A new way to measure muscle
Shortly after taking a faculty position at MIT, Joel Dawson '96, SM '97 got together with his former music teacher, Elena Ruehr, for coffee. Ruehr, an MIT lecturer in music and theater arts, mentioned that her husband, a neurologist at Beth Israel, was looking for an engineer to help him with a device to measure muscle loss in patients with Lou Gehrig's Disease and other muscular ailments. Dawson, who specializes in microchips for wireless communications, was intrigued by the chance to do something outside his normal focus — and something that might have a direct impact on improving people's lives. "A lot of my lab's research is on microchips for wireless systems, and electronics for cell phones and base stations," says Dawson, an associate professor of electrical engineering. "Wireless communications have helped people, but here the sense of help is a little bit more direct." Dawson assisted...