Bioengineering News
You do belong in science – even if it doesn’t always feel that way. The Double Shelix podcast, hosted by UC Berkeley Bioengineering PhD Candidates Sally Winkler and Kayla Wolf, launches on April 3 with a series of 7 episodes on the the theme of belonging in STEM. Every Tuesday, they’ll bring conversations with experts in science, education, and inclusion in conversation about how we can create STEM communities where all feel belonging.
BioE PhD student Alison Su, in Professor Amy Herr’s lab, won the Outstanding Student Poster award at this year’s International Conference on Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology.
BioE PhD student Andrew Bremer attended the Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) workshop, held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. CASE educates STEM students on science policy matters – including in-depth learning about the mechanisms of federal research spending and how to engage with policymakers as scientists.
PhD student Yiqi Cao took first place and the People’s Choice award at the 2018 UCSF Grad Slam competition, which challenges students to give a compelling presentation of their research in 3 minutes or less. Cao will now go on to compete in the UC system-wide Grad Slam event. Student Inez Raharjo took 2nd place, landing BioE in all of the top spots. Go BioE!
Leela Tanikella graduated with her MEng degree in Bioengineering in 2015. She currently works at Intuitive Surgical, where she is a Design Controls engineer. Her favorite part of her job is knowing that she is improving the lives of patients who benefit from the technology that she helps develop.
US News and World Report has ranked the UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering FOURTH among bioengineering graduate programs in the US. This is up two places from the previous year. Go BioE!
Professor Amy Herr and her lab are highlighted in this Nature Methods Technology Feature, exploring new ways to for researchers to share designs, devices and experience.
Greg Wohlleb MEng ’16 (BIOE) returned in February 2018 to represent BD Biosciences, chat with students about his work in engineering, and share his advice for getting the job.
Professors Sanjay Kumar and Kevin Healy, in collaboration with Professor of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology Andreas Stahl, have discovered that the same kind of fat cells that help newborn babies regulate their body temperature could be a target for weight-loss drugs in adults.
Synthetic biology startup Senti Bio, co-founded by PhD alumnus Philip Lee, has now raised $53 million in investments to fund their development of a design platform for synthetic gene circuits that can rapidly design, build, and test various therapeutic circuits.
Boost Biomes’ proprietary DNA sequencing-based discovery platform was developed by the company’s cofounders, biotechnology veterans Rob McBride, Jamie Bacher and Adam Arkin, to identify commercially viable microbial products. Boost Biomes’ first two products are focused on improving yield in the field and reducing spoilage after harvest, and are being evaluated in commercially relevant trials.
Associate Teaching Professor Terry Johnson has been identified as one of the 10 Best Professors at UC Berkeley by College Magazine.
PhD student Thomas Carey was selected as the winner of the Diagnostics World Early Innovator Awards program at the 2018 Molecular Medicine Tri Conference in San Francisco. Carey and his colleagues are developing a low-cost microfluidic-based platform to detect the presence of biomarkers present in virtually every fluid.
Master of Engineering students Jasodhara Raj (BIOE), Suyasha Gupta (BIOE), and Arnaud Bard de Coutance (ME) aim to develop software to automate and standardize the reporting procedures for influenza cases. This would mean that hospitals and physicians do not have to report data themselves, which would save a significant amount of time and increase physicians’ incentives to run the tests leading to improvement in tracking.
Check out BioE PhD alum David Breslauer on the San Jose Mercury News Sunday Business front page.
Professor Herr receives this honor for Current and Breakthrough Research in the Field of Electro-Driven Separations. “Dr. Herr’s use of IEF on samples from single cells to discriminate between protein isoforms differing by a single charge has inspired many scientists, both utilizing and building upon using relatively simple designs that give powerful performance.”
BioE undergrads Jovanny Guillen, Tatiana Jansen, and Irene Kim of the “Surgical Instrument Reprocessing in Low-Resource Settings” project were awarded an Ignite grant to help push their project to the next stage. Ashna Jasuja, Yasmine Kehnemouyi, and Abhinav Koppu of the “Bubbles: Combining Microbubbles and Ultrasound for Breast and Prostate Cancer Detection” team and Naser Abdelrahman of the “The Electromobilizing Sleeve” project will receive Spark grants for early-stage projects or experimental concepts.
BioE startup GenEdit is featured in Wired as the first company devoted solely to Crispr delivery.
The Master of Translational Medicine team of Daniel Beckerman and Woojoo Kim has receive an Ignite grant to push their project, “3D Printing Anatomical Models for Orthopedic Surgery”, to the next level of development.
Professor John Dueber’s lab has advanced two steps closer to cleaning up the dirty production of indigo dyes. Using synthetic biology they have done away with the wasteful chemical synthesis of indigo, and removed the damaging bleaching stage that converts indigo to leucoindigo.
IEEE Spectrum talks with Professor Amy Herr, founder of Berkeley’s Hacking for Impact course, about the non-technical challenges of pursuing impact.
BioE undergrad alumna Ann Lee-Karlon, later a PhD graduate of UC San Diego, has been elected to the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2018. She was recognized for “outstanding leadership in successful drug development and business operations in Genentech and for enhancing diversity of future BME leaders.”
BioE Master of Engineering students Bhardwaj, Dabiri, and Ramirez are working with the Million Hands organization to create customized low-cost prosthetic hands for children with 3D-printing.
Researchers led by Professor David Schaffer have for the first time used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to disable a defective gene that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in mice, extending their lifespan by 25 percent.
Bioengineering and EECS professor Steven Conolly is building a new kind of medical diagnostic technology called magnetic particle imaging (MPI).