BioE News – Page 15 – UC Berkeley Department of Bioengineering

Rempel leads study on electric vehicle charging stations

A study led by Professor Emeritus David Rempel and the environmental non-profit group Cool the Earth tested the functionality of 657 EVSE (electric vehicle service equipment) connectors at all 181 open public, non-Tesla charging stations in the Bay area. The study found that 27% were nonfunctional, a concerning issue for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Local news features BioE High School Competition

The annual BioEngineering High School Competition, conceived and managed entirely by undergraduates in the Berkeley BioEngineering Honor Society, was featured in the local The Press newspaper, along with the winning high school team.

Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub opens its doors

UC Berkeley this week celebrated the grand opening of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), the campus’s bold new home for research and innovation. BBH owes much of its success to founding Director Amy Herr and current Director David Schaffer, both BioE Professors. Nearly 20 startups have already moved into the space, several led by bioengineering alumni.

Berkeley commencement features two BioE speakers

Both the keynote and student speakers at the 2022 UC Berkeley doctoral commencement ceremony are bioengineers! Recent PhD alumna Sally Winkler, now a research scientist at AbbVie, will give the student address, and Ann Lee-Karlon, BS alumna and COO of Altos Labs, will deliver the keynote. The ceremony on May 18 will be webcast live.

Solar beats nuclear at many potential settlement sites on Mars

artists impression of nuclear power on Mars

Research by BioE PhD student Aaron Berliner and Prof Adam Arkin shows that photovoltaics could provide all the power needed for an extended mission to Mars, or even a permanent settlement there. The authors are members of the Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES), led by Adam Arkin.

Congratulations new NSF Fellows!

Congratulations to FIFTEEN new NSF Graduate Research Fellows! Among the winners are: current PhD students: Deniz Akpinaroglu, Joana Cabrera, Joy Chen, Benjamin Lesch, Alvince Pongos, Caleb Rux, Gabriel Sturm, and Jazmin Velazquez; incoming PhD students Maple Chen, Russell Ro and Esther Sim; graduating undergrads Joyce Chen and Carolina Rios-Martinez;

Dan Fletcher to lead the Blum Center

Dan Fletcher will be the next director of the The Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. The Blum Center supports research innovation for underserved and low-resource areas in the U.S. and abroad, taking an interdisciplinary approach to developing and supporting the knowledge, technologies, and people to build a more sustainable and equitable world. Fletcher is known for his global perspective and dedication to improving health conditions in low-resource areas, especially through development and refinement of the CellScope, a portable mobile phone-based microscopy platform.

The power of yes for ventilator access

BioE undergraduate Athena Lopez is part of a team at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology working on a startup to address ventilator shortages around the world. Lopez is also a member of the BioEngineering Scholars Program.

Kumar and Schaffer discover how biomaterials regulate stem cell neurogenesis in 3D

Engineered biomaterials are increasingly used to expand and differentiate stem cells for technological and therapeutic applications. A major open question in the field is how the mechanical properties of material scaffolds regulate stem cell differentiation, especially in complex 3D geometries like those found in tissue. In a collaborative study published in Science Advances, the labs of Sanjay Kumar and David Schaffer have discovered a 3D-specific molecular mechanism through which mechanical inputs act through the transcription factor Egr1 to determine how efficiently neural stem cells turn into neurons.

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