Bioengineering News

2013 Departmental Citation and Chair’s Award

April 29, 2013

April 29, 2013 – We are pleased to announce this year’s undergraduate award winners from the Bioengineering Department:  Daniel Price has been awarded the 2013 Departmental Citation in Bioengineering, and the Chair’s Award in Bioengineering will go to Tahoura Samad.

Keasling wins George Washington Carver Award

April 22, 2013

April 18, 2103 – Bioengineering and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Professor Jay Keasling has been awarded the 2013 George Washington Carver Award for innovation in industrial biotechnology.

Bioengineer named Goldwater Scholar

April 22, 2013

April 18, 2013 – Bioengineering junior Ritankar Das has been awarded the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program.

Large-scale production of engineered malaria drug launches

April 13, 2013

April 11, 2013 – Twelve years after bioengineering and chemical engineering professor Jay Keasling learned how to engineer yeast to produce the potent anti-malarial drug artemisinin, manufacturing plants are launching large-scale production of the medication.

BioE undergrad a Haas Scholar

April 11, 2013

Congratulations Robert Chen, a 2013-2014 Haas Scholar! Each year, twenty Haas Scholars are selected from all disciplines and departments across the University on the basis of the merit and originality of their project proposals.

MTM project featured on medGadget

April 5, 2013

April 5, 2013 – Research by one of our Master of Translational Medicine program research teams is published in JoVE and featured on medGadget — “New Vascular Catheter Remote Controlled Using MRI”.  The project involves a new system that uses the magnetic field of an intraoperative MRI to move a catheter through blood vessels with high…

Amy Herr, Mining the Proteome

April 3, 2013

April 3, 2013 – Check out an in-depth article on research by bioengineering professor Amy Herr, one of the inaugural cohort of Bakar Fellows at UC Berkeley. Herr is developing a microfluidic approach to protein assay, a way to quickly and efficiently analyze dozens of human proteins at a time.

Alumna Tsai new Whitaker grantee

April 2, 2013

April 2, 2013 – Congratulations to recent BioE alumna Michelle Tsai! Michelle will be spending a year in Ireland working on biomedical devices as a 2013-2014 Whitaker Fellow.

Mofrad Lab models how cells interact with surroundings

March 21, 2013

March 21, 2013 – Cells interact constantly with their surroundings, but it’s very difficult to observe the main player in this interaction – a protein called integrin. Professor Mohammad Mofrad and bioengineering graduate student Mehrdad Mehrbod have developed a computer model of integrin that gives researchers a new way to explore how the protein connects a cell’s inner…

Terry Johnson gets Distinguished Teaching Award

March 13, 2013

BioE Lecturer Terry Johnson has been awarded a 2013 Distinguished Teaching Award!

Video Interview – Sanjay Kumar talks research

March 5, 2013

March 5, 2013 – Associate Professor Sanjay Kumar, winner of the 2012 STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award, discusses his work on adult hippocampal neural stem cells in this video interview.

Fletcher 2013 AIMBE Fellow

March 5, 2013

February 20, 2013 – Congratulations to Professor Dan Fletcher, new member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows!

Bioengineer to Imagineer

January 31, 2013

January 31, 2013 – BioE undergrad Andrew Lin is part of a team of finalists in the Disney ImagiNations competition.

fletcher breast cancer

Fletcher Lab squeezes breast cancer cells

December 19, 2012

December 19, 2012 – This week researchers from Professor Dan Fletcher’s lab presented exciting findings showing for the first time that mechanical forces alone can revert and stop the out-of-control growth of cancer cells.

Amy Herr’s Lab has shrunk the Western Blot

December 10, 2012

December 10, 2012 – Bioengineering professor Amy Herr and BioE graduate student Alex Hughes have published a groundbreaking research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Herr and Hughes have successfully created a microfluidic Western blot device which can run 48 assays in an hour or less.

Sanjay Kumar named Stem Cells Young Investigator

December 5, 2012

December 3, 2012 – Bioengineering Professor Sanjay Kumar has been named the 2012 STEM CELLS Young Investigator Award winner by AlphaMed Press.

CellScope featured in Economist

December 2, 2012

December 1, 2012 – The CellScope, a cellphone-powered diagnostic microscope pioneered by Professor Dan Fletcher’s laboratory, was featured in an article in The Economist.

BioE student named Rhodes Scholar!

November 19, 2012

November 19, 2012 –   Daniel Price, a senior majoring in BioE, EECS and Physics, has been named one of the country’s 32 new Rhodes Scholars. Daniel will head to Oxford for study in 2013.

Arkin Lab adds predictability to genetic engineering of microbial circuits

October 10, 2012

October 8, 2012 – For synthetic biology to reach its promise, the design and construction of biological systems must be as predictable as the assembly of computer hardware. An important step has been taken by bioengineering professor Adam Arkin and a team of researchers, who have developed an “adaptor” that makes the genetic engineering of…

Berkeley iGEM wins regional jamboree

October 5, 2012

October 2012 – The UC Berkeley team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) won first place and the best presentation award at the Americas West Regional Jamboree held at Stanford Oct. 12-14, ensuring their participation at the World Championships at MIT in November.

Keasling wins Heinz Award

September 12, 2012

UC Berkeley professor of bioengineering and chemical & biomolecular engineering has been awarded one of four $250,000 Heinz Awards for 2012, for his work in engineering a synthetic form of the malaria drug artemisinin. Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle

New Bioe master’s degree approved

August 12, 2012

August 10, 2012 – The new Master’s in Translational Medicine degree, joint between UCSF and UC Berkeley, has been approved by UC President Mark Yudof.

New Energy Biosciences Building opens

August 6, 2012

The new Energy Biosciences Building, a state-of-the-art facility of five stories and 113,000 gross square feet, is completed and welcoming researchers this week at the corner of Hearst Ave and Oxford St. 

Bioengineers get NIH award for tissue chip

July 25, 2012

July 24, 2012 – Bioengineering professors Kevin Healy and Luke Lee and collaborators have been awarded a two-year, $1.7 million boost to develop on-chip models of living human heart and liver tissue from the NIH.

Amy Herr new Bakar Fellow

June 28, 2012

Bioengineering Associate Professor Amy Herr has been named to the inaugural cohort of Bakar Fellows at UC Berkeley.