Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

With an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, Peter Doerschuk joins the Cornell faculty as a full professor with a joint appointment in Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He spent the last 16 years at Purdue. “I was interested in coming here primarily for people kind of reasons,” he says. “I was wanting to do things with people outside of ECE, and Cornell has a very distinguished faculty in all disciplines—every department is an outstanding department.”

The interdisciplinary nature of Cornell’s graduate field system also appeals to Doerschuk. “Most faculty end up belonging to two or three fields and that allows me to recruit students with different views on a problem,” he says. “I’m interested in students with computational, statistical, and biological views and trying to meld them into one research group.”

Doerschuk, who collected a handful of undergraduate teaching awards at Purdue, is looking forward to teaching more graduate courses at Cornell. He’s already taught “Advanced Biomedical Analysis of Biological Systems.”

His expertise is in formulating mathematical models for a diverse range of biological and biomedical phenomena, especially ones that make predictions over time. “Uncertainty is very important in the biological universe and we have to deal with it in a quantitative way,” he says. “It involves a lot of numerical computing and writing special software to do it.”
 
One problem he’s worked on for many years is understanding the sometimes surprisingly beautiful three-dimensional structure of viruses. “We are increasingly coming to view the virus particle as a tiny little machine, 20 to 120 nanometers in diameter,” he says. “This allows us to get a broader array of disciplines involved—mechanical engineering to learn how they move; of course biology, and the instrumentation needed to study them involves electrical engineering and computer science.”

Doerschuk says he likes to find problems where models and computation allow more information to be extracted from current types of data or would enable more complicated types of new data to be analyzed.  “I’m driven more by trying to solve problems, than by methodology,” he says. “That's why I fit very well with biomedical engineering’s emphasis on human health.”

That approach can be seen in a new collaboration with professors Minah Suh and Theodore Schwartz at Weill Cornell Medical College. “We are modeling the
electrical and vascular behavior of the cerebral cortex in cortical epilepsy,” he says, “especially related to certain measurements—electrical and unusual optical measurements of the vascular system—that professors Suh and Schwartz have developed.” 

Trying to fill in the data gaps for these and other seemingly unrelated problems, like developing an implantable bio-sensor for ethanol, is work Doerschuk finds rewarding. “The process of doing the research is as satisfying as the results,” he says. “The fact that I can get paid to do what I like doing is cool.”