Tony Banks

Ok!! Yesterday we officially kicked-off our new institute at Northwestern University, the Querrey Simpson Institute for Translational Engineering for Advanced Medical Systems (QSI-TEAMS) at @NorthwesternU, with a half-day symposium, consisting of a series of presentations on the nature of the institute and on the six key launch projects that will form our focus for the next period of time – the former delivered by QSI-TEAMS leadership (myself, Jessica Walter and Anthony Banks); the latter by our lead clinical collaborators: Lorenzo Gallon (kidney health), Bonnie Martin-Harris (head/neck health), Theresa Brancaccio (vocal health), @CarolynFosterMD (pediatric health), Amy Paller (skin health) and @AnkitBharatMD (lung health). Each project builds on successful, published pilot scale studies of our advanced, wireless soft electronic devices, where the goal now is for scaled deployment in clinical trials as the basis for the next level of research in this space, with a focus on data science, medical relevance and translational potential. A panel discussion (@MelissaQuerrey, Kimberly Querrey, Farzaneh Sorond, Lisa Dhar and Tim Sullivan, with Jessica Walter moderating), ribbon cutting, lab tours, device demos, cocktails and a dinner event concluded the day. QSI-TEAMS represents a powerful entity to facilitate this style of work, all within an academic domain, perhaps unlike anything that exists elsewhere. The value is tremendous at many levels: at the educational level – rich opportunities for engineering and medical students alike; at the data science level – sophisticated AI systems that can act upon continuous clinical grade streams of data, including de novo health metrics; at the institutional level – adding to the economic value for Northwestern intellectual property; at the commercial level – increasing the efficiency and speed of translational activities; at the societal level – to improve healthcare for all. Recent press releases that describe QSI-TEAMS can be found at lnkd.in/gFAseVFj and news.northwestern.edu/stories/2025/1…. Thank you to President Henry Bienen and to trustee Kimberly Querrey for introductory remarks, to @stevexuMD for closing remarks and to all of the attendees – including Dean Christopher Schuh, Dean Eric G Neilson, Provost Kathleen Hagerty, incoming Provost @covariant, Vice President for Research Eric Perreault, and many others, from university leadership to top faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows and staff – roughly 200 in all – for their participation. Our gift to Kimberly for her generous donation to endow QSI-TEAMS, and for her vision around this opportunity, memorializes the occasion with a display containing examples of the full portfolio of actual devices that will support each of our launch projects. What a great event - the start of big things to come!

Awesome! @NeuroLuxInc @Wearifi @epicorebio

Super fun holiday party for the group yesterday – games, food, drinks, conversation, late into the night! For the event, we rented out the entire Five and Dime restaurant and bar in Evanston for the evening, with open bar and buffet, all-you-can-eat food. Based on the overall size, the elite talent level, the diversity of expertise, the highly collaborative style, the breadth of projects from science to engineering to medical translation, the scale of laboratory space and facilities, the productivity and scope of accomplishments (and, as an aside, the range of gender, ethnic and racial backgrounds), some say that our team is unique across the landscape of university groups here in the US -- and I fully agree!! Such an honor to work with this incredible collection of people. This event was a great chance to celebrate all of the amazing accomplishments over the past year, capped off with the launch of our new institute, the Querrey-Simpson Institute for Translational Engineering for Advanced Medical Systems (QSI-TEAMS), just a few days ago! Big thanks also to the staff at our Querrey-Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics (QSIB): the software/firmware/data analytics duo – Jacob Trueb and Amey Kasbe; the administrative team – Anastasiia Wedding, Allison Osmer and Marinko Kuljanin; our laboratory coordinator – Yuwei Li; and the great @aTonyBanks, the person that we put in charge of just two things: anything and everything! Special acknowledgement to Ana, Allison, Tony and Betsy for making the arrangements. Congrats to everyone and thank you for your persistence, hard work, good ideas and overall enthusiasm for our mission: science with societal impact!

