Biomedical Engineering Affiliates Win Symposium Awards

Morival (left) accepts his best poster award from Xiaoping Hu, professor and chair of UC Riverside’s Department of Bioengineering. July 9, 2018 - The Samueli School’s biomedical engineering department was well represented at last month’s University of California 19th Annual Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium. Two department members – a graduate student and a postdoctoral researcher – won awards at the event, held June 21-23 at UC Riverside.

Maha Rahim, a postdoc in the lab of biomedical engineering Assistant Professor Jered Haun, won an award of excellence for her oral presentation on bioimaging. Her presentation focused on the lab’s development of a high-content imaging platform for tumors that utilizes fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy.

Graduate student Julien Morival won an outstanding achievement award in the poster presentation category of the conference’s molecular and cellular engineering track. Morival, whose adviser is Assistant Professor Tim Downing, researches cardiomyocyte maturation – the process of creating cardiac muscle cells from stem cells.

This year’s symposium, “Meeting Biomedical Needs with Cutting Edge Science and Technology,” brought together all 10 UC campuses with industry leaders to share bioengineering’s latest developments. Prizes were awarded for oral presentations, poster presentations, rapid-fire competition and undergraduate capstone designs.

- Anna Lynn Spitzer