McCormick Prof. John Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery as well as the Director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics.
Before joining NU in 2016 as the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor, Rogers was on the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has been involved in various startups and has invented more than 80 patents and patent applications throughout his career.
Much of Rogers’ research has centered around medical devices, such as a miniature pacemaker. The Daily spoke with Rogers about his work.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: For medical engineering research, are you more of the designer, or do you work more on the testing side?
Rogers: Everything, soup to nuts, essentially every engineering aspect of these devices is pursued within our group (Rogers Research Group). Our collaborators are helping us to identify unmet clinical needs, challenges in caring for patients. We tend to focus on vulnerable patients at the earliest stages of life and then the latest stages of life. I think that’s where a lot of the health complications come in. So we’re focused on maternal, fetal, neonatal health in that early life regime, and then we also work with elderly patients — Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, stroke survivors.
We engineered devices to meet real practical clinical needs. Then we build them out into prototypes with sufficient levels of reproducibility and quality control enabled by our institute and the funding that’s associated with that endowment to complement what we can support with traditional federal sources of research funding to get those devices into the hospital on patients, used by nurses, fitting into the clinical workflow so we can get a much deeper understanding of the utility of the devices, the quality of the data, the engineering aspects.
It’s a lot of back and forth, very iterative in that sense. It’s science giving rise to new technologies, enabling us to see new opportunities for scientific research. We really do it all.
The Daily: How many of these devices that you have made, if any, have made it into widespread use?
Rogers: One is called Sibel Health. It’s a company that makes soft, wireless, wearable technologies for doing vital signs monitoring of patients both in a hospital setting and in a home setting. So ICU-grade quality and data streams, but without the wires and without the expensive hospital apparatus that’s used to make those measurements currently.
An important part of that company is based around global health — in particular, taking these devices to provide monitoring capabilities in regions of the globe that have no monitoring technology at all, even the old school wired based system. Many countries in Africa we’re deployed in, primarily facilitated by philanthropic support.
The Daily: What did your visit actually look like when you visited Africa to see the implementation?
Rogers: These are devices that monitor the health of the fetus, uterine contractions and all vital signs of the expecting mother during the intrapartum period. There’s a lot of mortality associated with childbirth in these parts of the world. The monitoring allows what is a very constrained resource, in terms of trained healthcare professionals, to triage their care to the patients that are in greatest need, and to predict healthcare trajectories, whether a C-section is gonna be necessary or not. So it was powerful. You see what kind of very limited resources are available in these parts of the world, and the technologies are designed specifically to allow economic viability for use in those regions.
The Daily: What would you say have been the highlights or greatest moments in your career so far?
Rogers: I get more enjoyment out of seeing students and postdocs emerge from the group and get started on a really exciting career of their own. Publishing papers is great. The translation is great. For translation, I’m not as deeply involved, and so the successes there are more satisfying in the sense that they’re a little bit kind of one step removed and it’s great validation of our work. But if a postdoc gets a faculty offer — I had one just the other day about an offer to join the faculty at Cornell in biomedical engineering — I’m more happy about that kind of thing than anything else that’s going on.
Just seeing young people emerge from our lab environment into employment at the very highest levels of large companies, startups, universities, that’s really great. That’s what we hope to be able to do in the future.
Email: [email protected]
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— Tiniest wireless pacemaker earns spot on 2025 best inventions list
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