Congratulations to Monica Albe on winning the 2025 Excellence in Advising and Student Services Award!
 

Dr. Daniel Okamoto, Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, presents Zombies of the Nearshore: Sea Urchins in a Changing Ocean at Wonderfest.

Congratulations to BioE PhD students Alonso Torres and Stephanie Brener! Torres received a 2026 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars at UCSF, and Brener and Honorable Mention.

Congratulations to bioengineering’s Master’s Programs Manager Joy Ahn! Joy has been received a 2025 Excellence in Advising and Student Services Award for her outstanding support of our master’s students.

Researchers from Adam Arkin's lab, funded by a grant from the Dept. of Health and Human Services, have engineered colonies of good bacteria that can be inhaled to crowd out pathogenic bacteria and combat lung infections without antibiotics.

Ammon Corl, a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, is highlighted in The New York Times for leading research that revealed the genetic variation behind the side-blotched lizard's unique rock-paper-scissors evolutionary game. Read the full article here. 

BioE Master of Engineering student Smrithi explains the career potential of a bioengineering degree.

Congratulations to bioengineering MD/PhD candidate Alice Tang, named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30! Tang has pioneered methods to analyze millions of health records using AI, uncovering revelations about complex diseases like Alzheimer’s. 

An in-depth look at research by Professor Phil Messersmith, who draws on biology to develop cutting-edge materials for medicine. His lab creates adhesives and therapies designed to work with the human body, offering new ways to repair tissues, heal wounds and treat disease.

Professor Seung-Wuk Lee has pioneered a biomining technique that could be a clean and more sustainable way to mine the rare earth elements essential to modern technology. His lab genetically engineered a harmless virus to act like a “smart sponge” that grabs rare earth metals from water, and, with a gentle change in temperature and…

Professors Paul Adams, Adam Arkin, Patrick Hsu, and Jay Keasling have been recognized in the “2025 Highly Cited Researchers” list, meaning their work ranks in the top 1% of citations for their field and publication year in Clarivate’s Web of Science citation index

Biologists believed that urchin reproduction along the Pacific Coast would only be affected by marine heat waves at lethal ocean temperatures, a new study conducted by IB Assistant Professor Daniel Okamoto and other marine biologists at UC Berkeley suggests that this threshold of susceptibility, for urchins and other marine species, may be at lower temperatures than previously thought. Read the full article here.

The origins of ever-evolving life are never sufficiently explained; innovations in the complex origins of life are continually being expanded into new horizons. Join Wonderfest’s guest speaker, Distinguished IB Professor and Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology, Dr. Charles Marshall, on November 18, 2025, as he explores the integral role of energy and information in the past, present, and future of life on Earth. Read the full article here.

A team led by Professors Kevin Healy and Niren Murthy have developed a microfluidic heart-on-a-chip, with which they were able to discover a lipid nanoparticle that could penetrate the dense heart muscle and efficiently deliver its cargo of therapeutic mRNA into heart muscle cells. This new drug delivery method and testing platform may pave the way to new cardiac treatments.

Adjunct Professor Taner Sen and his colleagues at the USDA and beyond have assembled and annotated the genomes of 33 wild and domesticated oat lines, along with an atlas of gene expression across in 23 of these lines, which will enable future efforts to even more hardy and productive strains of the popular grain.

Assistant Professor Victor Ortega-Jiménez and his lab have discovered that jumping entomopathogenic nematodes can be electrostatically attracted by the natural electric fields of the flying insects, thus increasing the effectiveness attachment to distant hosts and likelihood of infection. Read more...

Carina Galicia has received the College of Letters & Science Staff Achievement Award for 2024-2025. Read more here. 

BioE alumnus Connor Tou (B.S. 2020) has been named a 2025 STAT Wunderkind by by STAT News - an award that honors early-career scientists whose creativity and perseverance are helping to reshape biomedical research and health care.

Professor Dan Fletcher has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his contributions to the mechanistic understanding of biological self-assembly and mechanotransduction, and his work developing mobile phone-based microscopy for remote diagnosis of infectious diseases. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Research by IB's Adjunct Assistant Professor Juan Liu on a newly discovered fossil fish is being used to reshape the origin story of freshwater fish evolution. Read more in the Berkeley News article here.