From Unexpected Opportunity to Game-changing Discovery

Details

Published: Tuesday, September 06 2022 00:01

In the world of startups, opportunity can come knocking in strange ways. Six years ago, Didier Depireux (Ph.D. ’91, physics) was doing research at the University of Maryland when he was approached by Sam Owen, a young scientist who said he’d developed a device to treat motion sickness. Depireux was skeptical but decided to check it out. 

“Since I get very severe motion sickness, I made a deal with him,” Depireux recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll come over with my car and you can drive me around while I use the device. If I haven’t thrown up after 20 minutes while I’m in the back of the car reading, I’ll join the effort.’”

The two made plans to meet in Washington, D.C., on a muggy July afternoon.  Didier Depireux

“So, I go to Georgetown. The windows are down, it’s hot, it’s humid and I’m thinking I will not make it past the first turn,” Depireux explained. “Owen is driving and I’m in the back seat using his device and reading my cellphone. And for the first time in my life—and I’m over 50 years old—I was able to read in the back of a car and not get sick. I thought, ‘I need to join this, this is amazing.’”

Thanks to that strange summer ride-along, Depireux joined Owen in launching a startup called Otolith Labs to address inner ear-related conditions and their often debilitating symptoms. Otolith’s noninvasive vestibular system masking technology—designed for acute treatment of vestibular vertigo—received the FDA’s Breakthrough Device designation and clinical trials are ongoing, with support from investors including AOL founder Jack Davies and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

All of this sets the stage for a major test that could lead to the startup’s ultimate goal—FDA approval as early as next year.

“In July we told the FDA we want to do a large-scale pivotal trial with hundreds of participants,” Depireux explained. “If all goes well, we’ll have a meeting next summer where the FDA will approve us and then the device will become available.”

For Depireux, it’s the latest step on a bigger mission that has guided his career.

Didier Depireux“It’s mostly relevance,” he explained. “I would like my life to make a difference, that’s the one thing that keeps me going.”

From philosophy to physics

Depireux was raised in Belgium. A bright, thoughtful boy, he grew up with a strong interest in science and theory, thanks to his father, a physics professor, and his mother, a chemistry teacher.

“I was always very science-y,” Depireux recalled. “Initially, I wanted to become a philosopher and I read this 800-page book—I think it was Kant—and at the end of it I was like, ‘I still don’t know the answer, and I’m not even sure I understand the question anymore.’ That’s when I thought that’s not a good fit for me.”  

Depireux eventually gravitated toward physics. After receiving his B.S. in physics from the University of Liège in Belgium in 1986, he began his graduate work in physics at the University of Maryland, where he focused on string theory and met Distinguished University Professor of Physics Sylvester James Gates Jr., who quickly became a mentor and friend.

“Jim had a huge impact on me. He was a fantastic person to work with and he had so much positive energy,” Depireux said. “I still remember late one night I was working on something, and I was stuck and I wrote to him, and he said, ‘I’ll come over, let’s work this out.’ So we had office hours at 10:30 p.m. just because I couldn’t solve a problem.”

Depireux earned his Ph.D. in 1991 and went on to do postdoctoral work in Quebec, Canada, before returning to College Park in 1994. Inspired by his wife Pamela, who was getting her Ph.D. in neuropharmacology, Depireux took on the challenge of modeling the brain and studying how it processes sound. By 2001, he was also teaching a gross anatomy class at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“I think, to this day, I am the only string theorist who has taught gross anatomy,” he reflected.

From his research on the brain and hearing, Depireux shifted his focus to tinnitus—disruptive ringing in the ears. He explored possible treatments and eventually teamed up with former UMD Bioengineering Professor Benjamin Shapiro who was already working on the drug delivery challenges Depireux was trying to solve.

“I wanted to get drug delivery to the ear but I didn’t know how to do it,” Depireux said. “He had this method with nanoparticles to deliver drugs and I had the target so we started working together.”

In 2013, the two launched Otomagnetics, a startup that has made major strides in developing noninvasive methods to treat inner ear diseases and more.

“We’ve gotten very nice results as far as drug delivery goes and Otomagnetics is still an ongoing concern,” Depireux explained, “But raising money for drug delivery is the real challenge, because to get drug delivery to the ear is going to take hundreds of millions of dollars, and that hasn’t happened yet.”

