UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering

PhD alumni Connor Tsuchida and Ivana Vasic have both been named to the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list for their achievements in Healthcare! Tsuchida has founded Crispr delivery startup Azalea Therapeutics, and Vasic is developing therapies to support the next generation of in vitro fertilization as founder of Vitra Labs.

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Two Bioengineering PhD alumni have innovations named to the Time Magazine 200 Best Inventions of 2023 list. The Cala kIQ, developed by Cala Health, founded by alumna Kate Rosenbluth, is a wearable, rechargeable device that sends electrical impulses from the wrist to the brain, to assist patients with Essential Tremor and Parkinson’s. Proven 40 OS is a fertilizer using naturally occurring microbes that live on a plant’s root system and release nitrogen to reduce emissions and pollution while producing higher crop yields – developed by Pivot Bio, founded by alumnus Karsten Temme.

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PhD alumnus Wilbur Lam, now Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech, has been named one of the 2023 new members of the National Academy of Medicine. Lam was recognized for “outstanding contributions in point-of-care, home-based, and/or smartphone-enabled diagnostics that are changing the management of pediatric and hematologic diseases as well as development of microsystems technologies as research-enabling platforms to investigate blood biophysics. He also leads national/NIH efforts to assess diagnostic tests (including those for COVID-19) for the entire country.”

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Five Bioengineering PhD students have been named Siebel Scholars of the class of 2024: Cindy Ayala, Ruiming Cao, Sita Srinivasan Chandrasekaran, Cameron Tadashi Kato, and Andre Lai. The Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes top students at the world’s leading graduate schools of bioengineering, business, computer science and energy science.

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Three bioengineering PhD alumni, all of whom are now UCSF-affiliated faculty, have been awarded a $3.93 million Translational Team Science Award from the Department of Defense. Led by Yan Li, associate professor, Janine Lupo, professor, and Eugene Ozhinsky, assistant professor of the VA Advanced Imaging Research Center, the grant will support their efforts to create new, AI-based approaches that will enable direct translation of non-invasive metabolic MR imaging methods into clinical practice.

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PhD student Connor Tsuchida is first author on a new paper in “Cell” from the Doudna and Ye labs, using single-cell analysis to look at chromosome loss after CRISPR-Cas9 editing using a broad range of guide RNAs. The authors suggest a protocol to prevent chromosome loss

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PhD alumna Julea Vlassakis, now Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University, has been named a 2023 NIH Director’s New Innovator! These prestigious awards support early-career investigators with ambitious, unconventional project proposals demonstrating broad impact potential.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that Berkeley ME professor Grace Gu has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the LLNL Early Career UC Faculty Initiative! Gu will receive up to $1 million in funding over five years to support a research project that seeks to advance AI-driven manufacturing for metal-ceramic composite structures.

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