Dear Friends of BME,    

 

"Inspiring Engineering Minds to Advance Human Health" is the newly coined mission statement for BME at UC Irvine (UCI). This brief statement will serve as a reminder of why we exist, what we do and the core principles that we value and by which we abide.  

The purpose: BME exists to advance the state of human health via engineering innovation and practices.  

The business: In short, BME conducts "engineering research" that "inspires." Engineering uses scientific principles (disciplines) to design, build and resolve problems. So in order to attain our goal, we are empowering our faculty to inspire and mobilize our students to address health problems.

The Henry Samueli Endowed Chair H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., has been awarded a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop new equipment for analysis of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) levels in space and time within a living cell.

Wickramasinghe's project entitled "Platform for Targeting and Quantifying Gene Expression Levels in Living Systems" describes the three-year plan to create the Single-Cell Analyzer (SCA) which will have applications in areas ranging from developmental and systems biology to personalized medicine, cancer diagnosis and stem cell research. The ability to measure mRNAs in live cells is a significant advantage over current technology, since it will allow dynamic tracking of transcriptional responses to applied stimuli, such as silencing RNAs, drugs or signaling molecules.

The World Technology Network (WTN) has announced that Assistant Professor Michelle Khine, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Engineering, was named a finalist for the prestigious World Technology Award for Materials.  

The Award is presented by the WTN in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, Science/American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Technology Review. Khine joins a roster of individuals and organizations from over 60 countries around the world deemed to be doing the most innovative and impactful work. 

Assistant Professor Anna Grosberg, Ph.D., has recently joined The Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology after completing postdoctoral research at Harvard University.

Grosberg is expected to provide new and synergistic expertise in applying multiscale computational modeling and tissue engineering to stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells), cardiac morphogenesis (development of structure), and cardiac function. Her interests in stem cell biology will create new collaborative opportunities with the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and her multiscale and integrative modeling interests will provide meaningful interactions with the Center for Complex Biological Systems (CCBS).

Assistant Professor Elliot L. Botvinick, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Engineering, received a 2011 Pilot Grant from the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS) at UC Irvine for "A bloodless laparoscopic cutting tool."

Berns and his colleagues use an optically driven micromotor to study the control of nerve fiber movement called axons. The micromotor relies on the use of circularly polarized light with angular momentum to trap and spin a birefringent particle to create a controlled amount of microfluidic shear force against a living cell. Berns and his team of researchers demonstrated that the growth of a single nerve cell turns in a specific direction related to the micromotor spin direction and subsequent microfluidic flow direction. This is the first study to demonstrate that fluid shear forces can cause the turning of a nerve fiber and that there are "right turn" and "left turn" responses depending on the rotation of the spinning particles and the direction of the shear force.