MENTORING
STELLAR STUDENTS
STELLAR STUDENTS
Lauren Severance was nominated by Professor Elliot McVeigh.
Lauren’s graduate research stems from her interest in applying medical imaging tools for cardiovascular disease prevention. Her thesis, titled “Novel methods for early coronary artery calcium detection using CT” is focused on understanding the association between an individual’s genetic predisposition for coronary artery disease and CT-measured coronary artery calcium, as well as understanding and improving scan sensitivity to onset of calcium at an earlier age.
Lauren Severance, Ph.D. '22
Kendra Worthington, B.S. '22
This award is presented to the graduate and undergraduate students who have earned recognition in the Jacobs School community for their outstanding academic and leadership performance. Graduating engineers recite the graduation oath to express their commitment to upholding standards of ethics, integrity, and quality as practicing engineers and as graduates of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Participants will receive a ring prior to the event to be worn as a symbol of this commitment in a virtual ceremony.
The Engelson Ph.D. Thesis Award is a permanently endowed annual Student Award in the Department of Bioengineering. The award recognizes the “best” Ph.D. Thesis of the academic year in the Department of Bioengineering according to originality, depth of the analysis and significance of the work and it's potentional impact.
"Decellularized Extracellular Matrix Hydrogel Therapy for the Prevention and Treatment of Pathological Alterations Following Birth Injuries"
Pamela has joined the Nano-Omic Bio Engineering Lab in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan where she is now a postdoctoral research fellow.
Pamela Duran, Ph.D. '22
Michael Hu, Ph.D. '22
Shunichi Usami Memorial Award for Biomedical Engineering is a permanently endowed annual Student Award in the Department of Bioengineering in memory of the late Professor Shunichi Usami who has made pioneering contributions to bioengineering design over decades.
The award is specifically for the most meritorious Ph.D. thesis of the academic year with a special emphasis on the design aspects of bioengineering.
Michael completed his Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Professor Prashant Mali, and his thesis title is:
"Engineering of Ex Vivo Tissue Models Towards Enabling Point of Care Functional Oncology"
In April, I joined Illumina as a scientist within their overall R&D department. I am not able to disclose the exact nature of my work, but it is very much focused on technology development. Half of my work is very engineering-heavy, and centers around design and development of instruments. The other half of my work is very molecular biology-heavy, and centers around design and development of new assays.
The Siebel Scholars program recognizes the most talented students in the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science. The students are selected based on outstanding academic performance and leadership, and each receive a $35,000 award toward their final year of study.
Andrea Castro is a bioinformatics PhD candidate in Hannah Carter’s lab at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. She received her bachelor’s degree in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics from UCLA in 2017, and her master’s in computer science from UC San Diego in 2021. Her research involves investigating the relationship between patient genetic diversity in the immune system and tumor evolution; leveraging large-scale genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic datasets to learn more about immune surveillance and selection on tumors.
Pamela Duran received her bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (Tijuana, Mexico), graduating with Honors Distinction. She is currently a bioengineering Ph.D candidate at UC San Diego, co-advised by bioengineering professor Karen Christman and Dr. Marianna Alperin, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of pelvic floor muscle dysfunction after vaginal delivery—the leading risk factor for pelvic floor disorders.
Lauren Severance is a Ph.D. candidate in the UC San Diego department of bioengineering; she received her bachelor’s in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University. Advised by bioengineering professor Elliot McVeigh, she aims to improve early screening for coronary artery disease. Severance’s thesis work is focused on developing novel methods for early coronary artery calcium detection on CT. She has created numerous collaborations with clinicians, geneticists, and epidemiologists, resulting in discovery of a completely novel use for consumer genetic tests in coronary disease screening.
Every year, the Bioengineering department confers a TA Excellence Award upon Instructional Assistants that demonstrated exceptional professionalism, innovation, and dedication to their students. The award is based on student and instructor evaluations. In the 2022 academic year, awardees Yassar Abdelrahman and Bryan Nguyen were commended for their contributions to the success of their students in the classroom.
"I've had Yasser as a TA for a few classes now, and he's really been instrumental in helping me understand the course material, especially for BENG 112A. He's clearly worked exceptionally hard and has gone above and beyond for all of us. He was constantly available to answer questions and willing to walk us through difficult problems or find ways to make the class more manageable."
"Bryan was the biggest reason our senior design project was successful. He went above and beyond to meet with my team, give us correction and direction. He was very knowledgeable and understanding of what senior design is meant to be and we wouldn’t have been able to do our project without his help."
