On a dark and chilly Tuesday night last October, Professor Dhruv Seshadri watched as a visibly exhausted first-year and first-time PhD student, Joe Amitrano, worked hard in his office. Ta.
Amitrano and Seshadri were preparing their lab's research for review by Lehigh's internal review board. This is a tedious process that all laboratory research must go through in order to be approved.
Seshadri paused for a moment to suggest something that Amitrano would not have expected.
“'Hey, let's take a break and watch some basketball,'” Amitrano recalled Seshadri saying.
So Seshadri ordered pizza and they watched a basketball game.
For Seshadri, creating a work environment that feels like family is essential to doing meaningful work. He wants to make it fun and exciting for people to go to work.
“We bonded over our aspirations, our life goals, and the journey that led us to where we are,” Amitrano said. “Then we set up (an internal review committee) and submitted it.”
Seshadri began his journey in South Bethlehem this fall, joining the Department of Bioengineering as an assistant professor in August 2023. He received his PhD in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 2021.
While pursuing his master's degree at Case Western, Seshadri had the opportunity to work with the NFL's Cleveland Browns on wearable technology to reduce injuries in athletes. Since then, Seshadri's desire to develop and create wearables with his technology has continued.
Seshadri said that in the years since then, he and his research team have published more than 2,000 papers on wearable technology. He is also participating in an ongoing study funded by the American Society of Orthopedic Sports Medicine. This study utilizes wearable technology to enable athletes to return to play after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.
Additionally, maternal and newborn health is a major area of interest in Seshadri's studies and research. These are highly underserved areas of health care in today's low- and middle-income countries, he said.
“The more I read, the more I realized there was an unmet medical need. That's when I realized there were careers not just in wearable technology and sports medicine, but in other areas of medicine where there was a real need.” The trigger was 'remote monitoring and predictive analytics,''' Seshadri said.
In January of this year, Professor Seshadri was awarded the Lehigh Faculty Internationalization Grant, which is given to faculty members who wish to engage in international research collaborations. Seshadri, along with his students and interns, will travel to Palakkad, India, to collaborate with colleagues from the Indian Institute of Technology on clinical research and trials of wearable technology.
Seshadri said he hopes his research in India will have a lasting impact on the health field around the world. He also hopes to eventually commercialize his project and develop it into a product that can be used by people around the world.
He said research will focus on topics in wearable technology, such as summarizing medical room-level vitals monitored by wired systems. Now you can do it wirelessly without compromising clinical decision-making.
Seshadri said he is excited about the opportunity to work with colleagues in India to study how digital health technologies, such as wearable technologies, can help in medical areas where they are not currently used.
“We can take these learnings back to Lehigh and have students design those devices and send them back,” Seshadri said.
Anand Ramamurthy, dean of the School of Bioengineering, said the research Seshadri is conducting is “clinically important” and the department is proud of the impact he has had in his short time at Lehigh. Ta.
Seshadri is currently an assistant professor, but is likely to transition to a teaching position next year, which is the department's standard procedure for new faculty members aiming to become professors.
“We look at everything from the way he mentors students in the lab as research students, whether it's undergraduates or graduate students, how he mentors them, how he develops their skills in the lab. You can already see what he does when he's in the classroom,'' Ramamurthy said.
Seshadri said she is grateful for the hospitality and kindness of other faculty members since her arrival.
“We have a faculty happy hour every Friday, and it’s not just the professors,” Seshadri said. “The vice president for research at the university who meets us is sitting next to me as an assistant professor. I mean, there's no ego in collaborating with people. It's actually a lot of fun.”
Amitrano also said that after once expressing to Seshadri that he wanted to pursue a non-traditional consulting job after completing his Ph.D., Seshadri has since continually encouraged him to try projects that align with his interests. He also said.
“He's everything I wanted in a coach,” Amitrano said. “He's always active. He's always working. He's always there for me. He's always on the lookout.”