Going all-in on Otolith

Depireux balanced his time between Otomagnetics, his UMD research and teaching at the School of Medicine until 2016, when he experienced Owen’s experimental motion sickness device for the first time. Depireux saw so much potential with the device that he went all-in on Otolith. 

“You have to have pretty strong resilience to join a startup—I went for a year and a half without a salary or anything,” Depireux explained. “It’s not like we didn’t have money, we just needed all of the money to develop the device, get the patents in, all of the things we had to do.”

Though Otolith started with a motion sickness device, its co-founders hoped to make an even bigger impact by developing a device for vertigo, debilitating dizziness often caused by problems in the inner ear.

And they had a plan.

“For tinnitus or ringing in the ears, some patients get relief from a noise masker—they can still perceive their tinnitus, but the noise masker allows them to ignore the tinnitus,” Depireux explained. “So Sam, my cofounder said, ‘Why don’t we come up with a noise masker for the vestibular system?’”

That’s exactly what they did. Their novel device, worn like a headband, treats vertigo by applying localized mechanical stimulation to the vestibular system through calibrated vibrations. 

Depireux says he never would have made it this far without physics.

“My physics training really helped me,” he explained. “In physics, you have this huge problem and you have to break it down. If it’s intractable, you make it tractable, break it into small, simple things we can understand and then we can solve it.”

Promising results and personal stories

Clinical trials of Otolith’s investigational headband have yielded promising results. In the first of a series of ongoing clinical studies, 87.5% of the 40 participants reported a reduction in their vertigo within five minutes of turning on the device. But for Depireux, it’s the personal stories that are most rewarding.

“Somehow my phone number was listed as an emergency contact on clinicaltrials.gov, which I thought would be for emergencies only,” he said. “I’d have patients calling me in tears, telling me, ‘When my grandkids visit, I can finally bend down and pick them up, and it used to be that just bending down would send me into such vertigo that I would have to go to bed for days.’ Or ‘For the first time in years, I’ve been able to walk around the block.’ That’s what really motivates me.”

It's been Depireux’s goal all along—doing relevant research that changes people’s lives.

“We cannot help 100% of vertigo patients, no device does that,” he reflected. “But if we can help even half of those patients, that’s really my hope.”

Looking back on a career path that’s been anything but predictable, Depireux appreciates every challenge and setback that got him to where he is today.

“Something can feel like a failure when things go wrong, but then later you realize you really learned something from it,” he reflected. “I’m so grateful I was given the opportunity to come to the U.S. and study physics and do research in College Park, do this random walk in my career and finally end up doing something that I feel has given me great meaning in my life.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

Details

Published: Friday, September 02 2022 00:01

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, began new positions and more.

Recent Physics Grad Sees Many Roads Ahead

Details

Published: Friday, September 02 2022 00:01

As Jeffrey Wack (B.S. ’22, physics; B.S. ’22, mathematics) walked across the graduation stage in May 2022, he carried with him a lot of uncertainty about where to go next. His trepidation came from his voracious curiosity for a broad range of things, primarily within physics and math—the subjects of his two degrees—but also from his interests in teaching, outreach and music. The prospect of having to pick just one path forward felt confining to Wack. But that same curiosity served him extremely well during his time at the University of Maryland, and it left him with many opportunities for next steps.Jeffrey Wack (courtesy of same)

Wack collected an impressive resume at UMD. He taught an introductory course on nuclear physics and reactor operations, studied physics in Florence, participated in an optomechanics research project that resulted in a publication, made significant contributions to experimental research with coplanar waveguides, and co-taught a self-designed course on music theory and math. Since graduating, he began working as a fellow at the Museum of Math in New York City, sampling the working world while contemplating graduate school.

“The four years I spent at UMD were the best four years of my life this far,” Wack says. “I’m already having a blast living in New York, but I’m going to miss all the great people I met in College Park.”

Born and raised in Carroll County, Maryland, Wack attributes his broad scientific curiosity to his upbringing and the influence of his father.

“My dad is a pediatrician, but he's very interested in all sorts of science,” Wack says. “I have memories of playing the ‘why’ game with him and just asking him why. You know, you ask why, and then no matter what the answer is, you can always ask why again, and you sort of end up down this rabbit hole.”