It’s go time! Check out the @NorthwesternU press release (news.northwestern.edu/stories/2025/1…) that announces a set of ‘launch projects’ supported by our brand-new, endowed institute – the Querrey-Simpson Institute for Translational Engineering for Advanced Medical Devices (QSI-TEAMS) (See news.northwestern.edu/stories/2025/1…). Engineering science with a translational, medical orientation! From devices to address specific unmet needs in nephrology with Dr. Lorenzo Gallon, to those in otolaryngology with Dr. Bonnie Martin-Harris, Dr. Aaron Johnson and Ms. Theresa Brancaccio, in neonatology with Dr. @CarolynFosterMD and others at @LurieChildrens, in dermatology with Dr. Amy Paller and in pulmonology with Dr. @AnkitBharatMD – and several others that will come next, including some that focus on temporary (i.e. transient, or bioresorbable) and permanent implantable systems. See the release for details! An amazing opportunity to take clinical collaborations based on advanced technology platforms from our labs to the next level – translationally oriented, targeted to patient needs, aligned with clinical workflows, optimized for cost-effective care and configured to allow for global development! Eager to get started with Dr. Jessica Walter as Director of Clinical Research and Dr. @aTonyBanks as Director of Engineering! Thanks again to Kimberly Querrey and Louis Simpson for their tremendous trust in us to do something big -- something of societal benefit, something of scientific/engineering impact and something of broad educational value! In Kimberly’s own words -- “I am truly thrilled to witness the launch of these transformative QSI-TEAMS initiatives. They mark a bold step forward in redefining the landscape of biomedical engineering and unlocking innovations that will shape the future of human health. The launch of QSI-TEAMS represents a remarkable moment in our shared pursuit of scientific excellence. These transportive projects have the power to reshape the biomedical engineering landscape and accelerate breakthroughs that improve lives worldwide.”

Today we formally announce a new, endowed institute at @NorthwesternU – the Querrey-Simpson Institute for Translational Engineering for Advanced Medical Systems (QSI-TEAMS). Press release is here lnkd.in/gFAseVFj. As a sister institute to our existing Querrey-Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics (QSIB at lnkd.in/gjuWzuAw) -- and as a broader resource for the local community here -- QSI-TEAMS will serve as a powerful vehicle to facilitate the translation of engineering advances from promising technologies with initial pilot study demonstrations to clinically validated devices poised for rapid regulatory approval and deployment through partnerships with startups or large companies. This institute embodies the vision of Kimberly Querrey and the late Louis Simpson and their strong belief that advances in medical technologies will have a profound and positive impact on the care of patients. We are deeply honored by this opportunity to expand our efforts to execute on their vision. Additional details, including descriptions of six launch projects and the key people involved, will follow in a separate press release next week. (The QSI-TEAMS logo still in draft form. The pictures show Kimberly, Lou, myself and Lisa at a birthday event ~4.5 years ago, and Kimberly, Lou, myself and Tony at the launch of the QSIB facility ~5 years ago.)

Our Team of experts are ready to answer your questions at SFN 2025 San Diego! Booth 1517! Stop by for some free Merch.. :-) @NeuroLuxInc @SfNtweets @TSESystems

@NeuroLuxInc Booth#1517 @SfNtweets

@NeuroLuxInc booth #1517 @SfNtweets 2025! Come by and check out our latest fully implantable Biomedical research devices.

@SfNtweets 2025 San Diego Booth #1517! @NeuroLuxInc

It was a pleasure to be invited to give a talk today at Georgia Tech, part of the IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics. Thank you to Dr. Du @VanderbiltU and the organizers for the opportunity. @IEEEembs @NeuroLuxInc @yayun_du

I am speaking at IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics 2025. Hope to see you there! @NeuroLuxInc Please check out the details of my talk at: tinyurl.com/mvse2kab

RT @aTonyBanks: I am speaking at IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics 2025. Hope to see you there! Plea…

Very honored this afternoon to host the visit of a leadership team from Maruho Co.,Ltd, a top-flight Japanese pharma company specializing in various skin conditions – an excellent match for our research on advanced skin-interfaced sensors. We’ve greatly enjoyed our collaborations with Maruho over the last few years and we appreciate their commercial partnerships with @Sibel_Health and @Wearifi. Looking forward to an expanded relationship with our academic group here at the Querrey-Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at @NorthwesternU – and to a visit by their CEO planned for this coming March! Thanks again to the Maruho representatives who spent time with us today – Dr. Akihiko Ikoma (MD PhD, Senior Medical Director), Mayako Katakuse (Program Manager), Shogo Hoashi (Group Manager), Kazuaki Okamoto (RPh Msc, Program Manager) and Toshihiro Wakabayashi (General Manager) -- and to our group members who shared live demos of their latest technologies for quantitative measurements of the skin.

