Bioengineering

It was a terrible trifecta: a busted tilt skillet, an obsolete replacement part and thousands of hungry students restarting classes in six days.

For a UC Merced Dining Services team facing a logistical kitchen nightmare, the solution was a savory mix of collaboration and outside-the-pizza-box thinking. And it happened barely 12 giant steps from the broken cooker in the Pavilion dining center.

You could almost say Edwin Shen was destined to become a bioengineer. His mother, a medical doctor, practices pathology in Northern California, and his father retired from a career as a mechanical engineer for medical device companies.

“I guess what I do is right in the middle of my parents’ occupations,” he said. “Bioengineering was something my dad recommended I try. I thought research might be something that aligned well with my personality. It turned out to be a perfect fit.”

Professor Roberto Andresen Eguiluz has received a CAREER award for his research into the underlying cause of arthritis.

He is the 33rd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

UC Merced continues to be recognized nationally, with some programs leaping forward, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-2024 edition of Best Graduate Schools released on April 25.

When it functions correctly, inflammation protects the body from infection and injury. But when it becomes chronic, inflammation is linked to health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis and bowel diseases, including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

Rising juniors this fall will have an unprecedented opportunity for stem cell research training that could lead directly to careers in stem cell science after graduation.

Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz and his lab have created a new way to solve some of the mysteries among an increasingly important class of proteins that don’t appear to have any specific structures but serve very important functions, including the complex genetic processes that separate high-order organisms from single-cell bacteria.

They call it “molecular LEGO,” pulling the proteins apart and rebuilding them, segment by segment.

Bioengineering Professor Changqing Li is building a high-resolution CT imaging scanner that will allow scientists to study and understand how oxygen plays a role in cancer therapy and stem cells growing in deep tissue such as bone marrow, and possibly develop new advances to culture stem cells outside the body and therapeutics to control tumor growth.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have invited bioengineering Professor Eva De Alba Bastarrechea to serve as a member of the Macromolecular Structure and Function C Study Section within the Macromolecular Biophysics and Biological Chemistry Review Branch.

Twelve of UC Merced’s graduate programs and one of its schools are among the best in the country in the U.S. News & World Report 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings, according to results released March 29.