Kolb, Pakhomov of Bioelectrics Center Are Elected to Posts in International Societies

Juergen Kolb and Andrei Pakhomov, two researchers at Old Dominion University's Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics, have been elected to important positions in international science and engineering societies.

Kolb, assistant professor at the Reidy Center, became a member May 30 of the Power Modulator and High Voltage Committee of the IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society. The IEEE, which is known now by the acronym alone, was formerly the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Kolb was elected at the IEEE International Power Modulator and High Voltage Conference in Las Vegas.

Pakhomov, research associate professor at the Reidy Center, is a new member of the board of directors of the Bioelectromagnetic Society. His election was announced during the Bioelectromagnetics Conference in San Diego on June 11.

"We are pleased that the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics will be represented on two important international committees," said Karl Schoenbach, the founding director of the center. Schoenbach steps down next month as director in order to devote more time to research and will be succeeded by Richard Heller, a pioneer in electrogenetherapy who is moving to ODU this summer from the University of South Florida College of Medicine. In an email, Heller called the elections "great news."

Kolb, who has a doctorate in physics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, does research on the effects of pulsed electric fields in biological, medical and environmental applications. A particular focus of his work is the immediate physical response of cells and tissues to an electric stimulus. He has been a researcher at the Reidy Center since 2004 and in 2006 was also appointed assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology.

In September, Kolb will deliver an invited talk, "Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Fields for Medical Applications," at the International Congress on Plasma Physics in Fukuoka, Japan.

Pakhomov has a doctorate in radiation biology from the Medical Radiology Research Center in Obninsk, Russia, and was a lead scientist at that center and senior scientist with the Army Medical Research Detachment at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas before coming to ODU in 2004. Recently, he has studied changes in cell plasma membranes following exposure to nanosecond pulsed electric fields. He is the associate editor for the journal Bioelectromagnetics and served as guest editor for IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science.

This fall, Pakhomov will present invited talks on his research on nanosecond bioelectric effects at two international scientific forums in Europe.

The formal mission of the Reidy Center is to increase scientific knowledge and understanding of how electromagnetic fields interact with biological cells, and to apply this knowledge to the development of medical diagnostics and therapeutics, as well as environmental decontamination.

Schoenbach and the Reidy Center, via ODU, led a recent research initiative that brought together bioelectrics and related researchers from the Harvard/MIT Health Science Center, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Washington University, the University of Wisconsin and Eastern Virginia Medical School. In addition, the center has leveraged the increasing interest in bioelectrics outside the United States. An international research consortium for bioelectrics formed in 2005 had ODU, Kumamato University in Japan and Universitaet Karlsruhe in Germany as founding members. In 2006, the University of Missouri and the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany, joined the consortium.