The School of Medicine celebrates the following accomplishments by members of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Ph.D. students Jennifer (Jenny) Eng, left, and Elliot Gray, right, attended the National Cancer Institute 2020 Junior Investigator Meeting for the Cancer Systems Biology Consortium, Physical Sciences-Oncology Network, and Big Data Scientist Training Enhancement Program in August.

Eng won a poster award for her presentation on quantifying spatial heterogeneity in breast cancer subtypes. Eng is a mentored by Summer Gibbs, Ph.D., associate professor.

Gray won a poster award for his presentation on using machine learning to elucidate tumoral T and B cell functionality related to spatial metrics for pancreatic cancer patient stratification.  Gray is mentored by Young Hwan Chang, Ph.D., assistant professor.

Postdoctoral fellow Taisa Kushner, Ph.D., is one of 59 awardees out of a pool of 550 applicants of the 2020 Computing Innovation Fellows grants. The grant provides two years of salary support from the National Science Foundation.  The program aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be Ph.D. graduates in computing.  In September, Dr. Kushner joined the Artificial Intelligence in Medical Systems lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering as a postdoctoral scholar with Peter Jacobs, Ph.D., associate professor, as her mentor.

A team co-led by chair and professor Owen McCarty, Ph.D., received a five-year, $3.2 million R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for a study entitled “Contact Activation and Infection.” The research project will test the team’s central hypothesis that the contact activation system contributes to pathologic mechanisms that lead to vascular dysfunction, thrombin generation and inflammatory responses during systemic bacterial challenge by specific pathogens. This is the third R01 grant Dr. McCarty is currently carrying.

Congratulations!