Pamela Duran, Ph.D. was recognized for her thesis:

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.