Awards

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.

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!

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.

Hussain Fatakdawala participated Friday, April 4th, in the campus-wide Interdisciplinary Graduate and Professional Student Symposium (IGPS) and won the Dean’s Prize for Best Oral Presentation in Engineering for his presentation entitled “Imaging coronary arteries using a bimodal catheter combining fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) and intra-vascular ultrasound (IVUS)”.

BMEGG predoctoral student Justin Klein (Cherry lab) has been selected as the recipient of the 2014-2015 Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) Predoctoral Molecular Imaging Scholar Program. The pre-doctoral program supports a research scholar in an established molecular imaging lab that will apply molecular imaging approaches (including tool development) to investigate biological pathways in disease models.

This year’s BMEGG Outstanding Graduate Student Award goes to Beko Binder from Prof. Kent Leach’s laboratory. While a doctoral student in the BME Graduate Group, Beko has made significant advances in the development of pharmacological and materials-based approaches to promote cell survival and direct tissue repair, with particular emphasis on bone and angiogenesis. His research contributions are broad, utilizing a range of materials including hydrogels and implantable scaffolds derived from natural and synthetic polymers.

This year’s Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group Outstanding Graduate Student Award goes to Dr. Rick Fasani from Prof. Michael Savageau’s laboratory. While a doctoral student in the BME Graduate Group, Rick has made significant advances in developing computational tools for characterizing the phenotypic repertoire of cellular systems. His efforts represent a major advance in dealing with the Genotype-to-Phenotype problem, which is considered one of the grand challenges in modern biology.