Graduate Studies Committee

All BME Ph.D. students must select a supervisor for their dissertation research. Students may work with any member of the BME Graduate Studies Committee (GSC), which is comprised of BME department faculty as well as faculty in related fields who are active participants in the biomedical engineering graduate program at The University of Texas at Austin. The GSC makes curriculum recommendations and is responsible for graduate program policies through the program’s Graduate Advisor. Responsibilities of the GSC include graduate student instruction, advising, and supervising theses, reports, and dissertations.

Technical Area 1, Biomedical Imaging and Instrumentation

BME Faculty

Adela Ben-Yakar
Research Interests: Femtosecond Laser Micro-Surgery (FLMS) and Two-photon Imaging using optical MEMS devices and Photonic Bandgap Fibers for cancer detection and treatment; Femtosecond laser micromachining of integrated devices for microfludics. ben-yakar@mail.utexas.edu

Andrew Dunn
Research Interests: Optical microscopy, functional brain imaging, molecular imaging, neuroscience. adunn@utexas.edu

Sapun Parekh
Research Interests: Chemical and nonlinear microscopy; molecular basis of pathology; microscopy instrumentation; molecular physics of biomaterials; mechano-chemical coupling in cancer. sparekh@utexas.edu

Tyrone Porter
Research Interests: Image-guided ultrasound-mediated tumor ablation, Image-guided drug delivery, neurostimulation with focused ultrasound, photoacoustic imaging, controlled drug release, strategies to activate or enhance anticancer immunity,  in vitro models of the blood-brain barrier. tmp6@utexas.edu 

H. Grady Rylander
Research Interests: Vision research, biomedical sensors, laser applications, neuroprosthesis design. rylander@mail.utexas.edu

Samantha Santacruz
Research Interests: Neural engineering, brain-machine interfaces, neurotherapeutic devices, neuromodulation. srsantacruz@utexas.edu

Anna Sorace
Research Interests: Multimodality imaging to improve detection, monitoring and therapy of diseases in both preclinical and clinical cancer research. Specifically, her research includes identifying quantitative imaging biomarkers for early response to breast cancer treatment and utilizing them to guide and improve drug delivery. anna.sorace@austin.utexas.edu

James Tunnell
Research Interests: Biomedical optical spectroscopy and imaging; laser-tissue interactions. jtunnell@mail.utexas.edu

Thomas Yankeelov
Research interests: cancer imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, tumor modeling, predictive oncology, patient-specific modeling, computational oncology. thomas.yankeelov@utexas.edu

Evan Wang
Research Interests: Neuroengineering, bioelectronics, biomaterials, wearable electronics, nanotechnology. evanwang@utexas.edu

Tim H.C. Yeh
Research Interests: Nanobiosensor development, cancer biomarker detection; 3D molecular tracking and super-resolution imaging. tim.yeh@austin.utexas.edu

Bo Zhao
Research interests: Computational imaging, medical imaging, magnetic resonance imaging. 

Non-BME Faculty at UT Austin

Ray Chen
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests:  Nano-photonic passive and active devices for bio- and EM-wave sensing and interconnect applications, thin film guided-wave optical interconnection and packaging for 2D and 3D laser beam routing and steering, true time delay (TTD) wide band phased array antenna (PAA), and 3D printed micro-electronics and photonics. chen@ece.utexas.edu

Ming-Chieh Ding
Neurology - Dell Medical School
Research Interests: Investigating the alterations in neuronal excitation/inhibition and network signaling changes following ischemic injury. ming-chieh.ding@austin.utexas.edu

Wilson S. Geisler
Psychology
Research Interests:  Current projects are concerned with perceptual grouping, visual search, natural scene statistics, and the neurophysiology of primary visual cortex. geisler@psy.utexas.edu

John A. Pearce
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests: Thermal damage in tissue, electrosurgery, bioelectric phenomena. jpearce@mail.utexas.edu

Martin Poenie
Biological Sciences
Research Interests: Cellular imaging; Cellular regulation and development. poenie@mail.utexas.edu

Jonathan W. Valvano
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests: Bioinstrumentation, measurement of perfusion, tissue thermal properties, real-time temperature measurements, thermal modeling in tissue, embedded applications of microcomputers. valvano@mail.utexas.edu

Yuebing Zheng
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Digital nanomanufacturing, space-life detection, and global health and medicine. zheng@austin.utexas.edu

