Click here to learn about “Emerging Imaging Technologies for Noninvasive Optical Skin Biopsy” in a video addition from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology to the “Methods and Techniques for Skin Research” by UCI Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic researchers Drs. Mihaela Balu and Kristen Kelly and co-authors.

Click here to read more on the Journal of Investigative Dermatology website.

By Lori Brandt, UCI Samueli School of Engineering

Four UC Irvine biomedical engineering faculty – Elliot Botvinick, Michelle Digman, Chang Liu and Wendy Liu –  are among 152 medical and biological engineers who were inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s College of Fellows Class of 2022.

Each was selected for their outstanding contributions in their field. A prestigious professional distinction, the College of Fellows represents the top 2% of medical and biological engineers in the country.

“Induction into AIMBE is a well-deserved honor for these faculty, two of whom are also members of the Edwards Lifesciences Foundation Cardiovascular Innovation and Research Center (CIRC),” said Naomi Chesler, director of the CIRC and an Inclusive Excellence Professor of biomedical engineering, who nominated all four. “It is both a recognition of their research accomplishments and impact to date and an opportunity to contribute to biomedical science policy and public understanding of biomedical science and engineering on a larger stage.”

Professor Botvinick was recognized for work in biophotonics and its use in medical devices and the study of biophysics in cell-tissue interactions. In his research, Botvinick studies the relationship between mechanical stresses on cells and molecular signaling or mechanotransduction.

“I am honored to become an AIMBE fellow,” he said. “I will continue to devote my life to improving our understanding of how cells sense tissues and to develop new technologies to aid in the treatment of diabetes. As an AIMBE fellow, I will embark on the next chapter of my career, which is to invent, develop, test and commercialize unprofitable medical devices for underserved groups, particularly in pediatrics. And more importantly, to build and share the resources for other scientists to do the same.”

Associate Professor Digman was acknowledged for her contributions to the development of and applications to fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. Digman’s research focuses on quantitative spatial and temporal correlation spectroscopy, protein dynamics during cell migration, characterizing metabolic alterations in cells and tissues, and developing novel imaging technologies.

“I am honored to join my colleagues as an AIMBE fellow,” said Digman. “I want to thank my past and present group members, as well as collaborators for making so many things possible during this research journey. I’m also excited to support AIMBE’s mission of advocacy in the field of biomedical engineering. In addition, I want to thank Naomi Chesler, who was vital in all of our nominations, for her support and efforts in contributing to enhancing equity in our department.”

The AIMBE selected Chang Liu, associate professor, for his efforts in the fields of synthetic biology and directed evolution through the invention of in vivo hypermutation systems. He engineers specialized genetic systems that continuously and rapidly mutate user-selected genes in vivo. These systems allow researchers to evolve proteins at unprecedented speed, scale and depth in order to engineer new protein functions, probe the rules of evolution and understand the fundamental sequence-function relationships governing proteins and other macromolecules.

“I am delighted to be elected into the fellowship and look forward to fruitful interactions and endeavors with other members,” said Liu.

Professor Wendy Liu was recognized for contributions and service to the cell and tissue engineering community and advancing the field of immune cell mechanobiology. She uses bioengineering approaches to understand how the microenvironment regulates immune cell plasticity and immune-mediated wound healing. She is studying macrophages, innate immune cells that adopt a spectrum of functional phenotypes depending on their context and play a major role in wound healing and disease.

“I am honored and excited to receive this recognition from AIMBE,” she said. “I am also extremely grateful for the wonderful colleagues at UCI who have provided a supportive environment, and all of my collaborators and students who have contributed to our work.”

AIMBE’s mission is to recognize excellence, advance public understanding, and accelerate medical and biological innovation. Its College of Fellows includes over 1,500 honorees who work in academia, industry, clinical practice and government. The formal induction ceremony will be held during AIMBE’s 2022 Annual Event on March 25.

Read more on the UCI Samueli School of Engineering website.

I posted about Dr. Elliot Botvinick from the University of California Irvine who is developing a multianalyte sensor called iGlobe.  It is unique and exciting and funded, for development by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Dr. Elliot Botvinick, PhD is Professor, Samueli School of Engineering, BioEngineering, Surgery, Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic and The Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology. iGlobe: He was awarded a 3-year, $3.5 million grant, along with Dr. Gregory Weiss, Professor of Chemistry, from the Helmsley Charitable Trust for the development of the iGlobe, first of its kind device to simultaneously measure insulin, glucose, oxygen and ketones with a single probe inserted just beneath the skin.

Named the UCI Samueli School of Engineering “Innovator of the Year” and “Entrepreneurial Leader of the Year for several years running, Dr. Botvinick holds more than 20 invention reports and lots more than 10 patents. Dr. Botvinick earned his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego. He’s a dynamic and very enthusiastic scientist … and he is an amazing friend to the entire T1D community.

Just this week, Dr. Botvinick did a wonderful presentation to the DIY looping community as well as those in the T1D communities.  Hope you enjoy this!

Read more on The Savvy Diabetic.

MICHAEL BERNS, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of biomedical engineering with a joint appointment in developmental and cell biology, and co-founder and founding director of UCI Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in the United Kingdom.