The theme for BE Day 2022 was “Bridging the Boundaries in Bioengineering”, with the goal of highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of bioengineering by showcasing the various specializations of successful bioengineers. To do so, we invited speakers without a bioengineering undergraduate background to present at various components throughout our event. We also invited students from departments outside of bioengineering, including the Chemistry & Biochemistry, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Nanoengineering, Chemical Engineering, and Public Health departments, to explore their potential role in this field.
UC San Diego’s Bioengineering Department received notice in March, 2022 that the training grant Training in Bioengineering Research and Technology Development in Cardiovascular In Cardiopulmonary Health and Disease had been approved. The total award is for $1.5 M+ over five years. This new award cycle will mark 50 years of support for Bioengineering pre-doctoral training at UC San Diego by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
Under the leadership of PI and Program Director Dr. Andrew McCulloch, Dr. Karen Christman, and Dr. Geert Schmid-Schoenbein, this new T32 creates a novel program in bioengineering predoctoral training in cardiopulmonary science and technology. It takes advantage of UC San Diego’s leadership as a top-ranked bioengineering doctoral program focused on basic research and technology development together with world-leading NHLBI-supported basic and clinical science in cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary disease and healthcare.
The training grant offers the only graduate program on campus to provide bioengineering, predoctoral students with interdisciplinary, co-mentored training to apply four key technology themes to basic and translational problems in cardiac, vascular, blood, and lung health. The academic theme of the program is on new research and development in the areas of biomechanics and mechanobiology; biomaterials, cell and tissue engineering; computational and systems biology; and imaging and biophotonics. Engineering approaches at the interfaces between these four areas will be applied by trainees to basic science and translational applications in cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary research that includes new areas such as pulmonary hypertension, remote monitoring, heart valve and congenital heart diseases, neurovascular injury, metabolic diseases and infectious disease.
The goals of this new training program are aligned with the NHLBI’s strategic vision with a focus on training the next-generation interdisciplinary research workforce skilled at developing and using engineering technologies and analysis for basic and translational research that improves understanding, prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary diseases. Trainees will be chosen from predoctoral candidates admitted to the highly ranked and competitive Bioengineering doctoral program. Selected trainees will take courses on cardiovascular biology and engineering technologies specific to the program, have a clinical immersion experience, and conduct laboratory research in cardiovascular science with interdisciplinary co-mentors.
The overall philosophy will be to provide trainee-centered, co-mentored training in applying rigorous, quantitative, and integrative engineering approaches to important interdisciplinary problems in cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary science. This approach also reflects new bioengineering research directions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid adoption of machine learning by many program faculty, and the opening of a new School of Public Health in 2020. Mentor training will be required of all participating faculty.
This grant will ensure we train the next generation of diverse bioengineering scientists to be leaders in innovative cardiovascular research and technology development to advance healthcare delivery and improve health outcomes.
Pamela Duran, PhD ' 22
UC San Diego bioengineering PhD student Pamela Duran recently received an award for best doctoral basic science research from the American Urogynecologic Society (AUGS) for her research on how repeated birth injuries impact the pelvic floor muscles.
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UC San Diego bioengineering graduate student Rebecca Gow is currently working on a project to study movement competency in athletes, specifically female soccer players, and how it can correlate to injury. Gow, a student in bioengineering Professor Andrew McCulloch’s Cardiac Mechanics Research Laboratory, was particularly excited to contribute to this research since she’s been an athlete her whole life.
A team of undergraduate students in the Biomedical Engineering Society at UC San Diego is undertaking an out-of-this-galaxy challenge: designing, building and testing a low-cost prosthetic hand that can be controlled seamlessly by the user’s own mind. The goal for the project, called Skywalker Legacy, is to enable simple procedures involved in day-to-day life — including moving individual fingers, holding and moving objects — for those who use prosthetics.
Fitz is a 2nd year Bioengineering PhD student that studies neurodegeneration. He’s currently using bioinformatics and systems biology tools to better understand common pathological mechanisms across neurodegenerative disorders, and he uses cerebral organoids to study the initiation and progression of Alzheimer's disease and potential drug interventions.
Michael Fitzgerald
Ph.D. Graduate StudentSubramaniam Research LabKristen Garcia
PhD Graduate StudentFrom an early age, Kristen had two loves: math and teaching. When she was a little girl, her grandfather would indulge her as she assigned him math problems to solve, and she insisted on teaching her younger sister whatever math she herself was learning at the time. She breezed through AP math classes and enrolled as a pre-med student at Boise State. A summer internship at Rutgers exposed her to the world of Bioengineering, where she used mathematical modeling techniques to study circadian rhythms in the human body to time drug delivery effectiveness. Kristen returned to Boise State and began doing research on glucose monitoring devices, graduating summa cum laude in Applied Mathematics.
