Shu Chien Early Career Award

In order to foster the promotion of pre-tenured faculty and inter-UC-Campus activities between biomedical engineering (BME) departments and programs across the UC system, the BIC organizes the annual Shu Chien Early Career Lecturer Award to be given to a junior UC-BME faculty who demonstrates outstanding scholarly achievement. This competition typically coincides with the UC systemwide BME symposium each summer.

The 24th Annual Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium (BIC 2024) took place at UC San Diego on June 24-25, 2024. During the event, eight distinguished individuals delivered the Shu Chien Early Career lectures: Ritchie Chen (UCSF), Fangyan Ding (UCI), Kevin Freedman (UCR), Neil Lin (UCLA), Shelbi Russell (UCSC), Ben Smarr (UCSD), Ryan Stowers (UCSB), and Yi Xue (UCD). Kevin Freedman from UCR was awarded the 2023 Shu Chien Early Career Award for his innovative contributions to the field.

Dr. Kevin Freedman, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at UC Riverside, presented on “Playing Ping-Pong at the Nanoscale Using Solid-State Pores: Applications to Diagnostic Sensing and Single-Molecule Science.” His research focuses on developing nanotechnologies to study biological systems. Previously, he worked on single-molecule trapping and DNA detection at Imperial College London and has held research positions at institutions like Global Viral, LBNL, and Drexel University, where he completed his Ph.D.

The 23rd Annual Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium (BIC 2023), which was held at UC Berkeley on Jun. 22-23, 2023. Eight people (Linana Lareau, UCB; Yi Xue, UCD; Jun Chen, UCLA; Joshua Morgan, UCR; Francisco Contijoch, UCSD; and Arnab Mukherjee, UCSB) gave the Shu Chien Early Career lectures.

Jun Chen (UCLA) and Liana Lareau (UCB) finally won the 2023 Shu Chien Early Career Award.

Daniela Valdez-Jasso (UCSD) was named as the recipient of the 2022 University of California’s Shu Chien Early Career Jury Award at UC Santa Barbara. Her presentation was on “From the pulmonary arteries to the right heart: a multi-scale approach to understanding
pulmonary arterial hypertension”

Randy Carney won the People’s Choice Award. Carney’s presentation titled “Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy of extracellular vesicles (EVs): a new toolbox for clinical diagnostics” focused on his team’s development of early-stage cancer detection platforms using liquid biopsy.

Three finalists were chosen to deliver a 20-minute lecture on an impactful biomedical problem solved in an innovative manner in their laboratory. They were Aaron Streets at UC Berkeley, Seth Shipman at UCSF and Liang Gao at UCLA.  A clear first-place winner emerged following voting of the awards committee. The Shu Chien Early Career Lecturer was Aaron Streets who received a check for $1000 and bragging rights as the top Bioengineering pre-tenured faculty in the UC System.

Thanks to Dr. Erik Engelson (CEO Lucira Health) for generous funding of this Award.

The inaugural Shu Chien Early Career Award competition was held on November 23, 2020. This award is intended to foster the development and promotion of pre-tenured faculty across the UC system and to stimulate inter-UC-Campus activities between BME programs. The BIC plans to hold this competition at the annual UC systemwide BME symposium each year. Each of the 10 departments tenders their most promising pre-tenured candidate and the nominee’s CV and abstract of their most compelling research project is distributed to the awards committee.

The three top candidates for the 2020 competition were Dr. Stephanie Seidlit (UCLA), Timothy Downing (UCI) and Jamal Lewis (UCD). This was a diverse field including female and African American candidates who competed in the competition. Each candidate presented a 15-minute talk that addressed a single important question that drives their research program, including a cogent description of their strategy and its impact on the biomedical field. After each talk, a robust 5-minute question and answer session followed. Dr. Stephanie Seidlit received the inaugural Shu Chien Early Career Award, with Timothy Downing and Jamal Lewis as runner-ups.