Spotlights

Developing sustainable and scalable industry connections for the UC San Diego Bioengineering students. >> VIEW FLYER
Date: Wednesday February 10, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Location: REMO Virtual Booth

The Lucira COVID-19 All-In-One Test Kit is a molecular (real-time loop mediated amplification reaction) test that uses a simple nasal swab to return results in 30 minutes, at home. Lucira says the test will cost less than $50, and requires a prescription from a health care provider.

These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field or fields and publication year in the Web of Science™. Of the world's population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1000.

Professor Sheng Zhong is part of the collaborative effort from researchers worldwide working to create a common reference map of all human cells that will allow us to better understand and treat disease: the Human Cell Atlas (HCA). This network is contributing to an endothelial cell atlas in space and time by mapping the transcriptomes of endothelial cells from several tissues from donors of different ages and developing cutting-edge computational tools.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the cancellation of many summer undergraduate research experiences. UC San Diego’s Adam J. Engler quickly adapted his REU to an online program—opening up the opportunity to hundreds of students worldwide. >> read the article

BMES 2020 Fellowship Awarded

Serine, glycine and other nonessential amino acids are critical for tumour progression, and strategies to limit their availability are emerging as potential therapies for cancer. However, the molecular mechanisms driving this response remain unclear and the effects on lipid metabolism are relatively unexplored.

Nominated by: Professor Pedro Cabrales, Professor Geert Schmid-Schoenbein, and Professor Ester Kwon

Nominated by: Professor Adam Engler and Professor Bruce Wheeler

Nominated by: Professor Andrew McCulloch and Jennifer Stowe


An international team of researchers has developed a non-invasive blood test that can detect whether an individual has one of five common types of cancers, four years before the condition can be diagnosed with current methods.

This year's Outstanding Chapter Award goes to the University Of California - San Diego led by chapter president Reo Yoo.

Drs. Arnost and Kitty Fronek were both recruited by Dr. Benjamin W. Zweifach and joined the newly formed Bioengineering group in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, a precursor of today’s Department of Bioengineering, at UC San Diego. As medical investigators, their appointment in 1968 was a critical step in coalescing Bioengineering studies, research and education into a new profession with an explicit health care medical research direction.

The Department of Bioengineering ranks 4th in the nation for biomedical/bioengineering (US News and World Report Ranking of Best Engineering Schools, published March 2020).

"The UC San Diego Department of Bioengineering is ranked 1st in the nation for biomedical engineering by the National Research Council
at the National Academies. The department has been consistenly ranked among the top five programs in the nation every year for more than a decade."

UC San Diego bioengineering professor Shu Chien made many foundational scientific discoveries over the course of his 62-year academic career, ranging from uncovering a key reason why sedentary lifestyles can be unhealthy to how to more efficiently screen for adverse effects of small molecule drugs in patients.


It is a tremendous pleasure to announce the winners of the 2019-2020 Shunichi Usami Ph.D. Thesis Design Award in Bioengineering are:
Jun Wang: "Silicon Integrated Neuromorphic Neural Interfaces"
Pranjali Beri: "Cellular Adhesion Strength as a Potential Biophysical Marker of Metastatic Behavior"

It is a tremendous pleasure to announce the winners of the 2019-2020 Engelson Ph.D. Thesis Award in Bioengineering are:
Yiqian (Shirley) Wu "From Visualization of Molecular Events to Remote Control of T Cells"
Yan Wu "Studying human development via the single-cell profiling of primary human tissues and genetic perturbation of novel developmental models"

- Keynote Speaker: Dr. Mark Saltzman
- Student Organization Demos
- Senior Design Showcase
- Networking Luncheon
- Industry Demos
Wearable Sensing, NeuroPace, MaxCyte, Advanced Brain Monitoring, Cellink
- Quizbowl

San Diego, Calif., March 25, 2019--Two researchers at Jacobs School of Engineering were inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the organization announced. Professors Pedro Cabrales and Todd Coleman from the Department of Bioengineering were recognized during a ceremony at the National Academy of Sciences Great Hall in Washington, DC, on March 25.

San Diego, Calif., Feb. 5, 2019 -- Pancreatic cancer is the third most lethal cancer in the United States. Patients typically don’t know they have it until it’s too late, making it difficult to treat. Only 9 percent survive five years after diagnosis.

Clinical Bioengineering course offers undergraduate engineering students hands-on learning experience to solve clinical problems

San Diego, Calif., Jan. 28, 2019 -- A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego has identified a genetic pathway that causes some individuals to develop an abnormal heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, after experiencing a heart attack. They have also identified a drug candidate that can block this pathway.

San Diego, Calif., Jan. 24, 2019 -- “Biomaterials that can promote tissue repair and regeneration on their own without the need for delivering cells or other therapeutics have emerged as a potentially powerful paradigm for regenerative medicine.”

Join us in congratulating Dr. Bernhard Palsson & Dr. Rob Knight on this special recognition!!

Out of 343 teams, the UC San Diego Bioengineering IGEM team received 2nd place overall in the undergraduate track, UC San Diego's first finalist seeding in school and iGEM history. Our team won best overall diagnostics project as well as the following Special Track prizes: Best Education and Public Engagement, Best Entrepreneurship, Best Poster, and additional top 5 nominations in Best Integrated Human Practices and Best Wiki.

"The ultimate goal is to develop scalable maps that can zoom out to describe the functions of whole systems, and zoom in to the level of single cells and genomes." -Dr. Kun Zhang The money comes in two grants from the National Institutes of Health.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/biotech/sd-me-ucsd-salk-up...


Dr. Shankar Subramaniam is one of the pioneers of the field of developing data and analysis environments for metabolomics. His research group focuses on systems biology and systems medicine, including diseases of the liver, muscles, brain and vascular system.

Congratulations Dr. Elliot McVeigh for being Awarded the 2018 EMBS Technical Achievement Award
Mridu Sinha
Mridu completed her Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Profs. Todd P. Coleman and Stephanie I. Fraley Co-Advisers, and her thesis title is:
“Improving Clinical Practices in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: A Bioengineering Approach”

Chul Kim
Chul completed his Ph.D. thesis under the guidance of Professor Gert Cauwenberghs and his thesis title is:
"Energy-Efficient Integrated Biomedical Circuits and Systems for Unobtrusive Neural Recording and Wireless Body-Area Networks"


The BMES Annual Meeting is the largest and FASTEST growing event for the biomedical engineering and bioengineering fields.


Heart and brain activity are routinely measured through the skin with adhesive electrodes. But diagnosing gastric diseases may require patients to endure a tube stuck through the nose, down the throat and into the stomach.
“Bioengineering is a rapidly growing discipline. Many universities have invested heavily to grow their programs. Under the leadership of our recent chair Dr. Geert Schmid-schoenbein, and with the strong support by Dean Pisano, we recruited a record number of five top-notch faculty last year, continued to improve our graduate program, and further enhanced our strong partnership with our medical school. We are also the only Bioengineering Department in the country that has three ABET accredited undergraduate majors. I am very pleased that our efforts were well recognized in the survey by US News & Report.” -Dr. Kun Zhang. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/n

Congratulations Dr. Stephanie Fraley on receiving the 2016-2017 Best Teacher Award for Bioengineering !

Aswini Krishnan, a fourth-year bioengineering major at the University of California San Diego, has been awarded a Churchill Scholarship, one of the most prestigious and competitive awards available to American students pursuing science, mathematics and engineering fields. The award provides one year of funding to pursue a master’s degree at Winston Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.

Congratulations for this exceptional recognition of your outstanding early achievements as a young Engineering Professor!!

Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery UC San Diego – Summer 2018 – Accepting Applications The Jacobs school of Engineering (JSOE) at UC San Diego hosts a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) summer program in Biomaterials. The objectives of the program are to train undergraduates in basic research through challenging biomaterial-related engineering projects performed with research mentors from en

Chul Kim, a Bioengineering PhD graduate student in the Jacobs School of Engineering, will be receiving the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award for 2017-18. The award will be conferred at the 2018 International Solid-State Circuits Confere


San Diego, Calif., Nov. 10, 2017 -- Eight of the top 10 research grants awarded to UC San Diego departments outside of health sciences this year are led by women. And Karen Christman, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering, is one of them. Christman brought in $2.8 million dollars dor a research grant from the State of California. The Christman Lab focuses on developing innovative biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications.

Becoming an AIMBE Fellow is more than just another honorific designation. AIMBE Fellows are expected to "giveback" by contributing to AIMBE's critical mission of advancing excellence and advocating for the fields of medical and biological engineering . Never before has it been more critical for those in biomedical engineering to stand up for science and medical innovation.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has developed a technology for very accurate sequencing and haplotyping of genomes from single human cells.

Dr. Shankar Subramaniam is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair Professor of Bioengineering and Systems Biology at the University of California San Diego. He is a distinguished professor of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Nano Engineering at the University of California San Diego.

On August 10, 2017, Walt Baxter, Ph.D., a 1999 Graduate from UCSD Department of Bioengineering, was inducted at a black tie ceremony into Medtronic’s Bakken Society (http://adesignerportraits.com/2017-medtronic-bakken-society/). Medtronic is the world’s leading developer and distributor of medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, heart valves, brain stimulators, and diabetes management systems.

Dr. Contijoch earned his Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Pennsylvania in Bioengineering. For his graduate research, he was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) – NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) Interfaces Fellowship as well as a National Institutes of Health National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Fellowship.

Dr. King’s lab studies diseases that activate the body’s immune system even though there is no infection, such as heart attacks, metabolic disease, asthma, autoimmunity, and cancer. Researchers combine conventional biological techniques with bioengineering to uncover novel disease mechanisms and develop new therapies that limit organ dysfunction and promote healing, repair and regeneration. Previously he was a Cardiology fellow, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards.

Dr. Valdez-Jasso received her Undergraduate and Masters degrees in Applied Mathematics, and her doctoral degree in Biomathematics, all from the Department of Mathematics at North Carolina State University. Her graduate thesis, which was recognized for its excellence with a Lucas Research Award, focused on modeling approaches to understanding the dynamic pressure-area relationship of systemic arteries.

Ludmil Alexandrov is an Oppenheimer Fellow in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group and the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Neumont University and received his Master’s of Philosophy in Computational Biology as well as his Ph.D. in Cancer Genetics from the University of Cambridge.
Materials at the nanoscale have emergent physical properties (e.g., quantam confinement, photonics, super-paramagnetism), and also interact with biological systems in unique ways (e.g., enhanced permeation and retention effect, multi-valent ligand binding, phagocytosis). Combining these two phenomena, engineers can create nanosystems that interact with living host organisms to achieve diagnostic and therapeutic goals.

Upon the recommendation of the Graduate Studies Awards Committee (Professor Intaglietta, Chair) the winner of the 2017 Engelson PhD Thesis Award in Bioengineering is:
Armen A. Gharibans

Upon the recommendation of the Graduate Studies Awards Committee (Professor Intaglietta, Chair) the winner of the 2017 Shunichi Usami PhD Thesis Design Award in Bioengineering is:
Dae Y. Kang

At the University of California, San Diego, diversity is a core component of excellence that further enhances our quality and achievement.