Eight biomedical engineering undergraduates from Johns Hopkins University received the Provost Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) to help fund their research projects over the coming year.
The program was created to support and encourage Hopkins undergraduate students to engage in independent research, scholarly and creative projects with the help of a $3,000 fellowship. Students will present their projects at DREAMS, the annual Johns Hopkins celebration of undergraduate research held in the spring.
This year’s recipients from BME include:
Gohta Aihara, 2023
Project: “Investigating the Role of Yes-Associated Protein in CD4+ T Cell Cytotoxicity”
Mentored by: Dr. Jonathan Schneck, Professor, Pathology, Immunology, and Oncology and Ariel Isser, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Jeffrey Chen, 2023
Project: “Reduced PDMS drug absorption and sustained drug delivery for human iPSC-based cardiac micro physiological systems”
Mentored by: Dr. Deok-Ho Kim, Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Devin Mair, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Rachel Li, 2023
Project: “Developing a Physiologically Relevant Coculture Model of Fibroblasts and Keratinocytes to Study Skin Wound Healing”
Mentored by: Dr. Yun Chen, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering and Matthew Pittman, PhD candidate, Mechanical Engineering
Ranjani Ramasubramanian, 2022
Project: “Engineering a Bispecific Fusion Protein to Block Ocular Neovascularization”
Mentored by: Dr. Jamie Spangler, Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Ophthalmology and Dr. Jeffrey Gray, Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Tanishk Sinha, 2024
Project: “Optimizing Imaging Protocols to Visualize the Microvasculature Environment of Human-Sized Bones”
Mentored by: Dr. Warren Grayson, Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Allison Horenburg, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Amy Van Ee, 2022
Project: “Identification and Quantification of Extracellular J2 Staining against dsRNA in Keratinocyte Culture”
Mentored by: Dr. Luis Garza, Associate Professor, Dermatology and Dr. Yingchao Xue, Research Fellow, Dermatology
Kesavan Venkatesh, 2024
Project: “Evaluating the clinic readiness of diagnostic deep learning models for chest x-rays via computational ‘stress tests’”
Mentored by: Dr. Jeremias Sulam, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Dr. Paul Yi, Co-Director, RAIL, Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare
Jerry Zhang, 2022
Project: “Non-invasive, Continuous Cardiac Output Monitoring in Neonates and Infants with Congenital Heart Disease”
Mentored by: Dr. Danielle Gottlieb Sen, Assistant Professor, Pediatric Cardiac Surgery and Dr. Julie Shade, Assistant Research Scientist, Biomedical Engineering