March 11, 2004

Faculty honors

Horacio Dante Espinosa, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International.

The award recognizes his exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession: “Professor Espinosa has developed a comprehensive theory for the failure of brittle materials and composites under high strain rates. His accomplishments also include the deformation and fracture of thin films and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) materials, reliability of MEMS devices and the discovery of some important size effects in thin metallic films.”

Espinosa, who joined the Northwestern faculty in 2000, also is a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics and serves as editor of the publication Mechanics and associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Mechanics.

He is the recipient of numerous other honors, including the highly prestigious Junior Award from the American Academy of Mechanics, the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research and the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

Robert L. Satcher, M.D., assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine, has received a fellowship support grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through its Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program .

The four-year, $365,400 grant will fund Satcher’s research project, “Skeletal Metastasis in Prostate Cancer.”

A researcher at The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering, Satcher is a specialist in child and adult bone cancer. He is on staff at both Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Children’s Memorial Hospital and a member of Northwestern’s Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine.

His scientific investigations focus on developing bone substitutes for use in cancer patients, investigating new drugs for the treatment of bone cancer and unraveling the mechanism of bone metastasis, particularly in breast and prostate cancer. His goal is to develop an in vitro model for metastasis.

His clinical research includes studies of novel endoprostheses for limb salvage in patients requiring surgery to remove musculoskeletal tumors. In children with bone cancer, Satcher often replaces diseased bone with an endoprosthesis, bone from a bone bank or a combination of both. When the knee is involved, he offers another option. In rotationplasty, the diseased knee is actually replaced with the ankle, which is rotated 180 degrees to function as a knee.

“The child gets a prosthesis for the ankle and foot. Functionally, they can do whatever they want. It’s the gold standard,” Satcher said.

Satcher completed his postdoctoral research at both MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, and an orthopedic oncology fellowship at the University of Florida, Gainesville.