Teaching and empowering future bioengineering leaders with excellence, diversity, and inclusion.

Student Honors

Gregory Poore

PhD Graduate Student, 4th Year

Y. C. “Bert” Fung Interdisciplinary Award

Greg was nominated by Professor Rob Knight and was selected for this prestigious award particularly because he has assembled and led a team of international collaborators to define the cancer microbiome (bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live in tumors) and use it to guide diagnosis. He succeeded where many others had failed through a combination of technical advances from his engineering training and clinical insight from his medical training, and his company, Micronoma, is bringing cancer microbiome diagnostics to the large number of patients who can benefit.

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2021 Ring Ceremony Bioengineering Award Recipient

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.

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Aoife O’Farrell, BS '21

2019-2020 Engelson Ph.D. Thesis Award

The Engelson Ph.D. Thesis Award " is a permanently endowed annual Student Award in the Department of Bioengineering. The award will recognize the “best” Ph.D. Thesis of the academic year in the Department of Bioengineering according to the following criteria:

Originality
Depth of the analysis
Significance of the work and its potential impact

Dhruva Katrekar, PhD '21

Dhruva Katrekar

Dhruva completed his Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Professor Prashant Mali and his thesis title is: "Engineering a programmable RNA editing toolset for correction of point mutations in vivo."

“I am currently an employee of a gene therapy start-up called Shape Therapeutics and out here I'm working towards enabling clinical translation of my Ph.D. research.”

Vishwajith (Vish) Ramesh

Vish completed his Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Professor Gert Cauwenberghs and his thesis title is: “Human-Centered Machine Learning for Healthcare.”

“I am a Postdoctoral Researcher and NIH National Library of Medicine Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego. I am also the co-founder and CEO of a start-up currently in stealth. I aspire to take the stroke diagnosis technology I worked on as a Ph.D. student out of the lab and into active clinical environments.”

Vishwajith Ramesh, PhD '20

USAMI Award

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. This year, the award goes to Martin Spang.

Bioengineering student earns Strauss Scholarship

Undergraduate launches This Able online mentoring program

UC San Diego bioengineering undergraduate Zina Patel was selected to receive the $15,000 Strauss Scholarship, awarded to outstanding students developing social change or public service projects. Patel is one of only 14 students to receive the scholarship, which aims to prepare future leaders by encouraging them to undertake a high-impact venture and providing the funds to get started.

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Zina PatelUndergraduate StudentSenior

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) Awards

The NSF 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.

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Innovative Student Teaching - TA Excellence Award

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 2021 academic year, Michael Fitzgerald and Vasiliki Courellis were commended for their contributions to the success of their students in the classroom.

Michael Fitzgerald is a second year PhD student in Dr. Shankar Subramaniam's lab. Vasiliki Courellis is a second year MS Plan I student in Dr. Pedro Cabrales’ lab.

Michael Fitzgerald

PhD Graduate Student

Michael Fitzgerald

“Michael Fitzgerald has really gone above and beyond in BENG 130 with taking lead in setting up the group project guidelines, spearheading the meetings with students who needed help with their projects, and actively discussing/helping students with the course material in problem solving sessions beyond just solving problems, such as leading quiz games (i.e. Kahoot!). He also is active with answering student questions either within and/or outside the online classroom environment by email. His enthusiasm and eagerness to help students succeed in understanding/learning the material in BENG 130 has by far exceeded minimum expectations. He went above and beyond such expectations and thus I nominate him for the TA excellence award.”

Vasiliki Courellis

“Vasiliki went above and beyond as our TA for the entirety of the senior design project, consistently providing helpful feedback and resources to help us.” [She was] “very helpful to our senior design group and [was] good at setting clear expectations.”

“Her dedication and commitment to senior design make a big difference in the outcome of many projects.”

Vasiliki Courellis

PhD Graduate Student

Student Focus

A “Virtual” Breakfast with Industry.

Our amazing BWI Chair (Katherine Decker) with our keynote speaker (Dr. Ted Love). Deepan Thiruppathy, a 2nd year graduate student, participated in the live Q/A on our networking platform, Remo.

BEGS: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome the Virtual Format

It would be incorrect, and very much a flat out lie, to say that everyone in the Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS) loved the idea of virtual events. We wouldn’t acknowledge it, but we all hated the idea of Zoom hangouts after 8 hours of Zoom meetings. In the past, most of the BioE graduate students were comfortable hanging in the graduate lounge to interact with fellow graduate students.

After a trial run of virtual gatherings in Spring 2020, it already seemed like an uphill battle to implement and cultivate ideas for events. But, did our best to try to put on a good show.