Although the younger Wack asked questions about everything, from why fruit grows to what an immune system is, his earliest fascination orbited around astronomy. Then, during high school, his curiosity shifted gears, landing on the curiously strong connection between physics and mathematics.

“There was something about physics and calculus in particular that I really enjoyed,” says Wack. “Those relationships between position and velocity and acceleration, there's something about them that really caught me. Like ‘that's awesome!’”

Following in his older sister’s footsteps, Wack chose to attend UMD, drawn in by the opportunities for learning all things physics and math at a large university. In the fall of 2019, Wack studied abroad in the Maryland-in-Florence program, specifically designed for physics students to continue taking required courses while exposing themselves to a foreign culture and language. He was particularly inspired by the instruction of Luis Orozco, now professor emeritus at UMD and a Fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI). After the semester abroad ended, Wack reached out to Orozco to see if he could work with him on a research project. Orozco agreed, and during the summer of 2020 invited him to join a nanofiber project. 

Orozco’s research interests include optomechanics, the study of interactions between mechanical systems and electromagnetic waves. The project Wack joined was a multi-national collaboration, with an experimental group at Shanxi University in China and a collaborator at the University of Conception in Chile. The goal was to use light to cool an optical fiber as it travels through it.

Optical fibers are used to confine and direct light, whether it’s for carrying internet signals to homes or aiding in research. The fibers Orozco’s team used are stretched incredibly thin, about a hundred times thinner than human hair. These nano-fibers guide light, but they hardly confine it—some of the light actually travels outside the fiber. This is particularly useful for studying the interaction of light with atoms and ions, which can be brought close to (but remain outside of) the fiber. The downside is that the fiber is quite fragile and prone to tiny vibrations that shake and twist it, disturbing the light as it travels.

To minimize these tiny twists, the team sent in a laser beam of a particular intensity. The interaction of the beam with the material inside the fiber counteracted the fiber’s twisting, minimizing that particular vibration and thus cooling down the fiber overall. To detect this cooling, the team sent a second, probing laser beam and observed how much the fiber’s twists and turns perturbed that beam.

Wack’s role was to analyze the raw photodetector data from the probing laser and use it to extract information about the fiber twists. He analyzed the data and concluded that the method was successful, as detailed in a recent paper published in Photonics Research. But Wack wasn’t satisfied with simply analyzing data. He played the ‘why’ game, trying to understand the deeper physics of what was going on. He made his own, simplified model of the cooling mechanism—not to put in the paper, but enough to model the system to his own satisfaction. “I did that just to entertain myself,” Wack explains.

"Jeffrey contributed crucially in understanding the cooling process, thanks to his analysis of the distribution of the temperature fluctuations,” Orozco says. “The plots he produced made it into figure two of the publication."

By the summer of 2021, COVID-19 restrictions were easing up, and Wack was itching to try hands-on lab work. He joined the group of one of UMD’s most mathematically minded experimentalists, Chesapeake Assistant Professor of Physics and JQI Fellow Alicia Kollár. Kollár’s research concerns coplanar waveguides—little paths printed on a circuit board that microwaves can travel through—to create never before seen geometries and interaction patterns between bits of quantum information known as qubits.

Kollár’s creation of novel geometries relies on a peculiar theoretical property of coplanar waveguides: that stretching or scrunching them up does not change the frequency of microwaves they carry. Wack’s role was to make careful measurements to test how well this property holds in practice.

To investigate this, Wack had to get his hands dirty with several different lab skills. He had to learn to solder and assemble electronics, work with graduate students to create coplanar waveguides of different lengths, analyze data, and model the system using purpose-built software.

“Jeff did really phenomenal work,” Kollár says. “He was really just sort of diving into research, almost like a senior graduate student.”

Wack automated some simulation steps that had previously been done manually and used the new process to quantify a confounding effect—that the frequency change depended on the number of times that the waveguide was bent. If this pattern is confirmed experimentally, Kollár says, it will be used in many future experiments and theoretical studies alike.

