Shu Chien Early Career Award Nominee Lectures

Ritchie Chen, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Neurological Surgery, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. His research group is interested in understanding how bodily signals influence cognitive states like emotions. By engineering new molecular tools and devices to study neural circuits across the brain and body, he hopes to potentiate new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. He received his BS in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT. Ritchie then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University where he developed optogenetic methods for noninvasive control of neural circuits and organs in mice. For his work, Ritchie has been recognized with a Forbes 30 under 30 in Science, the Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Studies from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience, and a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.

Dr. Fangyan Ding is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Irvine and a recipient of the 2022 NIH Director's New Innovator Award. Prior to joining UC Irvine, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech, working with Dr. Michael Elowitz. I received my Ph.D. degree in Biophysics from ENS de Paris, working with Dr. Vincent Croquette and Dr. David Bensimon, and obtained my B.S. degree in Physics from Nanjing University. 

Dr. Freedman's group at UCR is focused on developing and characterizing micro and nanotechnology for studying unexplored biological systems and pathways, single cells, molecular biophysics, and kinetics.  As a Whitaker Fellow, he obtained postdoctoral training at Imperial College London (UK) in the laboratory of Prof. Joshua Edel. At this position, he worked on single molecule trapping technology harnessing dielectrophoresis (DEP) as well as integration with nanopipettes for single molecule DNA detection.  Other successful projects included the engineering of nanoscale Raman sensors, single molecule FRET systems, and microfluidics. After leaving Imperial College London, Dr. Freedman joined Global Viral and LBNL's Joint Genome Institute to work on single cell genomics, metagenomics, and bias-free 16S sequencing.  In 2014, he earned his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Drexel University while in the laboratory of Prof. MinJun Kim. During his doctoral work, Dr. Freedman worked to show that single proteins unfold one at a time as they pass through a nanopore per electric field denaturing forces.  Dr. Freedman has also held visiting scientist positions at KAIST (South Korea), University of Pennsylvania (USA), and Uppsala University (Sweden).  

Dr. Neil Lin, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), earned his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, where he investigated the microscopic mechanisms underlying non-Newtonian suspension flow properties. Following his doctoral studies, he conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University, focusing on methods to replicate microenvironmental cues for mimicking kidney functions in vitro. Joining UCLA in 2019, his research centers on applying mechanobiology principles to tissue engineering. His honors include an NIH MIRA, Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, and BMES CMBE Rising Star Award.

Dr. Benjamin L. Smarr, Ph.D. Neurobiology, is an assistant professor at UC San Diego Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute. His work leverages his domain expertise in biological rhythms and neuroendocrinology to uncover patterns in diverse sets of IoT time series data that carry actionable information to impact health and cognitive performance. In 2020 he became the technical lead of the global collaborative TemPredict study, which developed algorithms for early detection of COVID-19 infection, and unique cyberinfrastructure to serve rapid, collaborative explorations of population-scale, personal time series data. Beyond acute needs from the pandemic, the Smarr lab focuses on applications in women’s health and aging, and technical development in service of increasing participant engagement to map physiological diversity for equitable precision individual and public health.

Dr. Ryan Stowers is an assistant professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He obtained his B.S. in Bioengineering from Clemson University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in the laboratory of Dr. Laura Suggs. Following his doctoral research, Dr. Stowers was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Ovijit Chaudhuri. Dr. Stowers is the recipient of Young Investigator Awards from the Breast Cancer Alliance and Hellman Family Faculty Fellow. His research focuses on developing 3D hydrogel cell culture platforms to mimic native extracellular matrix properties and utilizing these platforms to determine molecular mechanisms by which extracellular matrix regulates cell phenotype.

Dr. Xue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, leading the Computational Optics for Biomedical Imaging (COBI) lab. Her research focuses on advanced multiphoton microscopy and multimodal imaging tools for intravital brain imaging. She chairs the Designated Emphasis in Biophotonics and Bioimaging at UC Davis. Beyond UC Davis, she co-chairs the Computational Cameras and Displays Workshop at CVPR 2024 and serves on the Program Committee for the SPIE Photonics West conference. Dr. Xue has received several prestigious awards, including the Weill Neurohub Fellowship and the JenLab Young Investigator Award.