Alper Bozkurt 39
Alper Bozkurt is bioengineering swarms of creepy crawlies to hunt for victims of natural disasters in rubble inaccessible to traditional rescuers.
In the wreckage of a building collapse, victims may become trapped under mounds of concrete, beams and drywall in spots with openings too small for a rescue team to enter. In a lab in North Carolina, Alper Bozkurt is designing a hero that’s up for the task. His solution, however, may leave some people skeeved out.
“The cockroaches you hate may one day save your life,” he says.
Bozkurt, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, oversees a research team that has assembled a swarm of Madagascar hissing cockroaches programmed to crawl through wreckage looking for survivors. The large, 2- to 3-inch-long insects wear “backpacks” equipped with a microphone to listen for survivors and a radio transmitter to send information about their location back to Bozkurt’s team.
Bozkurt calls the insects a team of “biobots.” By triangulating the biobots’ locations, the team can map out a disaster area, a trick that traditional rescue animals can’t accomplish.
“We had dogs, for example, working for us in search-and-rescue scenarios,” Bozkurt says. “They’ve been more efficient when scanning the surface of the rubble, not inside the the rubble.”
Each cockroach can be controlled remotely by stimulating either the left or right antenna, imitating the feeling of an attack, which causes the bug to veer in whatever direction the controller pleases. And it isn’t only their size that’s useful.
“Cockroaches reproduce like cockroaches,” Bozkurt says.
That is to say: Feed a male and a female, leave them alone, and in a few weeks you’ll have a colony. Bozkurt’s Integrated Bionic Microsystems Lab at North Carolina State is also designing electrical instruments that interface with sphinx moths, plants, birds, canines, lemurs and humans. His work on the “internet-of-bionics-things” has been covered by the BBC, CNN, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Science Channel, Newsweek and Reuters, and he was included in Popular Science’s The Brilliant 10 list in 2015.
His interest in marrying technology and medicine began at Drexel while he was completing his master’s of science in biomedical engineering. He remembers one moment that he says has stuck with him through his entire career.
It was an argument between Drexel doctors and Drexel engineers, and neither side could agree on whether it would be possible to model the human brain using the engineers’ imaging technique. The argument became intense, but Bozkurt sat quietly and listened.
His adviser, Banu Onaral, stepped in and said, “Folks, I am excited with both sides’ momentum and we have a great opportunity to turn this into a synergy. You just need to learn each other’s language so you can educate each other.”
After that, Bozkurt says he started learning more about physiology alongside engineering in an attempt to better understand his materials in an interdisciplinary way, an attitude change that has followed him to where he is today, designing medical devices along with insect-machine interfaces.
“Making something useful means you need to bring it to real life and real life is not only one field,” Bozkurt says. — Evan Bowen-Gaddy