On top of his studies and research, Wack also found ways to participate in outreach and teaching throughout his time at UMD. He volunteered to film a slinky demonstration of wave propagation. He taught an introductory course on nuclear physics and reactor theory to undergraduates for the Maryland Undergraduate Training Reactor (MUTR) program, where undergrads can become certified reactor operators. He also has an interest in music, having sung and performed in musicals in high school and having picked up electric bass during his college years. “And also, because I'm such a geek for computers, I do some digital synthesis,” Wack says. He found a way to weave this in with his math interest by creating a co-teaching a course on the math of music for the Student Initiated Courses (STIC) program.

Upon graduating last spring, Wack decided to take a gap year. This summer, he started a fellowship at the Museum of Math, combining his passion for mathematics and outreach. As a docent there, he talks to visitors about the exhibits and thinks a lot about math. As part of the fellowship, he’s also pursuing a personal project: planning a live performance that combines music, physics demos and lectures on math and music theory.

“So many of the paths forward seem appealing to me,” Wack says. “I'm going to go to grad school at some point, but this is part of why I wanted to do a gap year. I'm hoping that over the next two years, it'll come to me like ‘Aha! This is exactly what I want to do.’”

Written by Dina Genkina

Women in Physics Group Changes its Name to Physicists of Underrepresented Genders

Details

Published: Friday, September 02 2022 00:01

Women in Physics (WiP) has officially been renamed Physicists of Underrepresented Genders (PUGs) at the University of Maryland.

According to UMDPUGs (Physicists of Underrepresented Genders) physics graduate student Ina Flood, the group’s new president, the change reflects the organization’s ongoing commitment to fostering a supportive and encouraging community for all.

“Changing our name was a group decision initiated under Mika Chmielewski, our previous president,” Flood said. “The rationale behind this decision was to make it obvious that we’re committed to supporting people who might feel like they are underrepresented in the physics community. The name change is to help people feel that they’re included and welcome from the get-go.”

For more than a decade, WiP has provided physics undergraduate and graduate students with resources such as a mentoring program and networking opportunities. In addition to professional development events led by physics faculty members and professionals, the club also offered social programming like group study sessions, where members mingled and made new friends.

PUGs plans to continue the group’s ongoing programs and opportunities while taking a more proactive approach to supporting all members of the physics community. 

“As a university club, we’re already open to all people and sincerely welcome anyone who is interested in physics,” said incoming physics graduate student Kate Sturge (B.S. ’22, physics; B.S. ’22, astronomy), who was an active undergraduate member of WiP and is currently the PUGs webmaster and social media manager. “But this name change is our way of making ourselves more deliberate and explicit in supporting everyone in physics.”

Physics Chair Steve Rolston echoes the sentiment: "We value the contributions of everyone who shares our love of physics. We appreciate PUGs’ efforts to make that crystal clear."

Flood, Sturge and other PUGs members plan to do more to coordinate with other LGBTQ+ student organizations on campus. Flood said she hopes increased communication and collaboration will also help PUGs connect mentors with mentees and share more institutional knowledge about STEM and physics. The group also plans to develop more opportunities for safe in-person gatherings, including “study hours,” during which physics students gather to discuss and do homework together.

“Our biggest goal after our name change is to expand our accessibility and availability to members who may need guidance or community support during the school year,” Flood said. “It’s really important to our organization that we get people together, facilitate meaningful conversations and celebrate our shared identity as physicists.”

Blessing the World With More Leons

Details

Published: Thursday, September 01 2022 00:01

On a warm June afternoon in 2022, a group of friends, family members and former coworkers gathered around a Bradford pear tree outside NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to remember a physicist named Leon Herreid. Herreid studied physics as a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland and worked at NASA Goddard for 16 years before he died suddenly at age 40 in 1994.

Months after Herreid’s death, his widow Judy created the memorial, planting “Leon’s tree” and placing a brass plaque below it in one of the couple’s favorite spots—the baseball field where they used to play and drink beer in the summertime with NASA Goddard’s co-ed softball team. Along with the memorial, Judy launched a quirky tradition inspired by Leon himself.

“Years ago, I said to my sister-in-law, ‘I’m going to the tree, do you have any beer?’ What she had was something called Dead Guy Ale, so that’s what I take every time,” Judy explained. “Leon liked beer and he would think this was the funniest, most appropriate thing ever. I always tell any friend, ‘When you go to the memorial, be sure to pour a beer on him.’” 

Meanwhile, at the University of Maryland, Judy and her family have been honoring Leon’s legacy in a very different way. In 1995, Leon’s father, Paul Herreid, launched the Leon A. Herreid Science Graduate Fellowship Award for physics graduate students at UMD working in space science, with preference given to those affiliated with NASA Goddard.

“Paul was a giving philanthropist who really believed in education,” Judy explained. “He said he started those scholarships so we could create more Leons.” 

In 2021, Judy took her father-in-law’s mission a step further, establishing the Leon A. Herreid Current-Use Undergraduate Student Support Fund in Physics, a scholarship to support summer internships for undergraduate space science students at UMD, again with preference for those working with NASA Goddard. 

“Someone else came up with this idea and I liked that,” Judy said. “It was just another way to bless the world with more Leons.”

Leon Herreid

Leon with Judy, Hannah and Noah

Awardee Emma Kleiner

Awardee Lucas Smith

Megan S. Carnell, Lucas Smith, Hannah Herreid, Judy Herreid, Emma Kleiner, Donna Hammer, Noah Herreid & John Mather at "Leon's tree" outside NASA Goddard, June 2022.

“A True Geek” 

Judy—she was Judy Schwartz back then, also an employee of STX—still remembers the day she met Leon at a work event three decades ago. 

“I remember seeing him in the kitchen and he was eating an anchovy sandwich and I thought, ‘Ugh, how disgusting. Who is this person?’” she laughed. “He had a rat tail and he was a bad dresser, people knew him for that. So, I wasn’t all that impressed.”

But as she got to know Leon better, she realized there was much more to this space scientist than she ever could have imagined.

“He was a true geek. I loved that. He was brilliant and also well rounded,” Judy recalled. “It wasn’t just space that he loved most—it was the computers, the problem-solving. I’d say, ‘Talk smart to me’ and he’d tell me about the universe. He just had a passion for science and that world.”

The couple married and had two children, Hannah and Noah. And like everything else Leon did, his parenting style was grounded in science.

“Leon would stand in the closet when Hannah was a baby trying to get her to go to sleep. He’d be in there holding her and reciting the periodic table,” Judy explained. “He didn’t know nursery rhymes or anything, so this is what he would do, and it would calm her every time. Best dad ever.”

Meanwhile, Leon was climbing the ladder at NASA, working on major missions including Landsat COBE and XTE gaining the respect of those around him. That included Nobel Laureate John Mather, a College Park Professor of Physics and senior scientist at NASA who has remained friendly with Judy and her children for more than 25 years.

Meeting the Future “Leons”

Hannah and Noah are adults now. And thanks to events like the June memorial for Leon, Judy is getting to know another inspiring group of young people—the recipients of her family’s scholarships and fellowships. That includes physics Ph.D. student Lucas Smith, who received the Leon A. Herreid Science Graduate Fellowship in May 2022. 

“Lucas reminded me so much of Leon,” Judy said. “The science thing was kind of how he breathed, and he was just so appreciative of the fellowship.”

For Smith, whose research centers on developing the next generation of gamma-ray telescopes, the Herreid Fellowship provides welcome support as he continues to work toward his Ph.D.  

“I am incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity. Any amount of financial assistance goes a long way to alleviate the cost-of-living expenses that graduate students have,” Smith explained. “It is really touching to know that the Herreid family is willing to extend their support.”

Like Smith, Emma Kleiner (B.S. ’22, physics and astronomy) attended the June memorial as well. Kleiner is the first student to receive support from the Leon A. Herreid Undergraduate Student Support Fund in Physics. The funding allowed her to spend the summer of 2022 completing her research with NASA astrophysicist Antara Basu-Zych.

“My work at NASA Goddard involves studying interacting and colliding galaxies using Swift X-ray data,” Kleiner explained. “By observing and identifying X-ray sources we can better understand the triggering or quenching of star formation in galaxies. Receiving this support from the Herreid scholarship has meant the world to me.” 

For Judy, supporting these future “Leons” is the kind of tribute she thinks her late husband would truly appreciate, keeping his spirit and his love for physics alive now and for many years to come.

“Talking about him and the scholarship, it keeps him alive,” she reflected. “Leon and his siblings didn’t have a dime in student loans; their father Paul helped them and kept giving to education to support others, and I think Leon would be proud to continue that, to give people that opportunity.”

 Written by Leslie Miller