Berns was invited to join the society based on his extensive biomedical optics contributions in the fields of biology and medicine. “I am truly honored to be invited to join the Royal Society, especially because it’s the same society that has honored so many elite luminaries of the past,” said Berns.

The mission of the organization is to advance health, through education and innovation. Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society of Medicine are elected for life through a peer review process membership and governance. Famous Fellows include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur,
Edward Jenner and Sigmund Freud. Elected Fellows of the British Royal Society of Medicine are comparable to members of the National Academy of Medicine in the United States.

Click here to read UCI Department of Biomedical Engineering Discovery magazine.

She connects equity, samurai swords, imaging and an automated way to count and track mitochondria.

by Vivien Marx / Nature Methods
Photo credit: E. Digman

Aug. 19, 2021 – “My path to faculty was definitely not standard or straight,” says Michelle Digman, who is on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where she develops imaging techniques, shapes the department’s policies on equity matters and does outreach programs for local community college and high school students from minorities under-represented in science. She co-directs the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, directs the W.M. Keck Nanoimaging Laboratory and was recently named an Allen Distinguished Investigator for a bioluminescence imaging project she is working on with UCI colleague Jennifer Prescher.

After obtaining her Ph.D. degree in chemistry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the physics lab of Enrico Gratton at the university’s Urbana-Champaign campus. Then she followed Gratton’s move to UCI, where she completed her fellowship. Next, she became scientific director of UCI’s optical core. “I like helping people,” she says.

After a few years, though, she missed developing and using advanced imaging to pursue her own research and began the hunt for a faculty post. But it was right during a US economic downturn. Interviews took place but universities followed up to notify her that, as a result of the downturn, they could not hire after all. “I didn’t lose hope, though,” she says. Her multi-disciplinary background seemed a blemish. Even in an age that prizes interdisciplinary projects, she heard reactions in the vein of: “You’re not really a chemist or you’re not really a biologist,” she says. “It was just really hard to feel like I belonged in a department.” That changed when she started applying for posts in biomedical engineering. Universities liked her background in chemistry, physics, biology and computing.

Despite other offers, she decided to stay in Irvine, where she had already found collaborators. Staying would accelerate her ability to set up her lab, she says, and help her students “hit the ground running.” In her first year as principal investigator, she had five Ph.D. students. She welcomes people into her lab from diverse training backgrounds.

From this diverse lab now comes Mitometer: software to automate the way mitochondria are segmented and tracked in live-cell imaging and to avoid needing to piece together a computational pipeline of several tools. Digman is happy that Mitometer can capture the structure and size of mitochondria, count fission and fusion events, continuously track mitochondria, and capture their motility and velocity. Such information can be connected to metabolic data.

Mitochondria give scientists a workout. “Sometimes mitochondria can get clustered in one particular spot,” she says, which gets in the way of accurate counting. “If you want to count them, the algorithms will just count the blob as one gigantic spot.” Austin Lefebvre, a Ph.D. student in Digman’s lab, worked out a way to apply fluorescence intensity thresholds to remove image noise. The software loops through images to computationally locate the mitochondria. The team applied Mitometer to synthetic data and then to confocal images of breast cancer cells and found that cancerous and non-cancerous cells differed in motility and morphology. They connected that information to metabolic differences found using fluorescence lifetime imaging. Tumor cells and non-tumor cells differ in the free and bound ratio of the coenzyme NADH, which is important in cellular energy production. This hints at potential ways to target mitochondria for therapeutic purposes.

Of her future plans, Digman says, “We would like to use Mitometer a lot more.” And she hopes it can be used in other labs. Neuroscientists could use it to track mitochondrial journeys in long axons, she says. After collecting a time-lapse image series and setting some parameters, labs should find the system easy to use. “Austin has made this platform, let’s say, anyone-proof.”

Anyone should also be able to enter science, which is why she has set up, in her lab, a summer week for local community college and high school students from groups under-represented in science. Observing the students, Digman says, “I think they are really transformed.” Their tasks relate to work in her and other UCI labs. For example, they have explored using fluorescence lifetime imaging to detect how macrophage types differ in terms of metabolism.

Beyond these activities, Digman practices the martial art of iaido, an ancient samurai-sword-drawing technique from Japan. The movements are intended to look and feel effortless. “It’s almost a meditative art form for me,” she says. Iaido is a way to develop strength and to practice a traditional martial art. “The purpose is to display an ultimate level of true and pure beauty.”

Says cell biologist Rick Horwitz, “Michelle has this extraordinary ability to bridge complex biophysical technologies with cutting edge biological problems.” Digman spent part of her postdoctoral fellowship in his lab at the University of Illinois. Others attempt such bridges without understanding the methods, or they marry methods with mundane biological problems or fail to grasp nuances of experimental cell and molecular biology, says Horwitz who is senior advisor and inaugural executive director emeritus of the Allen Institute for Cell Science.

Digman has “the magic” to make projects happen and the collaborative spirit to bring community with her, he says. “Unlike some outstanding scientists, Michelle is a wonderful colleague—generous, helpful, collaborative, a real team player, and liked by everyone.”

Click here to read the full article on the UCI Samueli School of Engineering website.