Visitors from the US House and Senate Labor, Health and Human Services visited UC Berkeley on Tuesday, October 16 and toured Professor Amy Herr’s laboratory. The appropriations staff met with several bioengineering graduate students, as well as Professor Herr, who were able to provide specific stories of NIH funding impact on both research and the […]
Archives for 2018
Murthy Lab tech rapidly identifies antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’
Prof Niren Murthy’s lab, led by postdoc Tara deBoer, has developed a new cheap and simple point-of-care assay for diagnosing bacterial drug resistance. Termed DETECT, the technology can identify bacterial drug resistance directly from patient urine samples. The study appears on the Oct. 18 cover of the journal ChemBioChem.
Alumni news: Invasive breast cancers punch tunnels into neighboring tissue
Phd alumnus Ovijit Chaudhuri, now a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, has uncovered a previously unknown mechanism cancerous cells use to break through the basement membrane, allowing the tumor to become invasive.
Alum Artunduaga featured on VentureWell
MTM alumna and founder of startup Respira Labs Maria Artunduaga is featured in the Innovator Spotlight on VentureWell! She invented a device that continuously monitors patients’ lung function and collects lifestyle and other medical data to improve management of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
Natali – BioEngineering Scholars Program
“Participating in research-prep workshops with my peers made joining a lab for the first time exciting rather than intimidating. I was able to dive right into projects that directly align with the reason I decided to major in bioengineering — to help people gain a sense of dignity and independence through assistive medical devices.”
Arkin Lab disentangles bacterial gene translation
Using a massive set of 244,000 synthetic sequence experiments, Adam Arkin and his collaborators disentangled some of the complex determinants for how bacterial genes are translated. Published today in Nature Biotechnology, their work has made it possible to identify general rules for optimizing protein expression, a fundamental step in understanding living systems, and takes another step toward the efficient design of engineered bacterial gene expression systems.
Million Hands builds an open-source platform for customizable, functional, low-cost prosthetic hands
Learn more about Million Hands, a team-based project that has been making progress in developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands with more robust capability. Four bioengineering MEng students, Aastha Shah, Sina Dabiri, Jose Ramirez, and Aashish Bhardwaj, are members of the team.
4 MTM students win Jacobs Institute Innovation Catalyst grants
One third of patients who survive cardiac arrest suffer from permanent neurological or brain damage. MTM students Robert Schultz, Justin Olshavsky, Aurko Shaw, and Ikennah Browne won a Jacobs Institute Ignite grant to push their project, a brain-saving catheter for use in the field, to the next stage of implementation.
5 students named 2019 Siebel Scholars
PhD students Andrew Bremer, Marc Steven Chooljian, Phillip Kang, Stacey Lee, and Nicole Anne Repina have been named the 2019 UC Berkeley Siebel Scholars in Bioengineering by the Siebel Foundation. The Siebel Scholars program recognizes outstanding graduate students from the world’s most prestigious business, computer science, energy science, and bioengineering graduate schools.