's office. This wonderful event make me think sort of remind me what I did in 2015. So many thanks to the dean's office. It's really wonderful to celebrate the accomplishments of our associate professors. It's my great pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Joseph Rospoly. He joined Purdue BME in 2015 after getting a PhD degree from biomedical engineering at the Texas A&M University. But his footsteps have been everywhere in continental US and elsewhere and I'm sure he's gonna talk about his assignments throughout his his his growth. He's got some really good research collaborations with top notch medical schools including the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, IU School of Medicine and the University of Virginia School of Medicine. And also he's got really really good collaboration with GE Healthcare. As you know this is really hard for a assistant associate professor. So what he has been doing he's focused on electromagnetic modeling and radio frequency coil design for MRI for magnetic reticence imaging. So you see these capital equipment in many hospitals and he's really improving the coil design of those machines. So really big deal. He's designed over 30 coils for 3T and 70 MRI and he has got a lot of awards at Purdue including the Impact Faculty Fellow. This is for undergraduate course transformation. So Joseph has been really really a frontrunner in the department on undergraduate education. He's also got teaching awards Willis A Tacker Prize for Outstanding Teaching in Biomedical Engineering and Mentoring. So basically he has been really a frontrunner in terms of undergraduate teaching, graduate mentoring. So without further ado and let me just present to Dr. Joseph Ruspoly. Thank you very much Anand. I appreciate it. Honored to be your first official engagement as our interim head. Also I want to thank the college for putting on this series. It's been many years that it's been doing so and the tenure track is a grueling long experience. It could be a marathon just like a PhD program with ups and downs and it's wonderful to celebrate successes and to share perhaps some lessons learned along the way for our colleagues. So thank you very much. Ten minutes is not a very long time to go through. You know what I'd love to share with you. I could do a few power hours easily but I think that's you know what draw people like me to the profession standing in front of a captive audience. So I'll just start with some of my background. The places I've lived could be seen on this part of the globe. When I was young I moved around several locations on the east coast of the mid-Atlantic region. My father was in the Navy so every two or three years we packed up and moved somewhere new. Usually it was somewhere in Virginia or Maryland. There were highlights there. I actually lived on Camp David from 1983 to 85 during the Reagan presidency and of course many military bases. But the formative years I'd say started when I was 10 and my father was assigned to Pearl Harbor. And I was lucky enough that after that assignment he retired and found a civilian job out there. So much of my upbringing was in Hawaii. If you've been out to Oahu, Hanama Bay is a popular snorkeling spot on the east side of the island. Near Cocoa Head our house was maybe a couple miles from there. It was just idyllic beautiful society multicultural. Just loved everything about it but very expensive to live. And you know when the time came to graduate I ended up leaving. But meanwhile while I was there I was very interested in computers. I was building computers for family and friends. At the time it was buying different components and motherboards and putting it all together. I was writing code and Pascal and writing early web pages just in raw HTML for companies as well as personal interests and I was the webmaster at our high school. So I knew I wanted to do something to do with computers but I was also fascinated by electrical engineering in general. So I chose to go to the University of Virginia since I'd lived in Virginia before and I was able to get in-state tuition in my third and fourth years because of that history there. I double majored in electrical engineering and computer engineering. They were separate programs at the time and ended up writing two undergraduate theses. One for engineering and one for a minor in Chinese history. So at a time I was one of the few people that could speak at length about the policing of the British administration in Shanghai in the latter 19th century. It was quite an interesting topic on the side of my engineering courses. But upon graduation I never honestly gave much thought about graduate school. I had worked with talented TAs but I really was interested in getting a job, making some money, getting out of debt, etc. And there were a number of companies that recruited around there. I had offers from defense contractors in the D.C. area but I somewhat wanted to move west and I was intrigued by a job offer at Dell Computers in Austin, Texas. So I ended up moving there. I lived in Austin area for eight years. It was a wonderful place to be in your 20s. Austin's always changing. Supposedly you know you're from Austin if you can complain about how great Austin used to be. But it's still a wonderful city. And I ended up meeting the young woman who would become my wife there. She was attending University of Texas at Austin to get a master's degree in special education. And then she became a school teacher at the local public schools. And so we were married. She decided a couple years later that she wanted to get a PhD. And she went back to UT Austin. Got a PhD and got her first academic position at Texas A&M University. And so I was still working for Dell and she was starting at Texas A&M. And she'd come home from work and talk about you know all the wonderful time she had mentoring students that day, teaching courses, doing research. And I was driving into my job and I had great colleagues there and it paid well and it was there was a defined career path. But I realized I had an early midlife crisis that I'm thankful I did have. Because I realized I wasn't gonna have personal fulfillment you know staying in an industry job similar to Dell or the other companies in the Austin area. So now that she was an assistant professor I decided to quit and go to graduate school myself and it made plenty of sense to do so at Texas A&M University and College Station. I wanted to build on my electrical engineering background but pivot maybe to something that had to do with medicine. I really wanted to help people more immediately. You could say at Dell that you know you're building these data center servers and they're going out and doing wonderful things for all sorts of applications but I really wanted that more immediate impact perhaps even working in the hospital setting as part of my career. So I found a lab there that was mainly electrical engineering oriented and you know ended up getting into hardware design for MRI as non-set radio frequency coil design and ended up then coming to Purdue. But what brought me to Purdue obviously tremendous international reputation for excellence. The other opportunities I had were you know the caliber of engineering students and peers and the faculty that I would have didn't