Lab News
VISE Symposium Award
Congratulations to Emily McCabe for her presentation entitled "Autonomous Needle Steering: A Minimally Invasive Surgical Solution In Vivo" She was awarded Honorable Mention for Best Graduate Student Presentation at the annual VISE Symposium. Great work, Emily!
FDA Breakthrough Device Award
EndoTheia, Inc., a startup company spun out of the med lab, was awarded Breakthrough Device status by the FDA. It is one of only 7 devices in its clinical area to achieve Breakthrough Device status to date! https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/news/2023/company-co-founded-by-vande...
Congrats Mariana
Congratulations to our undergraduate researcher Mariana in being awarded an Excellence in Research Poster Award in the category of Engineering for her presentation at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair on September 8! She was selected as the only awardee in the discipline of engineering, and received a $200 prize.
Shannon's Undergrad Research Presentation
Congrats to Shannon, a summer undergrad fellow working in the lab, for presenting her research at the VISE Seminar!
PhD Defense of James Ferguson
James successfuly defended his PhD thesis titled "Estimation in Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotics: Enabling Novel Technologies in Image Guidance and Sensing". Congratulations Dr. Ferguson!
Welcome to the Lab Peter!
Peter Connor joined MEDLab this fall. He is pursuing a PhD in mechancial engineering. We're glad to have you here, and can't wait to see what you accomplish!
Mariana presents at SyBBURE Symposium
Undergraduate researcher Mariana Smith presented her research on a Foldable Laparoscopic Omnidirectional Wrist for Effective Robotic Surgery (FLOWERS) at the SyBBURE Symposium in August.
PhD Defense of Margaret Rox
Margaret successfully defended her PhD thesis titled "Mechanical and Computational Design of Continuum Robots for Minimally Invasive Lung Interventions." Congratulations Dr. Rox!
Recent PhD Defense
Max successfully defended his thesis entitled "Estimation, Modeling and Control of Steerable Needles for Transendoscopic Deployment into the Lung". Congratulations Dr. Emerson!
MED Lab Makes 7 Presentations at Hamlyn 2022!
The MED Lab and the Startup Companies that have spun out if it made 7 presentations, and published 5 papers, at the 2022 Hamlyn Symposium Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics. Congratulations to Margaret Rox, Daniel Esser, and Jesse d'Almeida who traveled to London, UK, to present their work! Dr. Webster also gave the keynote talk at the Autonomy and Shared Autonomy Workshop, as well as a presentation entitled "How I learned to stop worrying and love the MRI" at the Image-Guided and Collaborative Medical Robotics workshop.
Annual Crawfish Boil
The annual lab crawfish boil was a steaming success, with many of our students, collaborators, and friends attending. Our own PhD candidate James cooked up a whooping 90lbs of crawfish for everyone to enjoy!
ISMR Workshop Talk
Our graduate student Tayfun Efe Ertop gave a workshop talk about “Continuum Robots for Lung Applications: Past Experiences and Future” in the “Surgical Robots: The Next Generation” session at the ISMR Conference (Atlanta, GA).
NSF Fellowships
MED Lab is proud to announce that graduate student Jesse F. d'Almeida and undergrad student Adrian Florea both received the prestigious and extremely competitive Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The fellowship award will fully fund them during their time in a PhD program for the upcoming years! Congratulations to both of them!
Piper at DMD
Piper Cannon, one of our first-year students, presented a novel tool for auricle retraction at the Design of Medical Devices conference this year. The conference was hosted by the University of Michigan and this work was presented during a session regarding the advancements in surgical tools.
Conference Paper Presented at SPIE Medical Imaging 2022
Adrian Florea, one of the undergraduate researchers working in our lab, presented his paper “Design of a Modular, Multi-Arm Concentric Tube Robot Featuring Roller Gears” at the SPIE Medical Imaging 2022 Conference at San Diego, CA.
Paper Accepted for ISMR 2022
Our paper titled "Towards Suturing From Within the Urethra Using Concentric Tube Robots: First Experiences in Biological Tissues” has been accepted to ISMR 2022. Our graduate student Tayfun Efe Ertop will be presenting our work at the conference in Atlanta on April.
2022 Winterim at Harpeth Hall
Some of our students (Jason, Emily, Abby, Jesse, Jack, Daniel, and Piper) led a “Winterim” course during winter break at local all-girls high school, Harpeth Hall. The course, titled ‘STAR (Structures, Technology and Robotics): A Hands-On Engineering Experience,’ focused on many different aspects of engineering. The girls used the fundamentals they learned in class to build their own remote-controlled robots and compete in a final tournament! Good job to both the students and the instructors!
