Students

Congratulations to Sara Sukenik for winning first place in the graduate division of the 2016 International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) Student Poster Competition held in Atlanta, GA on September 18-21, 2016! Sara qualified to compete at the international level by first winning the San Francisco Bay Area ISPE chapter’s local competition. Her winning poster was titled “Modeling Monoclonal Antibody Production in Nicotiana Benthamiana Plant Cell Suspension Culture”. Sara is a Ph.D.

Chris Chapman recently received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program’s Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) award.  The GROW award provides travel and research funding for international research collaboration.  Chris plans to spend the next year abroad working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  The title of his project is “Towards Translating Silver Nanowire-PDMS Composite Microelectrode Arrays to Intracranial Records Arrays: In Vitro Characterization of Neural Coupling and Recording Fidelity as well as In Vivo Insertion Design."

Rafael Shimkunas, Ph.D. Candidate in the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group, receives the F31 Predoctoral Individual NRSA Grant Award from the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to study mechano-chemo transduction in the single rabbit cardiomyocyte contracting in cross-linked 3D viscoelastic gel.  Congratulations!

The College of Engineering’s Awards Committee has selected Jeni Lee as the winner of the 2016 Zuhair A. Munir Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation.

Lee is being honored for her research entitled, “Bioactive and Mechanical Stimuli for Engineering Neocartilage with Native Tissue-like Tensile Properties.”

Prof. Kyriacos Athanasiou was Lee’s mentor in the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering.

May 19, 2016 marked our 5th annual Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group Student Research Conference.  Dean and Vice Chancellor Julie Freischlag opened the conference with a motivating Keynote Address on achieving career satisfaction in the health sciences.  The day was well-attended by students at all levels, and the quality of research displayed in the oral and poster presentations was truly impressive.

Congratulations again to the students who received special recognition for their presentations:

Jeff Lu, Ph.D. Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, was selected to receive the 2016 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award for his multi-year efforts as a TA for the Biomedical Engineering senior design courses, BIM 110L, BIM 110A, and BIM 110B.  Jeff’s contribution to these courses, along with praise from students and instructors alike, were recognized during the 2016 Graduate Studies Honors and Awards Ceremony.  Congratulations, Jeff!

Jarrett Link, Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering, has been selected to receive a 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Currently Jarrett’s research focuses on maintaining functional properties of self-assembled cartilage and enzymatically enhancing its integration to native cartilage in an inflammatory environment. Articular cartilage covers the ends of diarthrodial joints, such as the knee. It facilitates seamless motion and bears mechanical load.

It is my pleasure to announce this year’s BMEGG Outstanding Graduate Student Award goes to Jeni Lee from Prof. Kyriacos Athanasiou’s laboratory. While a doctoral student in the BME Graduate Group, Jeni has made significant advances in the laboratory to engineer functional cartilage replacement tissues for treatment of arthritis with the use of novel chemical and mechanical stimuli, with an overarching goal to translate the technology to the clinical setting.

Our 4th annual Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group Student Research Conference, held on May 15, 2015, was a wonderful day of research and discussion highlighting our outstanding students.  Professor Victor Barocas from the University of Minnesota kicked off the event with a terrific plenary talk. The day was well-attended by students at all levels, and the quality of research displayed in the oral and poster presentations was truly impressive.

Congratulations again to the students who received special recognition for their presentations:

Brent Foster, a 1st year BME PhD Student in Professor Chaudhari’s Laboratory, has been selected by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) as a 2015-2016 fellowship award recipient.  The NSF GRFP will provide Brent with 3 years of funding to pursue his research project which aims to create an open-source 3D statistical representation of the healthy anatomy of the wrist structures. This representation will enable an analysis of the morphological variation in wrists across the population.