Bioengineering News
David Schaffer, PhD, a University of California, Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, bioengineering, and molecular and cell biology, who holds over 50 patents and whose research has spawned eight companies to commercialize stem cell and gene therapies, has been appointed the next executive director of QB3.
Check out this feature on Bakar Labs startup Glyphic Biotechnologies – co-founded by MTM alumnus Josh Yang!
Congratulations to Professor Phillip Messersmith, one of seven new recipients of the 2022 Bakar Fellows Spark Award, designed to accelerate faculty-led research and produce tangible, positive societal impact through commercialization. Messersmith is developing a regenerative therapy for the intestinal ulcers that accompany inflammatory bowel disease.
Professor Lisa Pruitt is one of two 2022 recipients of the Brown Engineering Alumni Medal, recognizing exceptional records of accomplishment by Brown alumni in their engineering careers. Pruitt received her Ph.D. from Brown and joined the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 1993, later becoming a joint professor in the Department of Bioengineering.
Congratulations to all of our graduates! In addition to our many talented grads, we’re proud that both the keynote and student speakers at the 2022 UC Berkeley doctoral commencement ceremony were bioengineers! Sally Winkler, now a research scientist at AbbVie, gave the student address, and Ann Lee-Karlon, BS alumna and COO of Altos Labs, delivered…
In a study published in Nature, a team of researchers in the lab of Professor Michael Yartsev studied neural activity in the hippocampus of freely flying bats and found that the neural codes remained unchanged over days and weeks. The discovery that these GPS-like neural codes remain stable over time has upended previous research and may further our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Nearly 20 years after the sequencing of the human genome, a large team of researchers has finally filled in the remaining few percent of unsequenced DNA, providing the first complete, gapless human genome. First author of many of the suite of papers is Nicolas Altemose, 2021 bioengineering PhD and current postdoc with co-author Professor Aaron Streets.
Undergraduate bioengineering student Alexandra Potter has been a long-term collaborator with Dr. CJ Yang of Harvard University on the effectiveness of lung cancer screening. Today she is first author on a paper published in the British Medical Journal, “Association of computed tomography screening with lung cancer stage shift and survival in the United States.” Potter is also CEO of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative.
Neural activity in the hippocampus is known to reflect how animals move through an environment. Using innovative wireless miniature microscopy technology in flying bats, Professor Michael Yarsev’s lab has resolved a long-standing scientific debate about the stability of those neural codes.
The UC Berkeley – UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering has once again been ranked 4th in the nation by US News & World Report! The College of Engineering remains the #3 engineering school.
Congratulations to Outstanding GSI Award Winners for 2021-22 from BioE courses: Erin Akins, Gabriela Lomeli, Amanda Meriwether and Vivien Tran! The UC Berkeley Outstanding GSI Awards are given to the best GSIs of the year, nominated by the course instructor.
Bioengineering professor Amy Herr has been named the inaugural Chief Technology Officer of the newly established Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network. Formed in December 2021 by the co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the Network is a 10-year effort to develop the science and technologies to observe, measure, and analyze human biology in action. Modeled on the success of the San Francisco-based CZ Biohub, new Biohubs will be created to bring together leading scientific and technology institutions with the goal of pursuing grand scientific challenges.
Professors Steven Conolly and Niren Murthy are two of the four 2022 winners of the 2022 Bakar Prize. The prize is given annually to former Bakar Fellows to provide additional resources to ensure a successful transition of their technology from academic research to industry applications.
Professor Jay Keasling is the recipient of the Science History Institute’s 2022 Othmer Gold Medal. The award recognizes his efforts in developing innovative synthetic biology tools that address major societal challenges such as biofuel manufacturing and medical applications.
Congratulations to Professor Michael Yartsev, winner of the C.J. Herrick Award in Neuroanatomy from the American Association for Anatomy. This award recognizes investigators in the early stages of their careers who have made important contributions to biomedical science through their research. Yartsev uses the bat as a model system to study the neural mechanisms of complex spatial, social and acoustic behaviors.
Glyphic Biotechnologies, founded by BioE alumnus Joshua Young Yang, is one of three winners of QIAGEN’s new Biotech Grants program. Glyphic is developing a first-of-its-kind, next-generation sequencing platform for proteins.