Each year, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering honors alumni, faculty and students for outstanding achievements in their fields. The following profiles highlight recipients of the 2025 Edward K. Rice Outstanding Student Award within the Bioengineering department.
Edward K. Rice Outstanding Doctoral Student
Jaime de Anda ’15, Ph.D. ’24
Jaime de Anda earned his bachelor’s degree in bioengineering in 2015 after transferring to UCLA from Hartnell College, a community college in Salinas, California. He continued his education at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering as a member of bioengineering professor Gerard Wong’s research group, earning his Ph.D. in bioengineering in 2024.
De Anda’s interdisciplinary research combines biochemistry, soft-matter physics and computational modeling to study microbiology and immunology for a diverse range of applications, such as plant-microbe biology and gastroenterology. He has published 24 papers in several top journals, including three articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. De Anda has presented his research at leading national and international conferences, including the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit, the Gordon Conference on Image Science and the Conference of Ford Fellows. He was also invited to deliver a lecture at the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering.
Among the many accolades De Anda has earned are the UCLA Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. A first-generation college student, de Anda also served as a mentor to graduate students in the lab and undergraduate students through programs such as the Cross-disciplinary Scholars in Science and Technology Summer Program at UCLA and the UCLA-Santa Monica College Summer Scholars Research Program.
De Anda is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, where he is studying gastroenterology, neuroimmunology and the gut microbiome.
Edward K. Rice Outstanding Master’s Student
Katherine Stone ’24, M.S. ’25
Katherine Stone graduated magna cum laude from UCLA Samueli in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering. She was admitted to the school’s Exceptional Student Admission Program to pursue her master’s in the same field.
During her time at UCLA, she worked as an undergraduate researcher, studying antibiofouling superhydrophobic surfaces at the Micro and Nano Manufacturing Lab led by mechanical and aerospace engineering professor CJ Kim. She also investigated autoimmune biomarkers in a longitudinal clinical study at the Rao Lab in the UCLA Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, where she now works as a study coordinator. In 2023, Stone was named as one of four national Ted Mullin Scholars. The program supported her summer research at the University of Chicago Medicine, where she conducted pediatric cancer immunotherapy studies, working on a project to improve lymphodepletion methods for anti-tumor adoptive T-cell therapy.
Stone served as a teaching assistant for lower- and upper-division bioengineering courses at UCLA. She was a mentorship family head for the UCLA chapter of Biomedical Engineering Society and a graduate-undergraduate liaison of the Bioengineering Graduate Association. Outside the classroom, she competed with the UCLA Club Swim Team at the College Club Swimming Nationals in 2022 and 2023.
As a member of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, Stone served as a tutor for lower division engineering classes. Her contributions earned her an Engineering Achievement Award in Student Welfare. Volunteering as a vaccination specialist amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Stone has also worked part time as an emergency medical technician for the past four years.