compare. So I was very excited about Purdue in that regard. There was an alumnus that I also admired nearly a hundred years ago. Edward Mills Purcell who got a double E degree in 1933 and would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the NMR phenomenon which led to MRI and I really appreciated his philosophical view of research in his Nobel speech talking about at his doorstep great heaps of protons quietly processing in the Earth's magnetic field in the snow and I really connected with that and I'd remembered that from before I was introduced to Purdue in Indiana. But at the time it was preeminent teams that were carrying out most of the hiring here and for me it was the engineering healthier brains preeminent team that drew me to Purdue whereas I could tell you all about the literature and MR hardware electromagnetic modeling. I was more familiar with the engineering healthier brains initiative through watching Frontline and Professor Tom Tolavich who led that team back in 2011 first you know discussed the dangers of repetitive head impacts through collision sports and so I was honored to join that team and work with all the colleagues Eric Noman and others in that preeminent team but I have to be honest Purdue also you know is exceptional in their partner placement program. My wife not even being in the College of Engineering it's not common to have a program that provost does a wonderful job here at really facilitating partner placements across colleges and that also played into our decision. Purdue was in the midst of doubling down and investing in MRI hardware and resources here on campus about a year after I came Purdue opened the MRI facility with a three Tesla human scanner from GE healthcare that I'm now at the director of and there's a photo of my group at the time at the opening ceremony of the facility so very exciting time to come here. I continued my work with Professor Tolavich and the neuro trauma group my little area that I carved out was doing MR spectroscopy on collision sports athletes so gauging the concentration of different metabolites in the brain and longitudinal studies before football season during and after recovery and also diffusion tensor imaging where we looked at white matter integrity throughout the same time course with a nice little graphic here of one of our participants white matter in 3D. I also stuck with what I considered my more bread and butter which was the radio frequency coil design and electromagnetic modeling for that it was for ultra high-field magnetic resonance so I worked with different partners as as non mentioned including the University of Pittsburgh we had NIH support for these studies where succinctly to say high-field MRI you can no longer have a single coil that transmits and excites protons in the body. The shorter wavelength requires that you have more than one in this case we have 16 independent coils or you could think of them as antennas for magnetic fields and they're all operating independently and ideally you have a nice uniform magnetic field that's created but in the not ideal case you know MRI could act a bit like a microwave and heat up tissue so really this is all research only seven Tesla MRI and that's because the safety aspects of it have not been hammered out enough and that's where a large part of my research lies in performing electromagnetic modeling to ensure safety with parallel transmit hardware and we've also spent a good time on breast MRI as well because that's something I've carried through since my early days as a doctoral student and then here taking advantage of our three Tesla scanners we've developed a class of wearable coils the initial motivation indeed was for breast MRI so to be able to have a wearable array of coils that can provide better image quality for a woman getting a breast MRI which is normally done prone with a very fairly uncomfortable position but my my hope was if we could do this supine wearing either a stretchable array similar to what you see at the bottom right and these are easily manufactured with conductive thread and embroidery machines so I've partnered with GE healthcare to evaluate some of these coils including this 60 channel array that's now with their partner at Stanford surgery and radiology for evaluation so very excited to continue this work and this has brought me one of my patent applications here at Purdue as well and then finally I just wanted to touch on service opportunities and that's beyond you know serving in committees here one service opportunity that I jumped on and I'm very glad I did was an international working group through my primary organization the International Society for Magnetic Resonance and Medicine and this was a three-year effort that culminated in the 120 page white paper with experts around the globe so I was I was chairing the RF safety subsection which was the largest chapter of this white paper and it was really a great opportunity to make colleagues and friends around the globe also though to manage a group of different colleagues who sometimes are competing in the research realm so that definitely has helped my future collaborative opportunities and international reputation but finally it all comes back to the students they're countless faculty peers and mentors here too many to list really but as well as undergraduate students in my lab I think about 30 so far but the graduate alumni for my group have gone on to very prestigious postdocs I'm very proud of them all and I wouldn't be here without these graduates and I also have a wonderful current cohort of students across BME and electrical engineering that I continue to work with and it's really that's why we're here for our students and just one of the highlights of the job in my opinion to be able to mentor them and watch them grow so I think I'm already over my 10 minutes as quick as that seemed thank you very much thank you Joseph questions I think we can allow two quick questions Joseph I do have a question I was reading your your biography and different people you work with so what lessons did you learn from your experience chairing the RF safety working group that that's great question on that working group you know they're experts from France Germany England's Korea and as I mentioned some of them might be competing for grants some of them might have alternate approaches to how they feel experimental hardware should be validated or even designed for high-field MRI so when I was given that opportunity I talked with some more senior colleagues who have been in these types of working groups before for advice and one one that really came through and was relevant here was to not let everything boil down to the least common denominator where everyone is an agreement otherwise you end up putting a white paper out that really has no meaning and would be not quite as impactful so there were many difficult conversations in the meetings we had over the years and you know we have to we had to come to consensus through voting it wasn't always unanimous and but we also wanted to be inclusive to include all the different approaches but really to make sure that we didn't let things kind of go down to the least common denominator. Well quick question anybody okay let's give another round of applause to Joseph thank you very much