Nice feature piece on our Querrey-Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at @NorthwesternU appeared last night on a program -- “Chicago Tonight” – that airs regularly on our local PBS television station. Thanks to Paul Caine for great questions – and great editing (!) – to produce a compact, informative segment highlighting our lab! Thanks also to Amanda Morris for help with all of the arrangements, pbs.org/video/northwes…

Bill Gates just spoke at the "Women's Health, Unstuck" event hosted by STAT at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard @broad_institute in Cambridge, MA earlier this week. See video below (apologies for the low resolution, 5MB max file size allowed?). His presentation highlighted our work with the team at @Sibel_Health on wireless, clinical-grade monitoring devices for tracking maternal and fetal health during the intrapartum period, where high rates of mortality often occur in lower-and-middle-income countries. He touched upon the cost effectiveness of this technology and on on-going deployments into various countries in Africa through collaborations with the @gates_founda, including hospitals in Nigeria where he visited recently to see these monitoring systems in action and to listen to feedback from healthcare workers. Reusability, low-cost adhesive interfaces, compatibility with smartphone technology and alignment with high volume manufacturing practices in consumer electronics are the main keys to affordability, essential for practical applications in these and other resource-constrained areas of the globe; advanced sensors, soft electronics designs and optimized wireless interfaces are key to reliable, high quality measurements, comparable to or better than the performance of the best (expensive, wired, etc) monitoring systems used in the most sophisticated hospital systems in the world. A couple of papers that describe certain of these technology features - existing and next-generation -- are at the links below, just as examples. All credit to the hardware engineers, programmers, manufacturing experts, data scientists, medical professionals and field technicians at @Sibel_Health, and to their partners at Dräger, the Steele Foundation for Hope and others! We’re profoundly grateful for support from the @gatesfoundation ! nature.com/articles/s4159… pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Reliving some olden times – separate visits during July to our labs here at @NorthwesternU by two of the original cohort of PhD students to join our group in 2003, shortly after I arrived from Bell Labs to set up shop at the @BeckmanIllinois and the @UofIllinois . A picture at our house in Champaign from the Fall of 2003 is below – both first year graduate students then, and now senior faculty members with academic achievements at the very highest levels! The first visit was with Professor Coskun Kocabas from the @OfficialUoM, who spent the day with us on July 2nd -- touring our labs, engaging in a series of short, one-on-one meetings with a collection of our group members to discuss their individual projects, and finally delivering a fantastic seminar on his recent research. His talk featured some remarkable work on graphene devices for controlled emissivity surfaces using concepts in topological interfaces (published in Science, 2024) and, incredibly, the deployment of this technology into space on satellites in low earth orbit through one of his startup companies, pic below! Professor Seokwoo Jeon from @korea_uni visited yesterday, with an agenda similar to Coskun’s, but with a different selection of projects, chosen to intersect with his interests. Seokwoo’s presentation highlighted some impressive results on large-area 3D nanostructures formed using inverse optical design methods and conformal phase masks (Science Advances, 2022; Nanophotonics, 2024) with many different use cases, and on graphene quantum dots as the basis of blue LEDs, solar absorbers and others (e.g. Nature Communications in press and 2024), including some fascinating practical applications in next-generation sunscreen materials, via one of his startup companies. Pic of us with the great Dr. @aTonyBanks - Director of Engineering Research here at QSIB, and long-time, essential member of our team, dating back to 2003 when he was working with Coskun and Seokwoo and others. Truly proud of these guys and their amazing career trajectories – Coskun from breakthrough work on aligned growth of single walled carbon nanotubes in my group to a postdoctoral fellowship in soft robotics at @Harvard with George Whitesides, to a faculty position in physics at @Bilkent_Uni, and finally to a Full Professorship at the @OfficialUoM with a large ERC grant; Seokwoo from innovative schemes in 3D nanofabrication with us to a joint postdoctoral fellowship at @Columbia in nanotubes and graphene with Profs. James Hone, Colin Nuckolls and Philip Kim, to a faculty position (through to Full Professor) in materials science and engineering at KAIST @kaistpr, and now to his current role as Eminent Professor at @UniversityKorea. What incredible luck to have started my group back in 2003 with PhD students of such phenomenal, world-class caliber -- clearly proven out through their independent accomplishments over the subsequent years!!

Join @NeuroLuxInc at the AAIC in Toronto! Drop by our booth to learn and see demonstrations of our new implantable devices technology! @alzassociation