Faculty Focus: Michelle Oyen

College of Engineering and Technology

Associate professor Michelle Oyen

Maybe Legos and “MacGyver” can’t solve all the world’s problems. However, Michelle Oyen is willing to try.

Oyen is on a complicated quest to improve health care through biomimetic materials, using and creating more natural-like substances that are better for the body and better for the environment.

“If you have arthritis and your cartilage is dodgy, instead of having a knee replacement surgery and replacing your bones and cartilage with metal and plastic, we make a material that’s more like the natural cartilage was and repair your joint using something that is more like something that was there in the first place,” said Oyen, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in ECU’s College of Engineering and Technology. She’s also co-director of ECU’s biomaterials research cluster.

She even uses Lego robots to help create bone-like material and channels TV’s MacGyver into her thinking.

“You put together the Legos and the 3D printer, and you can pretty much make a prototype of anything,” Oyen said. “Prototyping in a very MacGyver sense has become so much easier with these modern tools. Engineers are very MacGyver-ish.

”She has a passion for women’s health issues and is part of a group that will soon publish a journal focused on pregnancy.

“We’ve done some work on premature birth and trying to understand how the placenta develops and how that can go wrong and how that can lead to miscarriage or stillbirth,” Oyen said.

The Minnesota native spent 12 years at the University of Cambridge in England helping start its biomedical engineering program. She arrived at ECU in August 2018 to continue her focus on teaching and improving health care through engineering.

“It’s all using types of engineering tools to try to understand medical problems,” Oyen said. “There are so many problems in healthcare, and we have all this technology we can use to help people.”

– Ken Buday

Alex Manda

Alex Manda, a hydrogeologist and associate professor in the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award and will travel to Zambia next year to assist in water quality testing of the African nation’s groundwater system. Manda – a native of Zambia – will spend eight months in the country studying the potential contamination of groundwater in the suburbs around the capital of Lusaka. He will assess the potential impacts of nitrates in untreated wastewater, while engaging with stakeholders to help them better understand potential sources of contamination. He will also evaluate groundwater management approaches that may address elevated nitrate concentrations.

Chris Balakrishnan

Chris Balakrishnan, an associate professor in the Department of Biology, has been appointed to a temporary program director position with the National Science Foundation’s Evolutionary Processes Cluster. The position allows Balakrishnan to make recommendations about which NSF research proposals to fund. He’ll also influence new directions in the fields of science, engineering and education, while supporting cutting-edge research and mentoring junior researchers. Balakrishnan’s research focuses on evolutionary processes, especially in bird species. His work studies different behaviors – including parental care and song-learning mechanisms – and the molecular processes that underlie those actions.

George Bonner

George Bonner has been named director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program, a research partnership that integrates coastal, electrical, civil and mechanical engineering with the natural and social sciences to research and develop technologies to harness ocean hydropower as a source of renewable energy for North Carolina. Housed at the ECU Outer Banks campus in Wanchese, the NCROEP is led by the Coastal Studies Institute and the colleges of engineering at N.C. State University, N.C. A&T, UNC Charlotte and ECU. Bonner is a Roanoke Island native with three decades of engineering and management experience in the U.S. Coast Guard.

Scott Francis

Scott E. Francis has been appointed associate vice chancellor and president of the ECU Alumni Association. Francis comes to ECU from the University of Florida, where he was responsible for the support, training, direction and stewardship of 95 Gator Clubs, six affiliate groups and more than 700 leaders representing 422,000 alumni. At ECU, Francis will be responsible for representing the interests of nearly 170,000 alumni, lead alumni staff and provide direction on the association’s programs and component parts. Francis has a bachelor’s degree from Stockton University and a master’s degree from Western Illinois University.