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Setting Students and Organizations Up for Success

The COVID-19 pandemic and a year of remote life has helped show the importance of support systems in our daily lives. One of those support systems for bioengineering graduate students at UCSD is the Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS). BEGS provides graduate students with opportunities for both personal and professional develop during their degrees. And while some of the events may have looked different from typical years, BEGS was able keep serving that role through the pandemic thanks to the hard work of its leadership and to the systems of continuity that have been built up over the last few years. This is something to which Clara Posner has been vital.

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Clara Posner

Vice President Internal BEGSPhD Bioengineering Graduate Student

A Remote Reflection of Translational Medicine Day 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic wound on, and global vaccination efforts improved, many annual traditions found themselves adapting to the pandemic-induced, “remote-format” life. Translational Medicine Day, hosted by BMES to bring together students, industry professionals, and researchers interested in transforming research advances into patient-end medicine, found a unique kind of success in learning from last year’s efforts.

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Shayna Holness

PhD Graduate Student

Spotlight on Training in Multi-scale Analysis of Biological Structure and Function T32 Trainee

Shayna Holness: A “Force to be Reckoned With”

Since the inception of her Appointment to the Training in Multi-scale Analysis of Biological Structure and Function T32 Training Grant headed by Dr. Andrew McCulloch, Shayna has not only contributed to the Program greatly but has also contributed to Bioengineering as a whole.

Shayna Holness is a pre-doctoral student in Chemistry and Biochemistry with her research focusing on the Multi-scale study of replicative aging in S. cerevisiae. She is mentored by Drs. Jeff Hasty (Molecular Biology)and Elizabeth Villa (Molecular Biology). From the start as a trainee in the the program, Shayna delved right into helping with program events such as the NIBIB Symposium which takes place once a year in the Fall. The Symposium serves to connect trainees with one another, as well as Training Program Faculty, Staff and Alumni. Trainees will create a planning committee, which Shayna served on, and take part of the planning process. Shayna dedicated much of her time to planning a great Symposium for the year 2019 and also presented her research while helping run the event the day of. The fact that she has contributed much of her time and expertise to the Training Program is not even half of it.

Shayna graduated from Rider University, with not only a B.A. in music but also a B.S. in Biochemistry. She also completed the NSF and NIH-sponsored Summer Programs back in 2017. The list of all of Shayna’s accomplishments would probably never end, as she continues to break barriers as a young woman in Chemistry and Biochemistry. Beyond the Training Program, Shayna is also committed to her work in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, once again showing her tremendous potential and why she was chosen as a Trainee on the Training Grant. In summary, Shayna Holness is what some would describe as a “force to be reckoned with”, a very humble person but watch out world for she will surely make great changes to this world!

Student Spotlight

Aditi GnanasekarUndergraduate StudentSenior

Undergraduate Bioengineering Researcher Earns Goldwater Scholarship

Aditi is a rising senior at UC San Diego majoring in Bioengineering: Biotechnology. Apart from school and research, she loves to sing, swim, and watch basketball, and has recently started roller skating as well. She has applied her bioengineering know-how as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Professor Weg Ongkeko at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, analyzing RNA sequences to extract information on immune cell expression, ultimately working toward characterizing cancers on the molecular level.

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Adventures in Nanomedicine

Maya Holay attended Carnegie Mellon University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Chemical and Biomedical engineering in 2017. She began her graduate studies in UC San Diego’s Nanoengineering department and is currently a fourth year PhD candidate working in bioengineering faculty affiliate Dr. Liangfang Zhang’s lab. Her current research aims to expand the biomimetic therapeutic toolbox by developing novel cell and extracellular membrane coated nanoparticles.

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Maya Holay

PhD Graduate Student

Hope Leng, BS '21

Philosophy, STEM, and the Genentech Outstanding Student Award

A Philosophy major before transferring to the UCSD Bioengineering Program, Hope Leng has a strong inclination for the humanities, along with her own passion for bioengineering. She loves to read and dance, thinks that humanities and STEM go hand in hand, and loves bringing creativity from the humanities to the lab bench.

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To Our Peers, We Are All Strong During This Global Pandemic

Sicily is a senior studying Bioengineering: Biotechnology who recently graduated in June 2021. Her hobbies include dancing, painting, cooking, making things and she likes being creative in everything that she does. She also likes the outdoors and playing sports. Sicily has learnt a lot at UCSD and she hopes that she can make a difference in what she sets out to do.

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Sicily Rose Panattil, BS '21

Masters Program Student

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