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Professor Secord, Gavin Lloyd, and the Blattner Robotics Lab were recently featured in an article "Training Tomorrow's Automation Workforce: Robotics, Research, and Real-World Learning at St. Thomas" published in the July 2026 edition of the Precision Manuafacturing Journal:
https://www.mpma.com/precision-manufacturing-journal
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Through the generous support of the Blattner family and Graco, the new Blattner Robotics Lab is coming alive! This lab will be the hub for robotics and automation research and teaching on campus:
https://engineering.stthomas.edu/about/facilities-labs/blattner-robotics-automation-lab/
https://news.stthomas.edu/robotics-lab-makes-students-career-confident/
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Professor Secord was featured on the April 7, 2026 episode in season 4 of the Professor Podcast:
https://libguides.stthomas.edu/ppseason4/secord
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Together with colleagues at the Iowa State (Simon Laflamme and Rob Whitehead) and University of Florida (Iris Rivero and Minhee Kim), Professor Secord will be a primary investigator on the NSF-funded grant investigating energy efficient mechanisms for use in various structures, including energy-efficient buildings. The grant offers student employment and involvement opportunities through 2027! See the details of the project below:
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Working with amazing colleagues at Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Connecticut Health Center, Oklahoma State University, and Iowa State University, we produced the following comprehensive review article on engineering tools for wound healing:
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0173663
The article was selected as the Applied Physics Reviews featured article for April 2024!
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After well over a year's worth of effort, our work on mitral annulus motion simulation was recently published in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics:
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An abstract of our work on mitral valve motion simulation was selected as one of the top three abstracts at the 2021 Cardiovascular Implant Durability Conference (CVID) in Pacific Grove, California on October 12. This conference was well attended by industry leaders, academic researchers, and FDA regulators. Carter Gaulke presented our work to this esteemed audience! The full conference program and additional details can be found here. The title of Carter's talk was
"Design of a Mitral Annulus Motion Simulator for Accelerated Structural Testing of Mitral Repair and Replacement Devices"
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The work of Professor Secord and Professor Koerner was featured on the website Advances in Engineering: https://advanceseng.com/measuring-voice-coil-impedance-power-space-budget/
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Professor Secord gave an interview to the Aliance of Advanced Biomedical Engineering (AABME) at the Design of Medical Devices Conference (April 2018). You can listen to the interview here.
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The BRaM team was featured in an article in the St. Thomas magazine that described our work on tunable resonance cardiac energy harvesting. The basic idea is to create an implantable cardiac device that can adapt to the heart rate of the patient to maximize the ability to harvest energy for use in powering devices such as pacemakers. Read more here.
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Milad, Austin, and Amanda were also featured in this recent commercial for the St. Thomas School of Engineering! Take a look:
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We developed a molding process to create silicone versions of patient-specific hearts from multi-phase CT images. The images below shows an example of the mold and the resulting left atrium and ventricle.
