Robert Plonsey (July 17, 1924 – March 14, 2015) was the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. He is noted for his work on

bioelectricity In developmental biology, bioelectricity refers to the regulation of cell, tissue, and organ-level patterning and behavior as the result of endogenous electrically mediated signaling. Cells and tissues of all types use ion fluxes to communicate e ...

Education

Plonsey was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1924. He received the B.E.E. degree in electrical engineering from the

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

School of Engineering in New York in 1943, and the M.E.E degree from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

in 1948. He obtained his PhD from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1957. In addition, he completed the first year and a half of the MD curriculum and the

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...

School of Medicine (1969–1972).

Career

Plonsey was a professor at Case Western Reserve University from 1968–1983, including a term as chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering (1976–1980). In 1983, he moved to Duke University. He was a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

and was elected as a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 1986 for "the application of electromagnetic field theory to biology, and for distinguished leadership in the emerging profession of biomedical engineering." He retired from Duke in 1996 as the Pfizer Inc./Edmund T. Pratt Jr. University Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering.

Research

Plonsey's research centered on bioelectric phenomena, including the electrical activity of nerves and muscle. With his student John Clark, he derived a mathematical relationship between the transmembrane potential and the extracellular potential produced by a propagating

action potential An action potential occurs when the membrane potential of a specific cell location rapidly rises and falls. This depolarization then causes adjacent locations to similarly depolarize. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, ...

in a

nerve A nerve is an enclosed, cable-like bundle of nerve fibers (called axons) in the peripheral nervous system. A nerve transmits electrical impulses. It is the basic unit of the peripheral nervous system. A nerve provides a common pathway for the e ...

axon An axon (from Greek ἄξων ''áxōn'', axis), or nerve fiber (or nerve fibre: see spelling differences), is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, in vertebrates, that typically conducts electrical impulses known as action po ...

. Some of Plonsey's most influential work addressed the electrical properties of the

heart The heart is a muscular organ in most animals. This organ pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system. The pumped blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the body, while carrying metabolic waste such as carbon dioxide t ...

, often in collaboration with Roger Barr. They played a role in the development of the

bidomain The bidomain model is a mathematical model to define the electrical activity of the heart. It consists in a continuum (volume-average) approach in which the cardiac mictrostructure is defined in terms of muscle fibers grouped in sheets, creating a ...

model, a mathematical model of the

anisotropic Anisotropy () is the property of a material which allows it to change or assume different properties in different directions, as opposed to isotropy. It can be defined as a difference, when measured along different axes, in a material's physic ...

electrical properties of

cardiac muscle Cardiac muscle (also called heart muscle, myocardium, cardiomyocytes and cardiac myocytes) is one of three types of vertebrate muscle tissues, with the other two being skeletal muscle and smooth muscle. It is an involuntary, striated muscle th ...

, and developed a hypothesis of the mechanism for

defibrillation Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, specifically ventricular fibrillation (V-Fib) and non-perfusing ventricular tachycardia (V-Tach). A defibrillator delivers a dose of electric current (often called a ''cou ...

based on the idea that individual cardiac cells are depolarized on one end and hyperpolarized on the other during the shock, sometimes known as the saw-tooth model. Plonsey also collaborated with Yorum Rudy to calculate the relationship between body surface and epicardial electrical potentials, and with Frank Witkowski to analyze action potential wave fronts recorded during defibrillation shocks.

Awards

Books

Plonsey was the author of several books, including: *''Principles and Applications of Electromagnetic Fields'' coauthored with Robert Collin (McGraw-Hill, 1961) *''Bioelectric Phenomena'' (McGraw-Hill, 1969) *''Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach'' coauthored with Roger Barr (Springer, 3rd Ed., 2007) *
Bioelectromagnetism: Principles and Applications of Bioelectric and Biomagnetic Fields
' coauthored with Jaakko Malmivuo (Oxford University Press, 1995)

References

External links

Plonsey's websiteDuke University's website about Robert PlonseyIEEE EMBS Obituary of Robert Plonsey
{{DEFAULTSORT:Plonsey, Robert 1924 births 2015 deaths American electrical engineers Case Western Reserve University faculty Cooper Union alumni Duke University faculty Engineers from New York City Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering IEEE Centennial Medal laureates New York University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni