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Candido Cabo Named 2005 Scholar on Campus
at New York City College of Technology/CUNY
Power of collaboration is ‘at the heart’ of his April 18 talk
“Some people like to be safe within the margins of their field because they’re more comfortable with what they already know. You have to be courageous to challenge what you know and one way of doing that is to collaborate with researchers from other fields.”
So says Candido Cabo, a computer systems technology professor at New York City College of Technology/CUNY, who has been named 2005 Scholar on Campus. On Monday, April 18, at 5 p.m. in the Atrium Amphitheater, Cabo, an electrical engineer with a doctorate in biomedical engineering, will discuss “The Reconstruction of the Heart: Building Bridges Across Cells and Disciplines.” The public is invited to attend the Scholar on Campus lecture.
Cabo’s topic is a result of his research collaboration with Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons’ Department of Pharmacology on the heart as an electrical system. “Systems in nature are governed by the same rules whether we talk about interactions of cells or interactions of individual ants in a colony,” Cabo explains. “The global behavior of an organ cannot be predicted from the activity in each of its cells in isolation.”
However, combining the cross-disciplinary expertise of biologists, mathematicians, physics experts, engineers and computer scientists produces results that couldn’t be predicted from knowing an individual scientist’s behavior in isolation. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“It forces you to question what you know, to look at things from different perspectives, because of the questions you receive from others. For example, biology is a descriptive science, while others are quantitative. But the same electrical equations are applied to the heart by biologists as are applied to wires and cables by electrical engineers. Seeing that is the real challenge.”
Cabo credits such synergy with enabling the creation of computer models of complex biological systems like the heart. His computer screen shows one model: what seems to be a pulsing Lava Lamp pattern is actually a simulation of tachycardia he developed because it’s not yet possible to get a camera inside the heart to photograph it.
"It's especially exciting to have Professor Cabo as our scholar on campus this year," said Bonne August, City Tech acting provost and vice president for academic affairs. "The particular interdisciplinary nature of his work, which involves collaboration among several academic fields and sometimes the blurring of disciplinary lines -- is the direction in which higher education seems to be moving."
His varied background casts Cabo, a native of Galicia in Spain, in the mold of the classical scientist with a holistic view and outside interests, rather than a stereotypical specialist with a singular focus. As a Spanish National Institute of Health Research Fellow at a Madrid hospital, he developed not computer models but equipment and instruments for patients, then worked in the Netherlands as an engineering scientist in arrhythmia electrophysiology before arriving in the U.S. in 1987.
He graduated with a PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke University and was a National Science Foundation/Engineering Research Centers NSF/ERC Fellow at the Center for Emerging Cardiovascular Technologies, followed by a fellowship in pharmacology at the SUNY Health Science Center in Syracuse.
Why did Cabo, who now lives in Riverdale, cross over from electrical engineering to biomedical engineering? “I was always interested in biology,” he says; “so it’s not such a big jump. The heart is a generator of electricity. I’m always making connections.”
The goal of his research is to shed new light on the understanding of the mechanisms of abnormal heart rhythms, which eventually may lead to new therapeutic strategies to cure heart disease.
Cabo has been applying his ideas about the interface of disciplines since he began teaching at City Tech in 2000. “This is something I breathe every day,” he says. Right now, as a member of the General Education Committee, he’s taking an entertaining approach to reinforce general education skills in courses of the major: assigned reading for his computer systems students includes the chapter on the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels to stimulate out-of-the-box thinking.
He’s also developing PhD courses in computational biology for The CUNY Graduate Center, and participating in research collaborations with Upstate Medical University (Syracuse), St. Mary’s Hospital Imperial College (London), NYU Medical Center and Columbia.
During the past 20 years, Cabo has presented at conferences in a dozen U.S. cities and five other countries, received several research grants, served as a grant reviewer for the NSF and American Heart Association, reviewer for eight journals, and published at least 60 articles as lead or co-author. He is also co-editor of Quantitative Cardiac Electrophysiology, considered a leading text in the field.
Free time might seem missing from Cabo’s “to do” list -- he also mentors eight students, including a doctoral candidate -- but he still manages to volunteer at Centro de Educacion de Trabajadores in Manhattan, which provides immigrants with English, computer and citizenship classes as well as cultural, social and legal services.
“My work at the Centro keeps me in touch with social realities and is a way to give back to others what others gave me,” he says. “It also is a constant reminder of how we can achieve our personal and social goals through education.”
4.07.05
Photo by Al Vargas
