10:30 AM - Welcome and Opening Remarks: Andrew McCulloch, Ph.D. - Professor, UC San Diego Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering and School of Medicine

10:45 AM - Keynote Presentation: Albert Hsiao, M.D., Ph.D. Professor, UC San Diego Department of Radiology

"Once Upon a Time: One Physician-Scientist's Journey"

11:30 AM - Trainee Lightning Talks

Kathryn Hatch, UC San Diego Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Department of Biomedical Sciences

"Simulation of MRI K-Space Cardiac Motion Corruption for Deep Learning-Based Artifact Detection and Correction"

Natasha Carlson, UC San Diego Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Department of Biomedical Sciences

"Metabolic Plasticity and Neuronal Resilience: Unraveling Adaptive Responses to Chronic mtDNA Damage"

Jonathan Gunn, UC San Diego M.D./Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering

"Direct Injection of Delayed Release Chemokines in Sentinel Lymph Nodes as Long-Lived Immunotherapy"

Dylan Hirsch, UC San Diego Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

"Taking out the Guesswork: Computational Methods for using Multiscale Pharmacological Models to Design Optimal Treatment Regimens with Safety Guarantees"

Katie Lamar-Bruno, UC San Diego Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering

"Simulation of MRI K-Space Cardiac Motion Corruption for Deep Learning-Based Artifact Detection and Correction"

Samantha Sanchez, UC San Diego Ph.D. Student and Interfaces Trainee, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering

"Chemigenetic biosensor tools enable fast and sensitive kinase activity imaging"

12:30 PM - LUNCH

1:30 PM - Keynote Presentation: Dr. Sylvia Herbert, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

"Reflections on Academia: First Years as an Assistant Professor"

2:15 PM - Academic Panel Discussion

Erika Cyphert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Department of Bioengineering

Fanny Chapelin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Departments of Bioengineering and Radiology

Sylvia Herbert, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UC San Diego Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Andrew D. McCulloch, Ph.D. is the Shu Chien Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Engineering and Medicine at the University of California San Diego and Director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine. He leads the Wu-Tsai Human Performance Alliance at UC San Diego, directs the UCSD Interfaces Graduate Training Program and the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Specialization in Multi-Scale Biology as well as the UCSD NHLBI Graduate Training Program. Dr. McCulloch served as both Vice Chair and Chair of the Bioengineering Department and is a member of the Qualcomm Institute and a Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. 

Dr. McCulloch received his Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the University of Auckland. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Bio-Medical Engineering Society and is currently Associate Editor of PLoS Computational Biology. He also serves on the Executive Council of the International Union of Physiological Sciences.

Dr. McCulloch has published over 300 peer-reviewed research articles. His lab uses multi-scale engineering approaches to help understand, diagnose and treat heart diseases and to understand the biological principles underlying human athletic performance. They use experimental and computational models to investigate the relationships between the cellular and molecular structure of cardiac and skeletal muscle and the electrical and mechanical function of the musculoskeletal system in response to training and the whole heart during ventricular remodeling, heart failure, and arrhythmia. The lab is also developing new methods to use computational models and machine learning for clinical use and has licensed technologies that are now approved by the FDA for clinical use. 

Albert Hsiao, M.D., Ph.D. is a cardiothoracic radiologist trained in engineering at Caltech, and bioengineering and bioinformatics in the UC San Diego Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). He completed his residency and fellowships in Interventional Radiology and Cardiovascular Imaging at Stanford before returning to UC San Diego as faculty in Radiology, where he leads advanced cardiovascular imaging and the Augmented Imaging and Data Analytics (AiDA) research laboratory. He also serves as co-director of the T32 clinician-scientist radiology research residency program and co-director of the MSTP SURF program. While a radiology resident himself at Stanford, he co-founded Arterys, a cloud-native software company to bring 4D Flow MRI and artificial intelligence technologies to market. He continues to partner with industry to develop and bring new imaging technologies to market to improve diagnosis and management of disease.

Sylvia Herbert, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on developing methods that enable efficient and safe decision-making in robots and other complex autonomous systems, with particular emphasis on reasoning about uncertainty in real-world environments and human interactions. Her work integrates rigorous theoretical foundations with physical testing on robotic platforms.

Prior to joining UC San Diego, Dr. Herbert earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley, where she worked with Professor Claire Tomlin on safe and efficient control of autonomous systems. She completed her B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Drexel University. Dr. Herbert is the  recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, Hellman Fellowship, UCSD JSOE Early Career Faculty Award, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, NSF GRFP, UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and the Berkeley EECS Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award for Altruism. 

Fanny Chapelin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Radiology at University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from UC, San Diego in 2019 and then became the first woman faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Kentucky, where she developed her research program for four years. Dr. Chapelin has been developing non-invasive imaging techniques to visualize cellular therapies and inflammation in cancer and other immune disorders. Her research findings have led to several publications, and their impact has been recognized through numerous awards, including France’s Engineer of the Year Award for Science. Her research aims to provide scientists and clinicians with ways to visualize cell distribution, fate and efficacy to improve clinical practice and patient care.

Erika Cyphert, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego. She completed her postdoctoral training as an NIH NRSA F32 (NIA) Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University (Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering) and the UC San Francisco (Dept of Orthopaedic Surgery), working with Dr. Christopher Hernandez, studying associations between the gut microbiome and musculoskeletal tissue health. She received her Ph.D. (NSF GRFP Fellow) and B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University focused on biomaterials, drug delivery, and infectious diseases working with Dr. Horst von Recum. As an avid traveler she has spent time as a visiting researcher at the Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) and Tokyo Women's Medical University (Japan) as a Fulbright Scholar and Whitaker Foundation Grantee.

Sylvia Herbert, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on developing methods that enable efficient and safe decision-making in robots and other complex autonomous systems, with particular emphasis on reasoning about uncertainty in real-world environments and human interactions. Her work integrates rigorous theoretical foundations with physical testing on robotic platforms.

Prior to joining UC San Diego, Dr. Herbert earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley, where she worked with Professor Claire Tomlin on safe and efficient control of autonomous systems. She completed her B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Drexel University. Dr. Herbert is the  recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, Hellman Fellowship, UCSD JSOE Early Career Faculty Award, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, NSF GRFP, UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and the Berkeley EECS Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award for Altruism. 

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