At UC San Diego, she is a Bioengineering Ph.D. trainee in the Interfaces program in Dr. Daniela Valdez-Jasso’s lab. The Program has furthered her math passion as training synergizes the intersection of multi-disciplinary fields. Kristen says, “the Program has provided me with the opportunity to participate in multi-scale biology research where I’m working with a biventricular mathematical model to help answer sex-dependent questions around pulmonary arterial hypertension.” It has also allowed her to collaborate with students outside her field of study which has expanded her interdisciplinary knowledge base. Kristen was recently involved with the Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology in Oslo, Norway, in a joint program with UC San Diego, working on a diverse team of graduate students to improve a multi-scale computational model of myocardial energetics and mechanics. She served as a TA at both Boise State and UC San Diego and as a mentor in the Jacobs Undergraduate Mentoring Program. Kristen has won several academic honors and scholarships along the way. She currently attends professors workshops to learn to be an educator. Her career aspirations are to be a college professor who encourages students to find their passion and support them as they make mistakes, learn, and grow. Kristen also looks forward to making an impact in advancing the diversity of the engineering field.
To better help students navigate these challenges, the Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS) significantly ramped up its mentorship initiatives over the past year. We believe that mentorship is highly important for student success, as it allows people to share knowledge and insights and offer support and guidance; no one should have to go through grad school alone. We officially formed the BEGS Mentorship Committee in the 2019-2020 academic year. Led by Bioengineering PhD student Clara Posner as Mentorship Chair, the committee has been hard at work ever since.
The Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS) High School Outreach Program at Clairemont High School (CHS) is a group of graduate students who seek to enrich the education of high school students in San Diego, expose them to the bioengineering field, and mentor them to pursue career paths in STEM.
Though statistics show 60% of the student population are disadvantaged and 67% are minorities at CHS, this program was an opportunity to accelerate the careers of these talented young adults.
Through the two tumultuous years adapting the program to the pandemic, the BEGS High School Outreach Program has continued to have many successes. In the spring quarter of 2021, they were able to visit Clairemont High School to do a lung demo with Tania Pena's class of 9th graders. This activity involves building a model of the lungs using plastic water bottles, balloons, tape, and straws. A balloon stretched over the bottom of the water bottle acts like the diaphragm, and pulls air in through the straws into the "lungs." They talked to the students about lung mechanics and how bioengineers work to design devices such as ventilators, which is especially relevant to COVID. They also conducted a virtual panel with Tricia Samora's class at CHS, where students were able to ask them questions about career paths, applying to college, research in Bioengineering, and what it's like to be a graduate student at UCSD. Additionally, they produced several videos for the Bioengineering Graduate Society YouTube channel, including a "Who are Bioengineers" video introducing several graduate students and faculty in the department, and an "Ask a Bioengineer" video series where students can submit questions for graduate students to answer related to Bioengineering. They hope these videos will help promote UCSD bioengineering and make Bioengineering more accessible to all.
Secondly, they established a partnership with the BioCom Institute to create the Biocom California Institute Graduate Education Fellowship. This provides an unprecedented platform to potentially reach hundreds of additional schools in Biocom network. This award supports scholarships for conference attendance and gives our graduate students the opportunity to gain cross-functional work experience. They collaborate closely with educators, private donors, and biotech companies who are looking to reach high school students. This year, they quadrupled the number of high schools in our network and created whole new lessons to teach students basic bioinformatic skills necessary to analyze Illumina sequencing data. They are currently facilitating Illumina’s outreach goal to have iSeq experiments in San Diego High Schools. In addition to Clairemont High School, they are now operating at High Tech High (Clairemont campus), Helix Charter High School (La Mesa), and San Dieguito Academy High School (Encinitas). Attached is information regarding the award.
Finally, they created a new open software COVID-seq bioinformatics demo to teach students how COVID RT-PCR tests were developed starting from template COVID sequencing data. The students also learn how to align the original COVID virus spike protein RNA sequence a variant one to directly observe mutations discovered by the CDC. They are planning to expand this demo to San Dieguito Academy next year and include it in the BioCom high school curriculum.
In closing, they would like to acknowledge our team including Karl Wessendorf Rodriguez from Dr. Christian Metallo’s Lab, Elizabeth Heyde, a UCSD graduate alum now an R&D Engineer II at Medtronic, Gisselle Gonzalez from Dr. Adam Engler’s Lab, and Tiffany Zhou from Dr. Jeff Hasty’s Lab. They would also like to acknowledge Dr. Stephanie Fraley for her continual support in the funding and development of this program, and the UCSD Bioengineering faculty for generously allowing their students to be involved in this program. As the program expands this coming year, they are actively recruiting additional students and faculty who would be interested in expanding their reach into the San Diego community.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution.