Congratulations to Anum Azam, Tim Downing, Zach Russ, and Augusto Tentori, 2012-2013 Oustanding Graduate Student Instructors at UC Berkeley. These GSIs were nominated by their instructor for excellent teaching and mentoring as GSIs in a bioengineering class.  Congratulations!

Congratulations to Allison Berke, a winner of the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize in Literary Composition at UC Berkeley.  The Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prizes in Literary Composition are awarded for excellence of composition in poetry, story writing, drama, or another field of literary composition.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program has awarded prestigious fellowships to seven Berkeley-UCSF graduate students:  Daniel Hensley, Kesshi Jordan, Isaac Joseph, Preeya Khanna, Harrison Liu, Ryan Orendorff, and Julea Vlassakis.The NSF Graduate fellowship supports graduate students who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees. The award provides graduate students with three years of financial support and opportunities for professional growth. The NSF Graduate Fellowship is the oldest fellowship of its kind. Past recipients include several Nobel Prize winners, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Google Founder Sergey Brin.

Bioengineering Ph.D. student Connie Cheung was the team leader for the third-place team in this year’s UCSF Idea to IPO course.

The unique course uses seasoned entrepreneurs, teachers and mentors to help student teams translate their concepts into health care and life science startup businesses. The seventy students formed teams to focus on an idea, assess its market potential, create a business model and learn about clinical trials, financing, budgets, legal structures, regulatory requirements, intellectual property and operational basics.

The experience culminated in pitches to industry experts, where Cheung’s team won $15,000 in third place. Spiria, their business idea, uses an approach to brain mapping, based on a grid of sensors, is faster and safer than current methods. Read more at UCSF. 

BioE graduate student Daniel Cohen has been awarded the 2013 Daniel Cubicciotti Award by the San Francisco section of the Electrochemical Society.

The award is given to a student based upon their  academic record, quality of prior research activities, and personal characteristics including the highest level of integrity, an innovative and probing mind, inter-personal skills, and joy for life. Community services and participation in other activities, including, but not limited to music, sports, theatre, and teaching are also considered.

Congratulations Daniel!

Akwasi Apori and Samuel Tia of Amy Herr’s lab have formed Biomarque, creating cheap and portable integrated screening diagnostics for Hepatitis C and HIV. Peter Ledochowitsch will be working with other team members and Professor Michel Maharbiz on SiliCoG, enabling the measurement and wireless transmission of electrical signals from the cerebral cortex surface.

The Foundry is a one-year incubator program for start-ups, which provides access to design, manufacturing and business development tools, along with a community of entrepreneurs and experts.

Read more at The Foundry.

Very recent BioE alumna An-Chi Tsou was profiled in the Daily Cal about her new job at the California Science and Technology Policy Fellowship.

Tsou, who graduated in December 2012, is serving in the office of Assemblymember Rob Bonta, D-Oakland as a health and science adviser. The fellowship selects scientists and engineers for one-year appointments to the state Legislature to build collaboration between public policy and science.

Read more at the Daily Cal.

The LegoScope – a simple microscope based upon the CellScope developed in Fletcher Lab and built with Legos – was featured on ABC7 news on Thursday, January 17.

The LegoScope was conceived by three UCSF graduate students, including BioE student Harrison Liu, during a collaboration between UC Berkeley, UCSF, and famous Bay Area product design firm IDEO. The team hopes that the DIY microscope will help students around the world learn optics and microscopy, unconstrained by budgets and equipment.

Check out their segment on KGO TV.

Read more about the UCSF-IDEO collaboration to improve medical science with cutting-edge design.

Bioengineering Ph.D. student Kelly Karns has been awarded a coveted Kauffman Fellowship, one of only thirty offered each year. Karns will be participating in a 24-month apprenticeship with a venture capital firm and become a lifetime member of the Society of Kauffman Fellows.

The Kauffman Fellowship is a highly sought-after two-year program dedicated exclusively to the world of venture capital and the cultivation of new high-technology, high-growth, high-impact companies. The Kauffman Fellows faculty brings together leading venture capital investors, along with entrepreneurs, limited partners, engineering and science thought-leaders, corporate chiefs, and policy experts from academia and government. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the Kauffman Fellows Program is administered by the Center for Venture Education.

Congratulations Kelly!

BioE graduate student Mozzi Etemadi, along post-doc Kayvan Keshari, has won the Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award.  Davis Li, a former BioE undergrad, was also involved in the project.

Etemadi and Keshari won the challenge by developing a more efficient way to harvest biofuel from algae. The designed a way to use fiber optics to deliver light below the surface of the large vats where algae are grown for biofuels, so that more can be produced. 

Read more about the SISCA Award at Dow.