2020 Awards and Honors
CORE FACULTY
James Antaki
Awarded $4.7-million grant for treatment for congenital heart failure in infants & children from the U.S. Department of Defense (CDMRP); received scale-up and prototyping award ($40,000) to commercialize heart-recovery device for infants and young children from Cornell Engineering.
Lawrence Bonassar
Awarded a 2020 Fiona Ip Li ’78 and Donald Li ’75 Award for excellence in teaching from Cornell Engineering.
Ilana Brito
Awarded a $300,000 inaugural LRA-BMS Accelerator Award, a collaborative sponsoring partnership between the Lupus Research Alliance and Bristol Myers Squibb to supporting cutting-edge lupus research projects over two years; 2020 Robert ’55 and Vanne ’57 Cowie Award for excellence in teaching from Cornell Engineering.
Jonathan Butcher
Named a 2020 Class of Fellows of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).
Iwijn De Vlaminck
Awarded (with Drs. Darshana Dadhania and Chris Mason of WCM) $3.5 M, R01 NIH-NIAID for urinary tract infection research; awarded (with Dr. Jerome Ritz at Dana-Farber) $3.4 M R01 NIH-NIAID for Epigenetic Profiling of circulating cell-free DNA for the Monitoring of Graft-Versus Host Disease after Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation; awarded $267 K grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Characterizing cell-free DNA in urine, plasma and sputum of TB; awarded $1.1 M (with Professors Ilana Brito and Warren Zipfel) a R33 IMAT NIH-NCI grant to Explore Tumor-Microbiome Interactions in Human Colorectal Cancer; extension from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation for research on cell-free DNA as a non-invasive test of bacterial translocation, ileal inflammation, and extra-intestinal Crohn’s disease.
Claudia Fischbach
Named an Associate Director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF); awarded 2020 John Swanson ’61 ME in honor of his mother, Dorothy G. Swanson Award for excellence in teaching from Cornell Engineering.
Chris Hernandez
Received a mid-career travel award from the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Jan Lammerding
Awarded a research excellence award from Cornell Engineering; research article on muscular dystrophy on the cover of the April issue of Nature Materials.
Nozomi Nishimura
Awarded 2020 James M. and Marsha D. McCormick Advising Award` from Cornell Engineering.
Mert Sabuncu
Awarded a research excellence award from Cornell Engineering; honored as an inspirational Cornell faculty member by Merrill Presidential Scholar Danqiao Yu.
Marjolein van der Meulen
Named a fellow of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR); elected second vice president of the Orthopaedic Research Society for a two-year term.
FACULTY PROMOTIONS
Claudia Fischbach
elected the inaugural Stanley Bryer 1946 Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
Christopher Hernandez
promoted to the rank of professor.
STUDENTS & POSTDOCS
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Aaron Chiou (Fischbach Lab) awarded a Young Investigator Award at the International Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Mineralized Tissues (ICCBMT).
Carolyn Chlebek (van der Meulen Lab) awarded an Outstanding Collegiate Member Award from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at WE19, the world’s largest conference for women in engineering.
Junghun Cho (Yi Wang Lab) received editor’s choice for his paper in the March 2020 Magnetic Resonance in Medicine journal.
Korie Grayson (King Lab) inducted into the Cornell chapter of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.
Keng Jung (Lee Lab) selected as one of the featured speakers at the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Summit in Boston (BEIS-Boston) in July 2020.
Lu Ling (Fischbach Lab) received a poster presentation award at the 2020 Physical Sciences Oncology Annual Investigators Meeting.
Omary Mzava (De Vlaminck Lab) selected for the Africa Fund Fellowship from the Cornell Graduate School.
Nancy Ruiz-Uribe (Schaffer-Nishimura Lab) received a three-minute thesis (3MT) award in the Ph.D. category from the Alzheimer’s Association (@ISTAART).
Eti Sinha (Elemento Lab), with Ravin Sardal, won Grand Prize at Stanford University's "Building for Digital Health" Hackathon.
