Bioengineering News
Professor Seung-Wuk Lee discusses pyroelectricity: the finding that viruses can generate electricity when exposed to heat, and how this may pave the way for next-generation biosensors and diagnostic tools.
How isochoric preservation can protect food, organs — and even the planet. Professor Boris Rubinsky discusses the state of the art in cryogenics and preservation.
Professor Seung-Wuk Lee discusses pyroelectricity: the finding that viruses can generate electricity when exposed to heat, and how this may pave the way for next-generation biosensors and diagnostic tools.
The Master of Engineering capstone design team advised by bioengineering faculty Kevin Healy and Syed Hossainy has won the 2024 Capstone Innovation Award. The team of Angana Dasgupta, Isabella Lopez, Natalie Saadeh, and Boyan Yin was selected for their project, “Experimental assessment of multiple cell lines’ function and morphology on piezo-responsive films under small amplitude…
The Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) has selected Professor Michael Yartsev for the 2024 Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award, given in recognition of outstanding and innovative work from all areas of neuroscience. The award will be presented at the FENS Forum conference in Vienna.
Congratulations to Professor Liana Lareau, winner of a 2024 Spark Award from the Bakar Fellows Program.
Congratulations to our 2024 undergraduate award winners: Elena Maria Mujica, Departmental Citation, Cyrus Tau, Chair’s Award in Bioengineering, and Sarp Dora Kurtoglu, Bioengineering Service Award. Special honorable mentions under the Chair’s Award go to Justin Garlepp and Derrick Ma. Outstanding work by all!
Professor David Schaffer will lead the new Bakar ClimatEnginuity Hub, an incubator that will provide resources and support to entrepreneurs in renewable energy and clean technology.
Professors John Dueber and David Schaffer are featured in this article highlighting campus research and entrepreneurship in sustainability.
A project supervised by Professor Boris Rubinsky and run by MCB/ME/EECS students Maxwell Johnson and Valentin Astie, has been selected as a Big Ideas Winner and will receive a $5,000 award. The MEGAN Protocol is developing a neuro-haptic AI-based device technology that has the ability to detect the onset of Parkinson disease years before the…
Congratulations to Professor Teresa Head-Gordon, who has been honored with a prestigious research award from the Humboldt Foundation, known for fostering collaboration with German scientists.
Congratulations to our new NSF Graduate Research Fellows! Among the winners are current PhD students Kira Buttrey, Emilie Kono, Nathan Lanclos, Brendan Mitchell, Gabriela Pena Carmona, Sarah Wasinger, and Dana Wilkins; incoming PhD students Joseph Asfouri and Corinne Martin; and graduating undergraduates Sushil Bohara, Justin Garlepp, Cyrus Tau and Dhruv Vaish. Well done!
Congratulations to Outstanding GSI Award Winners for 2023-24 from BioE courses: S. Erfan Ghazimirsaeed, Chinmoy Saayujya and Madeleine Snyder (BioE PhD Student)! The UC Berkeley Outstanding GSI Awards are given to the best GSIs of the year, nominated by the course instructor.
In a paper in the journal Science, a team led by Professor Michael Yartsev’s lab identified the part of the brain in Egyptian fruit bats that controls vocalizations and found that it contains very similar neural wiring to the part of the human brain that controls speech.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has allocated a $4 million grant to support collaborative research by UCLA, USC and CalTech that will examine cellular behaviors, many of which play a key role in developing immunity to pathogens and disease. Dino Di Carlo, UCLA professor of bioengineering and UC Berkeley BS and PhD alumnus, will lead the team.
Professor Aaron Streets was featured in this overview on the potential of microfluidics in The Scientist magazine.
Professor Amy Herr weighs in on how researchers manage budgets and the ‘boom–bust’ grant cycle.
Professor Emeritus Boris Rubinsky’s isochoric vitrification method of preserving coral samples in suspended animation is part of recent emergency efforts to save dying coral reefs. The method is being used by the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Professor Irina Conboy and former student Alina Su have founded a new company, Generation Lab, offering an at-home molecular aging test that analyzes a person’s biological age by assessing “biological noise” in their system. The test evaluates an individual’s risk for top health conditions and the pace of aging across 19 systems in the body, which can help physicians see where interventions may be most needed and effective.
Researchers in Professor Phillip Messersmith’s lab have demonstrated that treatment with DPCA, an enzyme inhibitor molecule shown to trigger regeneration in mammals, can protect against and repair colon damage in a mouse model of colitis. This work suggests that short-term use of this small molecule drug could someday provide a restorative therapy for patients with IBD — and a path to remission.
Congratulations to Professor Boris Rubinsky, elected to the National Academy of Inventors. Rubinsky is known for developing a variety of new technologies in the fields of medicine and biomaterials, including a minimally invasive surgical technique called irreversible electroporation, work in cryopreservation, and the 3D printing of biomaterials.
PhD alumni Connor Tsuchida and Ivana Vasic have both been named to the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list for their achievements in Healthcare! Tsuchida has founded Crispr delivery startup Azalea Therapeutics, and Vasic is developing therapies to support the next generation of in vitro fertilization as founder of Vitra Labs.
The Herr Lab has been awarded a 3-year ‘Symbiosis’ grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, geared towards designing and disseminating microfluidic tools to power new understanding of marine symbiotic systems – like coral reefs – adversely impacted by rising sea temperatures and other climate-associated stresses. Herr’s lab welcomes two new postdoctoral scholars, Drs. Fangchen Liu and Cyril Deroy, and is collaborating with experts in coral systems from the Carnegie Institution for Science (Prof. Phillip Cleves) and the University of Miami (Prof. Nikki Traylor-Knowles).
Undergraduate researcher Cyrus Tau was selected to present, and won the Best Talk award, in the Biochemistry/Molecular Biology oral presentation section at this year’s Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists – ABRCMS 2023.
Recent alumna Allison Nguyen (BS 2022) gave the keynote address at Thermo Fisher Scientific’s inaugural Junior Innovator’s Challenge awards ceremony in Washington, D.C this fall. Allison was a Bioengineering Scholar, a co-founder of the BioE Mentorship Program, and is now employed in the Product Engineering Leadership Development Program at Thermo Fisher.