Alumni

Ruobing Zhang ('10) is a Principal Investigator at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as of October 2017. Prior to that he was a postdoc at Harvard University working on mapping brain with serial sectioning SEM. He will continue to decipher the map of neural networks and the ultrastructure of tumors with this state-of-the-art imaging technique.

Damien Mathew was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in August 2017.

Congratulations to Eric Johnson-Chavarria ('14) who has just been appointed as a 2017 NIH-AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow.

Eduardo Cruz-Chu ('10) is an Investigator at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. He previously held postdoc positions at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany and the Swiss Technical Institute (ETH) in Zurich.

In Fall 2017, Vinayak Agarwal ('12) began as an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he was a postdoc at Scripps Insitute of Oceanography in San Diego.

Recent graduate David Park ('16) is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Biology at Ferrum College in Virginia.

A tribute to 1969 graduate, Frederick Yi-Tung Cho (1939-2011), has been published by his former advisor, Govindjee ('60), and former lab mates and Biophysics alums John Munday ('68) and George Papageorgiou ('68).

Bryan Spring ('08) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Northeastern University. He completed his postdoc at Harvard Medical Center.

In 2017, Andrew Krivoshik (MD/PhD '01) became the Vice President of Medical Sciences - Oncology at Astellas Pharma Global Development, Inc. (APGD). Prior to that, he held medical directorships at Abbott Labs.

After completing a postdoc at Caltech, research at the University of Colorado, and teaching at Drexel University, Hairong Ma ('05) is now a Research Assistant Professor of Cell Physiology and Molecular Biophysics at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

Ahmet Yildiz ('04) is an Associate Professor in the Physics & Molecular and Cell Biology departments at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2005, he received the GE/Science Young Scientists Award, for his essay "Elucidating the Mechanism of Molecular Motor Movement."

After serving as clinical director at several medical facilities, Lelia "Adelina" Paunescu ('01) is now founder/principal of ACMP Clinical and Regulatory Consulting.

Bobby Scott ('74) is a Scientist Emeritus at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, NM. He continues to publish scientific papers and is quite active in the international group called Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information (SARI), which he helped organize.

Entering with an unusal background, agriculture, alum H Fred Downey graduated from Biophysics in 1968. The day after graduation, he began as an Assistant Professor of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology at the U of I. He also held a joint appointment in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. In 1972, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of TX Southwestern Medical Center. He moved to Fort Worth in 1985 to become a Professor of Physiology at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, a position from which he retired as Emeritus Professor in 2014. He still has an office in the Department of Integrative Physiology and Anatomy and continues to publish research reports.

Marc Mangel (MS '72) received a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the University of British Columbia in 1978. Since 1980, he has been at the University of California (Davis 1980-1996; Santa Cruz 1996-) where he is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematical Biology and conducts research in ecology and evolutionary biology, at the level of the cell and higher. Mangel was the Independent Scientific Expert witness in the case in the International Court of Justice "Whaling in the Antarctic: Australia v. Japan" in which the Court concluded that the Japanese special permit whaling program in the Southern Ocean contravened international law. In 2014, he received a DSc honoris causa from the University of Guelph.

Not all graduates remain in traditional scientific positions. Mauktik Kulkarni (MS '02) is currently a writer/producer in India. He is working on getting a documentary, "Living on a Sunbeam", produced. It is about his 2014 backpacking trip across India. In 2009, he published a book about 5000-mile motorcycle ride through South America: "A Ghost of Che: A Motorcycle Ride Through Space, Time, Life and Love"

John Munday ('68) retired from the Department of Natural Science and Mathematics, Regent University, in July 2014 and is working on a book on science and faith.

Karen Groh graduated with an MS in 1985 and is an Assistant Professor at Good Samaritan College of Nursing and Health Science, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

2012 graduate Gemma Comellas headed to Portland after earning her PhD, where she works as a RET Design Engineer for the Intel Corporation.

Shwayta Kukreti (PhD '07/MD '11) is currently pursuing Radiology at UCLA, where she continues to research molecular imaging using laser spectroscopy, specifically on breast cancer. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the American Physician Scientists Association.

2004 graduate Jee Hyun Choi has been working for the Center for Neuroscience at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology for about 9 years. She runs a Functional Mouse Brain Mapping lab and also teaches at the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea.

Thomas Makris ('04) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. Tom did his postdoc at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Su Xu ('95) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She also serves as the manager of a small animal in vivo imaging core, which is equipped with a Bruker Avance III 7T small animal MRI scanner, a Siemens inveon small animal PET-CT imaging system, a Xenogen IVIS-200 optical in vivo imaging system and a MRI-guided focused ultrasound system. She is married to alum Yihong Yang ('95).

After graduating from Andy Wang's lab in 1994, Hong Zhang became a postdoc with Johann Deisenhofer at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, TX until 1998. She has been a faculty member with the Molecular Biophysics program at UT Southwestern since 1999.

Darayash "Darrell" Tata ('91) received his PhD from what was then known as the Physiology and Biophysics Department with Dr. Floyd Dunn. He is now a Program Director at The National Cancer Institute in the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnostics.

Hannah Distinguished Professor David Kramer ('90) teaches Photosynthesis and Bioenergetics at Michigan State University. He is also a Research Associate at the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center. Prior to his position at Michigan, we was an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Plant Sciences at Washington State University.

Goran Neshich ('89) is the leader of the Computational Biology Research Group at EMBRAPA, Brazil. He served as the the ISMB 2006 Conference Chair. ISMB, the International Society for Computational Biology, held its 14th annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology in August 2006.