Edward Guo, Ph.D.

Three biomedical engineering professors at Columbia Engineering have recently been recognized by two professional organizations for their innovative research and leadership…

…Biomedical Engineering Professor X. Edward Guo has been elected as a member-at-large of the board of directors of the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS), an organization whose mission is to promote, support, develop, and encourage musculoskeletal research and which is a leading forum for the dissemination of new musculoskeletal research findings.

Guo currently serves as membership chair of the international task force for the ORS. As a member-at-large of the board, a two-year term, Guo will lead the group in strategizing its approaches in the financially challenging era of research and growing globalizing threats from Asia. Guo, who also directs the Bone Bioengineering Laboratory at Columbia, was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, the founding chair of Biomedical Engineering Society Inaugural Annual Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Conference, and inaugural chair of the society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group. He was elected a fellow of AIMBE in 2007.

Biomedical Engineering Professor X. Edward Guo is part of a team of researchers that has produced a study finding that pre-menopausal Chinese-American women have far greater bone strength than their Caucasian counterparts, as determined by a breakthrough technological advance.

A team of researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Medical Center announced today the results of the first study comparing bone structure in Chinese-American women to Caucasian women. The report, just presented at the Orthopaedic Research Society’s annual meeting at Long Beach, CA, found that pre-menopausal Chinese-American women have far greater bone strength than their Caucasian counterparts, as determined by a breakthrough technological advance.
The Columbia team was led by X. Edward Guo, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and, from Columbia University Medical Center, John P. Bilezikian, Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, Marcella Walker, Assistant Professor of Medicine, and X. Sherry Liu, Associate Research Scientist.

The team used a groundbreaking analytical technique developed at Columbia Engineering— Individual Trabeculae Segmentation (ITS) — to analyze the microstructure and strength of the trabecular, or spongy bone, one of the two types of tissue that form bone (the other is cortical, or compact bone). Trabecular bone is the most important site of osteoporosis-related fractures. Critical to the research was the use of ITS, an advanced 3-D imaging analysis technique that was conceived and developed in Dr. Guo’s Bone Bioengineering Laboratory, and has a unique ability – using high-resolution computed tomography images – to quantify the plate and rod microstructure crucial to bone strength and osteoporotic fracture of bone.