Three new faculty members join CBE

Eduardo Reátegui joins CBE as assistant professor in the Cancer Research Cluster

Constantly striving to outdo himself, Eduardo Reátegui’s passion for learning and discovering new things has led him to achieve things beyond his own initial vision.

“I’m driven by a desire to keep moving forward in my research,” he said. “I’m never satisfied with achieving the goal I set out to achieve. Rather, I am passionate about understanding what else could be added to improve a certain outcome.”

Dr. Reátegui joined the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as an assistant professor this fall and will work as part of the Bioengineering Research Group in conjunction with the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Wexner Medical Center.

Professor Reátegui’s research goal is to bridge engineering disciplines with biology to exploit complex cellular interactions and mechanisms towards the goal of solving unmet needs in life sciences and medicine. His research group focuses on the development of translational microtechnologies combining microfluidics, biomaterials, and molecular imaging techniques to help better diagnose, study, and treat cancer and infectious diseases. 

Previously, Dr. Reátegui was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. Under the mentorship of Dr. Mehmet Toner and Dr. Shannon Stott, he developed a non-invasive “liquid biopsy” microfluidic device that sorts out circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and extracellular tumor vesicles (EVs) present in the blood of cancer patients. The technology enables molecular analysis of these tumor biomarkers to deliver accurate cancer diagnostics like the identification of tumor subtypes with unique genetic signatures for breast and brain cancer patients and the presence of DNA point mutations at the single-cell level.

Currently, Professor Reátegui is working on expanding the applications of circulating biomarkers not only as a diagnostic tool, but also exploring their role in cancer metastisis and cell-to-cell communication with the immune system. 

Dr. Reátegui obtained his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2011, where he received the Best Dissertation Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering for his doctoral research. His doctoral work provided the foundation for launching Minnepura Technologies, a start-up company at the University of Minnesota. 

Throughout his academic career, he earned a number of travel, research and “Best Poster” awards, earning his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts and his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, Peru, where he also received first-class honors. 

He has been a Professional Mechanical Engineer since 2003 and is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Materials Research Society (MRS), and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). 

Publications

Professor Reátegui has two patents and five more patents pending. Dr. Reátegui began publishing in 2008 and has 19 peer-reviewed articles to date, including articles in Nature Communications; Nature Biomedical Engineering; and Nature Materials. Additional papers appear in Advanced Materials; Biomaterials; Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology; Journal of the American Chemical Society; Journal of Biomechanical Engineering; Technology; Journal of Materials Chemistry B; Journal of Physical Chemistry B; and Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics.

Andrew Tong assumes teaching role

Andrew Tong, who was named a research assistant professor in 2015, has now assumed teaching responsibilities as a clinical assistant professor and will split his time between the two roles.

Tong has had remarkable success in grant writing, securing over $10M in funding from the DOE (National Energy Technology Laboratory), State of Ohio agencies, and others.

His goal is to use his research experience in the process development, safety and economic assessment of chemical looping technologies to connect these course concepts with students.

Tong obtained his Ph.D. in 2014 from The Ohio State University, where he won three awards for research and outstanding academic achievement and mentored 11 students in Dr. L.-S. Fan’s lab. 

Publications

Tong has one patent and has published two book chapters and ten articles which appeared in the journals  Applied Energy; Energy and Environmental Science; Energy & Fuels; and Fuel.

Andrew Maxson joins CBE as clinical assistant professor in Unit Operations

Andrew Maxson has been named clinical assistant professor in the Unit Operations Laboratory.

Maxson had begun teaching at Ohio State in Spring 2017 while completing his PhD in chemical engineering here. As a Buckeye himself, he is thrilled to join the faculty, and loves his new role as a professor.

In his new role as a Unit Ops clinical assistant professor, Maxson is looking to continuously improve safety in the lab, use TA time more efficiently, experiment with allowing students to optionally develop their own design extension, update experiments to improve student experiences, and add pumping and filtration experiments.

“A major motivation for me in teaching is to share the lessons learned from my nearly ten years of industry experience,” said Maxson, whose experience includes process engineering in automotive and appliance manufacturing at General Motors and Whirlpool. “With that goal in mind, I have created case studies based on my experiences and incorporated them into the lecture material in Unit Ops.”

Maxson is a graduate of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and completed his Ohio State PhD in August. During his Ohio State academic career as a graduate student, he won three awards for outstanding academic achievement and mentored 14 undergraduate students in Dr. Jack Zakin's laboratory.

While teaching spring semester, Dr. Maxson made a number of improvements to his classes. He updated the lecture quiz format, improved the course organization, and labeled students’ hard hats with their names not just to help them keep track of their hats, but to enable their peers and TAs to address them by name. With over 200 students in a class, it is sometimes difficult for TAs to learn every student’s name. 

Major improvement to Unit Ops

Maxson also made a major improvement to the Unit Operations laboratory itself by reprogramming the PID control software on the Distillation experiment. Automatic control of reflux ratio, feed rate, and bottoms level had never been successfully implemented before. Students were required to manually change the pneumatic control valve settings to maintain constant values of those process variables. As a result, steady states were difficult to achieve, the data was of little value, and a great amount of a student’s time was spent sitting by a valve. Now, with automatic control, the column runs entirely automatically without intervention and steady states can be achieved for the first time.

Publications

Published works include articles in Rheologica Acta; International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer; and a chapter in “Wormlike Micelles: Advances in Systems, Characterization and Applications,” published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.