11/01/14 — Mechanical engineering grad Anupam Pathak started a company called Lift Labs that creates devices to assist people with Parkinson's and other tremor-related diseases.
10/30/14 — Charvi Shetty is the CEO and founder of KNOX Medical Diagnostics, a company specializing in cloud-connected personalized care for asthmatics. With the support of the Foundry@CITRIS, she is currently working on building a better asthma-monitoring device.
10/24/14 New York Times — With funding from the National Science Foundation and two private donors, Berkeley Engineering scientists will establish a research center intended to help develop medical robots that can perform low-level and repetitive surgical tasks.
10/23/14 New York Times — Robotics scientists, pondering the intriguing possibility of repurposing existing search-and-rescue robots to help contain the Ebola epidemic, are planning a nationwide series of brainstorming meetings, including one Nov. 7 at UC Berkeley.
10/07/14 — One team in Professor Amy Herr's senior capstone bioengineering course came up with an elegant solution to improve on walkers for the elderly and infirm that don't fit into tight spaces: the Ninja Walker.
09/22/14 Office of Science and Technology Policy — A post to the White House blog last week recognized mechanical engineering professor Lydia Sohn for her prize-winning submission to a foundation-sponsored competition seeking the most compelling ideas for revolutionary life science platform technologies. Sohn's idea? A low-cost, label-free platform to screen, and subsequently sort, single-cells for multiple surface markers.
09/05/14 Daily Californian — A group of UC Berkeley students, led by co-founders Taner Dagdelen and Zachary Zeleznick, both bioengineering juniors, have launched what they call the first-ever student-run health tech incubator.
08/27/14 Wired — Researchers in the labs of Berkeley bioengineers Kevin Healy and Luke Lee are collaborating on a project to recreate parts of the human body on chips. The research aims to find ways to get tissue to live and mimic how real organs function in order to eliminate years of animal and human testing of medical treatments.
08/13/14 Berkeley Lab — The road from lab bench to market can be long, but UC Berkeley's Jay Keasling has been patient. Thirteen years after he discovered how to make an antimalarial drug in microbes, the product - the world's first semisynthetic antimalarial drug - has been shipped from Italy to Africa to bolster the fight against this killer disease.
07/31/14 CBS News — UC Berkley professor Brian Barsky's experiments could solve a common modern problem. He's developing software designed to help anyone who has to wear glasses every time they look at a computer or smartphone.
07/29/14 — Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing vision-correcting displays that can compensate for a viewer's visual impairments to create sharp images without the need for glasses or contact lenses.
06/10/14 — Berkeley researchers, led by Irina Conboy of bioengineering, have discovered that oxytocin – a hormone associated with maternal nurturing, social attachments, childbirth and sex – is indispensable for healthy muscle maintenance and repair. It is the latest target for development into a potential treatment for age-related muscle wasting.
05/27/14 — Neuroscientists, engineers and physicians from Berkeley and other university and industry partners are teaming up for an ambitious 5-year, $26 million project to develop new techniques for tackling mental illness by using devices implanted in the brain to target and correct malfunctioning neural circuits in conditions such as clinical depression, addiction and anxiety disorders.
05/02/14 New York Times — The CellScope Oto, based on a device born in professor Dan Fletcher's bioengineering lab in 2009, is one of two tools featured in a New York Times article on a new breed of apps and devices that increasingly put medical tools in the hands of consumers.
05/01/14 — Researchers led by Robert Ritchie, professor of materials science and engineering, have learned that the natural bone aging process can be hastened by a deficiency in vitamin D.
04/04/14 — Sometime soon, Sylvain Costes (Ph.D'99 NE) hopes that annual medical checkups will include a simple blood test to determine levels of DNA damage. The list of things assaultive to the body's basic building blocks is long - radiation, ultraviolet light and toxins, to name a few - and errors occur even during normal cell division. The body continually repairs this damaged DNA, but sometimes, the routine repair process can fail. DNA damage and genetic mutations can lead to serious health problems like cancer, immunological disorders, neurological disorders and premature aging.
04/04/14 — Anupam Pathak's (B.S'04 ME) idea to build a device to assist people with Parkinson's disease or essential tremor evolved from helping soldiers survive combat. Pathak started his mechanical engineering doctoral research at the University of Michigan at the height of U.S. troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004. Field reports showed that large numbers of freshly minted troops, with little experience in war zones, were facing stress-induced tremors during combat situations. A soldier with shaky hands is dangerous; the situation was so bad that tremor was affecting casualty rates.
03/24/14 Contra Costa Times — Japanese radioisotopes aren't lurking in the sand at Miramar Beach, the California Department of Public Health said in a final report debunking suggestions that the beach contained radioactive material from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. "Nuclear radiation is something you can't smell, see and feel; it tends to scare people" said UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Kai Vetter, leader of the school's Rad Watch project, which has tested West Coast air, rain, milk and fish without finding any evidence that Fukushima-related contamination poses a health threat.