Stephen Sloan (Bonassar Lab) awarded a Trainee Podium Award for Outstanding Scientific Research at the Orthopaedic Research Society/Philadelphia Spine Research Symposium in November 2019.
Chelsea Stephens (Butcher Lab) received a social justice award at the annual Diversity Programs in Engineering event held virtually in 2020.
Mathew Tan (Fischbach Lab) awarded a 2020 research award from the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester, NY; received a scientific merit award for his poster presentation at the Physical Sciences Oncology Network (PS-ON) Annual Investigator’s meeting.
Johana Uribe (Daniel Lab) inducted into the Cornell chapter of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.
Jacob VanderBurgh (Reinhart-King Lab) accepted paper at the Journal of Cell Science.
Yan Wen (Yi Wang Lab) received a QSM recon challenge award at the 5th International Workshop on MRI Phase Contrast & Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping in Korea.
Matthew Wittman (Fischbach Lab) awarded a Young Investigator Award at the International Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Mineralized Tissues (ICCBMT).
Jinwei Zhang (Yi Wang Lab) received a QSM recon challenge award at the 5th International Workshop on MRI Phase Contrast & Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping in Korea.
Chris Brunkhorst (Nishimura Lab), Aria Henderson (Lee Lab), and Nancy Ruiz-Uribe (Schaffer-Nishimura Lab) each awarded a Mong Fellowship from Cornell Neurotech.
Aaron LaViolette ( Ph.D. TA of the Year) Cara Roberts, Alex Cheng and Len Magara received excellence in teaching awards.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Haley Antoine awarded an Outstanding Collegiate Member Award from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at WE19, the world’s largest conference for women in engineering.
Hyoann Choi received a spring 2020 research award from Cornell Engineering Learning Initiative (ELI) for her proposal entitled “Human small intestine on-a-chip.”
Cassie Gologorsky awarded 1st place in the undergraduate student paper competition at the Summer Bioengineering, Biomechanics, and Biotransport (SB3C) Meeting.
Danielle Jorgenson received a spring 2020 Undergraduate Research Award from Engineering Learning Initiatives for her project entitled "Confirming Cell Expression in Bone following Loading."
Stacey Wong received an excellence in teaching award for BME 3410.
Danqiao Yu received a 2020 Merrill Presidential Scholar award, naming Meinig School Professor Mert Sabuncu as the Cornell faculty member who most significantly contributed to her college experience.
Stephie Lux, Alexa Podolsky, and Sophia Windemuth each awarded a scholarship from Tau Beta Pi (Engineering Honors Society).
Team VitalMask consisting of five undergraduates including BME students Allison Fleisher and Kristen Ong won 1st overall and 3rd in the IBM coronavirus challenge at the 7th annual AI Health Hackathon held at Weill Cornell Medicine.
POSTDOCS
Laurie Bizimana (Schaffer-Nishiumra Lab) selected as a L'Oreal USA 2019 For Women In Science Fellow.
Oliver Bracko (Schaffer-Nishiumra Lab) hired by University of Miami as an assistant professor, starting June 2021.
Anna Maria Porras (Brito Lab) hired by J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida, as an assistant professor, starting August 2021.
David Small (Schaffer-Nishiumra Lab) awarded a 2020 APS-CV Section Research Recognition Award from the American Physiological Society-Cardiovascular Section
Lianne Trigiani (Schaffer-Nishiumra Lab) received a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to pursue a career in health-related research abroad.
MEET THE 2020 NSF FELLOWS
The Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering proudly congratulates Ph.D. students Serafina Lopez (Bonassar Lab), Maggie Pacheco (Andarawis-Puri Lab), Cara Robertus (Putnam Lab), and Ruben Trujillo (Putnam Lab), who each recently won a 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). The NSF GRFP offers three years of stipend support during a 5-year fellowship tenure to applicants selected through a national competition.
Three undergraduate students, Emily Jiang, Emma Stowe, and Ai Mochida, also received NSF fellowships.