We would like to congratulate some of our wonderful core, joint and affiliate faculty for their recent tremendous achievements!

Jennifer L. Wilson

NIH MIRA Award

Jennifer L. Wilson, an assistant professor of bioengineering, has received a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health. The $1.6M, 5-year award will support research towards improving the development of new therapeutics, a process that is limited by intolerable safety or insufficient efficacy. In the Lab for Understanding of Network Effects (LUNE), Dr. Wilson and her team are exploring the extent to which models of protein interaction networks within cells can identify novel target proteins with improved safety and efficacy. To further distinguish their approach, the lab is also integrating real world evidence from the electronic health record to improve the translational impact of the lab’s work.

Jun Chen

2022 BBRF Young Investigator Award

Jun Chen, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, notes that sleep disturbance is a core symptom of depression, which often precedes depressive episodes and can persist during remission. Diagnostic tools for sleep disturbance, e.g., polysomnography, need to be conducted overnight by clinicians in health facilities. Sleep trackers, e.g., wristband sensors and under-bed sensors, are often expensive and inaccurate. This project will test a smart bedsheet for depression pre-diagnosis as a way of recognizing early sleep disturbance signs. It is based on the concept that biomechanical activities during sleep, (e.g., body movements, ballistic forces generated by the heart, and breathing activities) will deform the smart bedsheet and induce current signals. The project will assess the concept in a pilot study.

Ke Sheng

NIH Award

Radiotherapy is important to achieve durable breast cancer control, but due to the difficulty of setting up and imaging the breast, the treatment is crude, resulting in life-changing side effects. The UCLA team led by Dr. Ke Sheng proposes a novel soft robot to improve the individual patient breast setup. A dedicated breast CT will be synergistically developed to provide the needed image guidance for precision breast radiotherapy. The proposal budget is $1,572,075

Aydogan Ozcan

Joseph Fraunhofer Award & Robert M. Burley Prize

Optica (formerly OSA) is pleased to announce the Aydogan Ozcan, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize. Ozcan is honored for seminal optical engineering contributions to computational optical imaging, lensfree microscopy, holography and mobile optical sensing.