Early Career Researchers
Early Career Researchers
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Advancing Scientific Knowledge
In their chosen research areas, early career researchers strive to position themselves as leading experts. With their fresh perspectives and innovative ideas, they are making significant contributions to advancing scientific knowledge.
2023 Sloan Research Fellow
2023 Sloan Research Fellow
Lingyan Shi, Ph.D.
Lingyan Shi, Ph.D.
A Sloan Research fellowship is one of the most distinguished awards available to young researchers, in part because so many recipients have gone on to become unparalleled leaders in their fields — 56 Fellows have received a Nobel Prize, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, and 22 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics.
"Sloan Research fellows are shining examples of innovative and impactful research,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We are thrilled to support their groundbreaking work and we look forward to following their continued success."
UC San Diego bioengineering professor Lingyan Shi is pushing the boundaries of what's possible when it comes to using targeted light to look inside living cells. Her work in the fast-moving field of biophotonics has already led to the development of improved platforms for peering into living cells with high resolution both in terms of space and time. For example, Shi created an imaging platform that relies on a "heavy" version of water which allows her team to ask and answer intriguing questions about how diet affects fat metabolism – questions that are leading to new insights regarding diabetes and aging. Shi and her team have also developed new techniques for looking deep into the brain as well as new disease diagnostics, such as early identification of specific types of cancer.
One of the foundations of Shi's biophotonics research is "chemical imaging" in which energy from exquisitely targeted photons vibrates the chemical bond of molecules – like a pluck on a guitar string. Instead of music, vibrational frequencies triggered by this "pluck" allow Shi and her team to see specific molecules within a living cell.
"The Sloan Research Fellowship is a great honor for me and my research team! Thank you," said Shi, who leads the Laboratory of Optical Bioimaging and Spectroscopy within the Shu-Chien and Gene-Lay Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
More technically, Shi Lab’s is developing novel chemical imaging technologies that reveal the spatial-temporal metabolomics in situ at multiscale level (from subcellular organelle to large area of tissue) and studying insightful mechanistic information for age-related mitochondrial dysfunction and diseases. Her team’s research provides a next-generation SRS microscopy which goes super-resolution and multiplex. The new imaging platform allows researchers to quantitatively visualize the metabolic dynamics of a large variety of functional biomolecules, which offers powerful tools potentially for disease detection, diagnosis and treatment, as well as for mechanistic understanding of scientific fundamentals in normal physiology, aging, or diseases.
Related work from the Shi lab on Super-resolution SRS microscopy was just published in Nature Methods.
Read about Dr. Shi's work with an interdisciplinary team of UC San Diego Researchers building a first-of-its-kind microscope.
2023 NIH Director's New Innovator Award
2023 NIH Director's New Innovator Award
Brian Aguado, Ph.D.
Brian Aguado, Ph.D.
Brian Aguado, assistant professor in the Shu Chien- Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, received the 2023 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award. This prestigious award is part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, and enables exceptionally creative scientists to push the boundaries of biomedical science through broadly impactful research.
Aguado studies sex-specific differences in disease from the molecular scale all the way up to the organism level. His lab uses bioengineering tools to develop more relevant, sex-specific models and treatments for disease — starting with cardiovascular disease — and enable better clinical outcomes for patients to resolve sex-based health disparities. This New Innovator Award will enable him to use biomaterials to understand sex differences in how scar tissue develops in the heart muscle after injury at multiple length scales. Myocardial fibrosis — the scarring in the heart due to abnormal remodeling of the extracellular matrix (ECM) — is commonly seen with several heart diseases, including ventricular hemodynamic overload, myocardial infarction, cardiac inflammation and many familial cardiomyopathies, all of which can lead to heart failure. While medications exist to relieve heart failure symptoms, no effective therapeutics exist to halt and reverse myocardial fibrosis in a sex-specific manner.
Aguado aims to identify how X and Y chromosome dosage in heart cells gives rise to sex differences in cellular behaviors and ECM remodeling. Understanding the role of sex chromosomes in regulating myocardial fibrosis would significantly advance our understanding of sex-specific cardiovascular disease, potentially leading to more targeted sex-specific therapeutics. Aguado is also the recipient of a Science Diversity Leadership Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a Jacobs School Early Career Faculty Development Award, the NIH R00 Pathway to Independence Award and the American Heart Association Career Development Award.
Project Title: Probing Sex Differences in Myocardial Fibrosis at Multiple Length Scales Using Biomaterials
Grant ID: DP2-HL173948
Bio:
Dr. Brian Aguado is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, where his research is focused on studying sex differences in cardiovascular disease using biomaterial technologies. Dr. Aguado completed his B.S. degree in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford University, his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University, and his postdoctoral fellowship in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Aguado has most recently received the NHLBI K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, the American Heart Association Career Development Award, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Science Diversity Leadership Award to support his sex differences research. Dr. Aguado also co-founded LatinXinBME, a new social media initiative dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive community of Latinx biomedical engineers and scientists to mentor each other personally and professionally through their careers. For his efforts, Dr. Aguado was named one of the 100 Most Inspiring Latinx Scientists in America by Cell Press and received the Biomaterials Young Investigator Diversity Award from the Biomaterials journal.
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