Jeff Chalmers receives prestigious 2014 Cell Culture Engineering Award
Jeff Chalmers was recently named the sole recipient of the global 2014 Cell Culture Engineering Award from Engineering Conferences International (ECI). The award recognizes Chalmers' significant service and dedication to the profession, and the outstanding contributions to the cell culture field from him and his team of researchers.
Chalmers' contributions include the elucidation of the mechanisms of cell damage in large-scale cell culture processes and advocating the use of a hydrodynamic parameter, energy dissipation rate, EDR, to quantify the hydrodynamic conditions in several types of bioprocess equipment.
To begin to quantify the effect of EDR on cells, he and his students developed a device and subsequently advocated its use in the biotechnology industry to quantify the hydrodynamic sensitivity of a number of animal cell lines, and their specific clones. His most significant accomplishment in this area was his detailed study of how animal cells attach to bubbles, and how Pluronic F-68 prevents this attachment.
Through use of high-speed imaging technology (below, presented at Cell Culture Engineering III and IV) Chalmers and his team showed cells in the bubble film (white spots) in media without Pluronic F-68, and the same system containing F-68 (no white spots on the bubble film). In addition, Chalmers and his team developed and patented an alternative to the well-known cell protective agent, Pluronic F-68, which prevents this adhesion.
Chalmers is professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University and, since 2011, director of the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center's Analytical Cytometry's Shared Resource Center.
Professor Chalmers has mentored more than 40 graduate students, many of whom work directly in the cell culture field. Jeff is also actively involved in the cell culture community, serving as co-chair for Cell Culture Engineering V and Cell Culture Engineering VI in 1996 and 1998.
He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and patents and has given more than 150 invited seminars. He is on the editorial board of Biotechnology and Bioengineering since 2003.
The Cell Culture Engineering Award was established in 2001, and is given bi-annually at the Cell Culture Engineering conference (ECI Conferences). Former recipients were: Wei-Shou Hu (2002), Eleftherios T. Papoutsakis (2004), W. Robert Arathoon (2006), Martin Fussenegger (2008), Michael Betenbaugh (2010), and James M. Piret (2012).
In some of Professor Chalmers' other research, he examines tumor cells. Watch a video of an actual confocal, microscopic circulating tumor cell isolated from the blood of a head and neck cancer patient captured in Professor Chalmer's lab. The blue portion of the image is the cell nucleus, and the green color is staining the internal proteins of the cancerous tissue.
