Bioengineering News
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.
Two PhD alumni have innovations named to the Time Magazine 200 Best Inventions of 2023 list. The Cala kIQ, developed by Cala Health, founded by alumna Kate Rosenbluth, is a wearable device that assists patients with Essential Tremor and Parkinson’s. Proven 40 OS is a fertilizer using naturally occurring microbes to reduce emissions and pollution while producing higher crop yields – developed by Pivot Bio, founded by alumnus Karsten Temme.
BioE startup Aluna, founded by alumna Charvi Shetty, has been named a 2023-24 Tech for Global Good Laureate, one of four venures recognized for using technology to significantly advance health equity and improve lives. Aluna makes hardware and software that helps people with breathing problems.
Professor Amy Herr has won the 2023 Microsystems & Nanoengineering/Springer Nature Test of Time Award, recognizing research that was presented at MicroTAS within the last 10-15 years that is still impacting today’s research in the filed of microfluidics.
The CZ Biohub SF-backed NextGen initiative, co-founded by Professor Aaron Streets, succeeds in diversifying faculty hiring in biological and biomedical sciences at major Bay Area universities
PhD alumnus Wilbur Lam, now Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech, has been named one of the 2023 new members of the National Academy of Medicine. Lam was recognized for “outstanding contributions in point-of-care, home-based, and/or smartphone-enabled diagnostics that are changing the management of pediatric and hematologic diseases as well as development of microsystems technologies as research-enabling platforms to investigate blood biophysics. He also leads national/NIH efforts to assess diagnostic tests (including those for COVID-19) for the entire country.”
Five Bioengineering PhD students have been named Siebel Scholars of the class of 2024: Cindy Ayala, Ruiming Cao, Sita Srinivasan Chandrasekaran, Cameron Tadashi Kato, and Andre Lai. The Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes top students at the world’s leading graduate schools of bioengineering, business, computer science and energy science.
Bolt Threads, a company co-founded by BioE PhD alumnus David Breslauer, plans to go public in a SPAC deal that values the one-time unicorn at $250 million. Bolt Threads uses synthetic biology and other techniques to sustainably produce engineered biomaterials, including synthetic spider silk and mushroom-based faux leather.
Congratulations to undergraduates Karla Gutierrez Cebrero and Elaine Tong, both named Fall 2023 Bakar Ignite Scholars! The program connects undergraduate students with leading scientists in the Bakar Fellows Program to conduct paid research that supports their Bakar projects.
PhD alumna Julea Vlassakis, now Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University, has been named a 2023 NIH Director’s New Innovator! These prestigious awards support early-career investigators with ambitious, unconventional project proposals demonstrating broad impact potential.