News

Congratulations to all of our 2026 Grad Slam finalists! Nadja Michelle Maldonada Luna took 3rd place at UCSF on April 7, and Kavita Parekh and Grace Hu competed at Berkeley on April 8, with Kavita winning the People’s Choice prize. Amazing work showcasing a passion for their research!

Congratulations Leen Arnaout and Carlos Ng Pitti, winners of UC Berkeley’s 2026 Outstanding Graduate Peer Mentor Award! Peer-to-peer mentoring is a critical part of graduate education — we appreciate our fantastic student guides.

PhD alumna Tejal Desai, now Dean of the Brown University School of Engineering, has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s most prestigious general scientific societies.

Grad Slam challenges PhD students to present their research in three-minute talks. Grace Hu and Kavita Parekh are finalists in the UC Berkeley slam (April 8), and Nadja Michelle Maldonado Luna at UCSF (April 7)! The winners from each campus will compete in the UC-wide Slam on April 22.

Congratulations to Professor Steve Conolly for his well-deserved receipt of the 2026 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award at UC Berkeley. This award recognizes his many years of advising literally hundreds of students with a sympathetic ear, constructive criticism/feedback, and sound advice rooted in experience.

PhD student Lucas Waldburger is co-lead author on a paper describing their new tool which promises to vastly accelerate plant engineering. ENTRAP-seq can simultaneously screen thousands of transcription regulators for plants, and shrinks experiments that previously required a whole plant or whole leaf down to a single cell.

Congratulations to awardee Alonso Torres and Honorable Mention Stephanie Brener, recognized in the 2026 Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Mentoring for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars at UCSF!

Berkeley engineering faculty Grace Gu and Grace O’Connell were awarded the 2025 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to scientists and engineers in the early stages of their careers.

UCSF Health-UCSF Medical Center has again been named to the national Honor Roll in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025-2026 Best Hospitals rankings for adult care, a distinction earned by only 20 medical centers nationwide and four in California. It tied as the No. 1 hospital in California and ranked best in the state for cancer, geriatrics, neurology and neurosurgery, pulmonology and rheumatology.

Researchers led by UC Berkeley Professor Michael Lustig have developed Displacement Spectrum MRI, an innovative imaging technique that traces blood flow sources ‘in reverse’ to study brain function and disease.

Congratulations to BioE PhD alumna Monica Kapil, the first woman ever named Alumna of the Year by the SJSU Mechanical Engineering Department!

Congratulations to first-year PhD student Chance Bowman, awarded one of only nineteen 2025 Hertz Foundation Fellowships! The highly prestigious Hertz Fellowship is among the oldest and most coveted awards in science and engineering graduate studies.

Bioengineering doctoral student Maria Astolfi and her colleagues argue for a new type of partnership with indigenous peoples to create a more ethical bioeconomy, one that will sustain indigenous biodiversity and bring these communities into science as equal partners.

The Guggenheim, one of the most prestigious fellowships in the country, provides unrestricted funding to pursue cutting-edge creative research. Landry plans to study how compounds extracted from plants used in Indigenous Bolivian medicine might have potential as treatments for nervous system disorders.

Congratulations to our new NSF Graduate Research Fellows! Among the winners are current PhD students Ashley Qin and incoming PhD students Erin Ahern and Steven Robles Blasini. Well done!

UC Berkeley Professor Phillip Messersmith, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering, has been named to the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Also named this year were PhD Alumni Karen Christman, Professor at UC San Diego, and Wilbur Lam, Professor at Emory University / Georgia Institute of Technology.

Devin Schoen and Benjamin Sipes are two of this year’s ten finalists in the UCSF Grad Slam competition. On April 2 each finalist will present their research in three minutes or less, in language accessible to a general audience, and the winner will go on to the UC Grad Slam. Attend in person or tune into the YouTube live stream to vote for the People’s Choice award!

BioE graduate student Jazmin Isabel Velazquez examines the unique paths graduate students take on the road to their PhD in this story based on her experience in the Healy and Rubinsky Labs.

Berkeley faculty Adam Arkin and Rikky Muller have received awards of over $20 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to pursue microbiome engineering and implantable biologic drug delivery.

Research by PhD student Ruming Cao has developed a new computational imaging tool for visualizing moving samples. Led by Professor Laura Waller, the neural space-time model (NSTM) uses a small, lightweight neural network to reduce motion artifacts and solve for the motion trajectories.

Three Bioengineering PhD students have been named Siebel Scholars of the class of 2025: Claire Hilburger, Eric Markley and Sakshi Shah. The Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes top students at the world’s leading graduate schools of bioengineering, business, computer science and energy science.

Mekhail Anwar receives up to $15 million from ARPA-H to develop a next-generation miniature scanner powerful enough to detect individual cancer cells during surgery.

Seth Shipman and his team have developed a more efficient way to make several precise edits simultaneously to human cells.

MD/PhD student Alice Tang has achieved first place in the 2024 AMIA Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Awards, a prestigious honor for top doctoral dissertations that contribute to the science of informatics in any biomedical application domain. Tang’s work is on “Leveraging Clinical Data and Knowledge Networks to Derive Insights Into Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Congratulations to bioengineering students Devan Shah and Serena Tang, awarded 2024 Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Scholarships!