Directory

Staff

Elizabeth Jensen

Assistant Director, Bioengineering Department
Business Officer

1104 BioE
Oversees department operations: Budget & Finance, Academic Personnel, Human Resources, Gifts, Procurement, Student Affairs.

Nicole Becker

Student Affairs Manager

1106 BioE
Responsible for the overall management of all graduate services, including the Biological Engineering PhD Program, the Bioengineering Graduate Emphasis, and the NSF and NIH training grants.

Debbie Fingerle

Personnel and Payroll Analyst

BioEngineering 1110

Elizabeth Floyd

Academic Program Administrator

1108 BioE
Program coordinator for Biological Engineering and its training programs. Responsible for program administration and student coordination for the NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program in Data Driven Biology and the NIH T32 training grant in Quantitative Mechanobiology.

Marty Grant

Contracts & Grants and Financial Manager

Remote

Responsible for the overall management of departmental finances and contracts and grants pre and post award administration.

Faculty

Beth L. Pruitt

Professor and Chair of Bioengineering
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Director, NSF Research Training Program in Data Driven Biology
Director, NIH T32 Training Program in Quantitative Mechanobiology
Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program

3108 BioE
The Pruitt Lab studies how mechanics mediates biological signaling using microtechnologies for cellular mechanobiology and mechanical measurements.

Marley Dewey

Assistant Professor of Bioengineering

3110 BioEngineering
The Dewey Lab engineers biomaterials with extracellular vesicles towards skeletal repair. Specifically, we examine a new class of extracellular vesicle residing in the extracellular matrix, termed matrix-bound nanovesicles. Using these tools we answer basic science questions and create translational therapies related to bone cancer, improving bone repair, preventing bone infection, and repairing coral reefs.

Siddharth Dey

Associate Professor of Bioengineering
Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering

3008 BioE
The goal of our lab is to develop novel single-cell sequencing technologies to understand how variability in the epigenome regulates gene expression heterogeneity and cell fate decisions.

Dorit Hanein

Professor of Bioengineering
Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Office: PSNB 4619 Labs:CHEM 1126, 1135A
The Hanein Lab is exploring the structural functional complexities of the macromolecular machines that drive our biological processes—this includes imaging them in three-dimension and high resolution while at work in isolation, as well as within cells, organoids and tissues.

Carolyn Mills

Assistant Professor of Bioengineering

The Mills lab is focused on the study and engineering of protein assemblies to address challenges in plastic waste remediation, biological liquid-liquid phase separation, and oral vaccine development. Leveraging combined expertise in protein engineering, soft matter, and synthetic biology, we aim to engineer microbial and biomolecular solutions to pressing global challenges that are low-cost and accessible.

Arnab Mukherjee

Assistant Professor of Bioengineering
Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering

3349 ENGR II
Our research focuses on engineering genetic reporters for imaging what we think of as the "dark matter" of biology - living systems that cannot be readily imaged using existing reporter gene techniques.

Michelle O'Malley

Professor of Bioengineering
Professor of Chemical Engineering
Scholle Chair in Chemical Engineering

3343 Engineering II
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology of non-model microorganisms.

Kevin Plaxco

Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Professor of Bioengineering
Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program

3002 BioE
In-vivo molecular measurements, anyone?

Ryan Stowers

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Engineering biomaterials to probe questions in mechanobiology.

Yon Visell

Associate Professor of Bioengineering, and of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program
Mechanical Engineering

2213 Elings Hall
Haptics, Robotics, Tactile Sensing, Soft Electronics, Soft Robotics, Bioinspired Systems, Computational Acoustics

Niels Volkmann

Professor of Biongineering
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Biomolecular Science and Engineering

Focuses on the development and application of innovative new computational, artificial intelligence, and data science tools to bridge information between the atomic and cellular scales, covering more than six orders of magnitude from Ångstroms to tens of microns

Students

Ivan Chavez (They/Their/Them)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee

Renata Dos Reis Marques (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee
Dewey Lab

Ella Evensen (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee

Sam Feinstein (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Pruitt Lab

Gianna Gathman (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee
Stowers Lab

Leo Harjanto (They/Their/Them)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Natasha Jones (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Mills Lab

Shaylee Larson (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee
Plaxco Lab

Trent Llewellyn (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Volkmann Lab

Brandon Nguyen (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee

Haley Obenshain (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Maya Papez (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
T32 Trainee

Artury Ramirez (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
O'Malley Lab

Elisabeth Rothman (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Chien Fellow

Donovan Sak (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Chien Fellow

Katelyn Schwarz (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Sarah Seagrave (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
O’Malley Lab

Rafael Solorzano (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Zsofia Szegletes (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Dey Lab

Kevin Valenzuela (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Marcus Varni (He/Him/His)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee

Lauren Washington (She/Her/Hers)

Graduate Student
DDB Trainee
Pruitt Lab

Affiliated

Dennis Clegg

Professor of of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Biomolecular Science and Engineering
Wilcox Family Chair in BioMedicine

5125 Biology II
Human stem cell research; Molecular mechanisms of stem cell differentiation; Derivation of ocular cells from stem cells; Soft tissue regeneration.

B.S. Manjunath

Distinguished Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science

3157 Harold Frank Hall

Research areas include image/video analysis (including texture and shape analysis, segmentation, registration); multimedia databases and

Angela Pitenis

Assistant Professor
Materials

3019 Materials Research Lab

Research at the intersection of materials science, physics, chemistry, and biology, and aims to understand interfacial phenomena and ener

Omar Saleh

Professor
Materials

3006 BioE
Saleh's research is focused on the molecular physics underlying biological systems, with particular experience in nucleic acids, protein/DNA interactions, biomolecular elasticity, and self-assembled biomolecular systems.

Spencer Smith

Associate Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Director, Dynamical Neuroscience Program
Co-Director, Brain Initiative

We're generally interested in how the brain works, at the level of neurons and synapses.

Sebastian Streichan

Associate Professor of Physics and of Biomolecular Science and Engineering

Broida 4409
We use ideas and concepts from physics, computer science, and mathematics to ask how embryos get in shape, and how organs function.

Max Wilson

Assistant Professor Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

We use photo-switchable proteins from plants to understand and control complex cellular behaviors.

Enoch Yeung

Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering

3104 BioE
How does life perform computation?

Postdocs

Marissa Gionet-Gonzalez

Postdoctoral Researcher
ASEE E-Fellow Award
UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow
AHA Postdoctral Fellow Award

Joint postdoc in Pruitt and Stowers labs studying the design of viscoelastic biomaterials for in vitro models of cardiovascular health