Category: Fellows

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators My research focuses on engineering next-generation culture technologies to overcome fundamental limitations in how complex 3D tissues are grown and maintained in the lab. Conventional incubator-based systems often suffer from evaporation, unstable gas exchange, contamination, and poor nutrient and oxygen diffusion—all of which limit tissue viability, scalability, and reproducibility. Working…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators Plasmids are self-replicating pieces of DNA that play a key role in microbial ecology. Small, multicopy plasmids persist in bacterial populations despite being dispensable, imposing fitness costs on their hosts, and often lacking specialized mechanisms to ensure their stability. Our laboratory (and others) have recently established that these plasmids segregate…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators My research takes a multimodal approach to improving the reproducibility, characterization, and functional relevance of cortical organoid models by leveraging deep learning for both molecular and electrophysiological analysis. Despite their promise for modeling human brain development and neurological disorders, organoids suffer from variability, immature physiology, and limited standardization. My work…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators I’m developing techniques to transform everyday Wi-Fi signals into clinical-grade health monitoring tools as part of the PulseFi project in the INRG lab. My research focuses on extracting physiological signals like heart rate and breathing rate from wireless Channel State Information (CSI), allowing non-contact vital sign monitoring with accuracy comparable…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators My research focuses on developing innovative methods to map chromatin accessibility using nanopore long-read sequencing with the ultimate goal of better understanding how epigenetic changes impact RNA processing. In Brooks lab, we designed an end-to-end platform combining Add-seq, a novel method for chromatin accessibility profiling, and NEMO, a deep learning…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators I’m utilizing methods in synthetic chemistry and marine algal enzymology to make new chemical tools to study glutamate receptors within the mammalian brain. The specific family of neuronal receptors I’m targeting are implicated in a wide range of biomedical phenomena from addiction, pain, and neurodegeneration to learning, memory, and synaptic…

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Innovators I investigate the intricate molecular processes underlying human brain development, particularly focusing on the role of extracellular RNA (exRNA) in early corticogenesis. I utilize human cortical organoids, 3D cell models that mimic the developing brain, to study how exRNA, secreted from cells within vesicles, can act as a signal, conveying…

Alumni QB3 Fellows 2024QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Excellence I am doing rotations in the Fall and Winter quarters. In my first rotation, I worked in Dr. Benedict Paten’s lab to assess the performance of a genome assembly polish tool for the pangenome project. I’m doing my second rotation in Dr. Russell Corbett-Detig’s lab on…

Alumni QB3 Fellows 2024QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Excellence This fellowship is supporting me in exploring different projects in the Applied Optics Group, Schmidt Lab and expanding my multidisciplinary research skills. Currently, I am focusing on the fabrication, characterization, and integration of nanophotonic and optofluidic devices with applications in biosensors.

Alumni QB3 Fellows 2024QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Excellence I have been a rotation student on the CB3 track for my fellowship year. I have been fortunate to work with the McKinnie and Lokey labs thus far. In the McKinnie Lab I probed the substrate preference and activity of a PLP-dependent enzyme. My work led…