STUDENTS
EXCEPTIONAL MERIT Graduate students earn competitive fellowships to further their research
THREE BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS HAVE RECEIVED GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM AWARDS FROM THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION. The GRFP is a competitive program that recognizes and supports outstanding students who are pursuing research-based graduate degrees in science and engineering. LUCIANO GROISMAN, JESSICA HERRERA AND THINH PHAN are among 46 awardees from UCI who will receive three years of annual funding. Groisman entered the BME doctoral program this fall, advised by Professors Elliot Botvinick and Ali Mohraz. The single parent of a child diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, his research seeks to develop longer-lasting insulin infusion technology.
BME Discovery
“After years of dealing with my son’s Type 1 diabetes, I realized the available technology did not live up to its potential,” Groisman said. “This drove my desire to develop tools for better glucose management for my son and others who deal with this burden daily.” Herrera, who recently completed her undergraduate degree at UCI, plans to pursue a doctorate in the UCSFUC Berkeley joint Ph.D. program in bioengineering. Advised as an undergraduate by Distinguished Professor Kyriacos Athanasiou, she researches tissue engineering of articular cartilage, the tissue that covers the ends of bones in joints and helps cushion and distribute forces during movement such as walking and running. By engineering replacement cartilage from cartilage cells, Herrera hopes to advance treatment options for those who suffer from
cartilage degradation and osteoarthritis. “I am very grateful and honored to receive this funding. It will help me accomplish my goal of becoming a professor and helping people through my research,” she said. Phan, a second-year biomedical engineering doctoral student, is advised by Professor Bernard Choi. He is working to create a whole-brain optical imaging system that can monitor cerebral blood flow and metabolic activities in vivo in a quantitative manner, with the ultimate goal of picturing the brain’s functional activities in diseases like stroke and Alzheimer’s. “The imaging system would aid in further understanding the overarching mechanisms of these diseases and could potentially lead to novel effective therapeutics,” Phan said.
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