Non-BME, Non-UT Austin Faculty

James Bankson
Dept. of Imaging Physics, Divsion of Diagnostic Imaging, MD Anderson
Research interests: Magnetic resonance imaging; fast imaging; quantitative imaging; parallel imaging; system engineering; receiver coil and phased array detector design; signal processing. jbankson@mdanderson.org

Konstantin Sokolov
Dept. of Imaging Physics, MD Anderson
Research Interests: optical imaging and spectroscopy of cancer; molecular imaging, multimodal contrast agents; nanoparticles and nanotechnology in molecular imaging. kostia@mail.utexas.edu

Technical Area 2, Cellular and Biomolecular Engineering

BME Faculty

Aaron Baker
Research Interests: Cardiovascular biology, vascular mechanotransduction, and vascular drug delivery. abbaker@austin.utexas.edu

Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez
Research Interests: Tissue repair and regeneration. Polymer science, biomaterials, injectable bone grafts, chronic wound dressings, tissue-engineered ligaments, biovascular grafts. cosgriff.hernandez@utexas.edu

Amy Brock
Research Interests: Cancer systems biology, heterogeneity and cell state plasticity, gene regulatory networks, cheomtherapy drug resistance, normal differentiation and differentiation therapy. amy.brock@utexas.edu

Don Elbert
Research Interests: Hydrogel scaffolds, cell-sized hydrogel microspheres, peripheral nerve regeneration, mathematical modeling. don.elbert@utexas.edu

George Georgiou
Research Interests: Antibody engineering, enzyme engineering, protein folding in vivo. gg@che.utexas.edu

Jenny Jiang
Research Interests: Systems immunology, genomics, single cell analysis, immune repertoire sequencing, bioinformatics, infection, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. jiang@austin.utexas.edu

Hyun Jung Kim
Research Interests: Bioinspired organ mimicry, in vitro disease model, regenerative medicine, host-microbe ecosystem, synthetic biology. hyunjung.kim@utexas.edu

Nicholas Peppas
Research Interests: Biomaterials, controlled drug delivery, molecular modeling of protein structures in contact with biomaterials and tissues, modeling of biomedical devices, bionanotechnology and molecular recognition processes. peppas@che.utexas.edu

Tyrone Porter
Research Interests: Image-guided ultrasound-mediated tumor ablation, Image-guided drug delivery, neurostimulation with focused ultrasound, photoacoustic imaging, controlled drug release, strategies to activate or enhance anticancer immunity,  in vitro models of the blood-brain barrier. tmp6@utexas.edu 

Marissa Nichole Rylander
Research Interests: Multidisciplinary elements of bioheat transfer, nanomedicine, biomedical optics, tissue regeneration, and cancer engineering. mnr@austin.utexas.edu

Michael Sacks
Research Interests: Cardiovascular biomechanics; computational simulation of the behavior of the cardiovascular system; advanced constitutive models; biomechanical interactions of cell, tissue, and organ in native and engineered heart valves and myocardium. msacks@ices.utexas.edu

Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert
Research Interests: Biomaterials, drug delivery, tissue engineering, nerve regeneration, and stem cell biology for applications to treat spinal cord and peripheral nerve injury. sakiyama@utexas.edu

Jeanne Stachowiak
Research Interests: Biological membranes, biophysics, construction of minimal cell-like systems, biomaterials, drug delivery. jcstach@austin.utexas.edu

Laura J. Suggs
Research Interests: Cardiovascular tissue engineering, adult progenitor cells and vasculogenesis, biologically active materials. laura.suggs@engr.utexas.edu

Evan Wang
Research Interests: Neuroengineering, bioelectronics, biomaterials, wearable electronics, nanotechnology. evanwang@utexas.edu

Song (Stephen) Yi
Research Interests: Combining computational and experimental expertise to build a quantitative understanding of genetic/epigenetic variation and signaling network perturbation in disease. stephen.yi@austin.utexas.edu

Janet Zoldan
Research Interests: Tissue engineering, stem cell bioengineering, human-induced pluripotent stem cells. zjanet@austin.utexas.edu

Non-BME Faculty at UT Austin

Zhengrong Cui
Pharmacy
Research Interests: Improving the efficacy of anticancer drugs and overcoming tumor chemoresistance, vaccine delivery and adjuvant discovery, and targeting of drugs to chronic inflammation sites. zhengrong.cui@austin.utexas.edu

Kevin Dalby
Pharmacy
Research Interests: Signal transduction, protein-protein interactions, drug design, cancer, protein kinase biochemistry, and cell biology. dalby@mail.utexas.edu

Andrew Ellington
Chemistry and Biochemistry
Research Interests: Evolutionary engineering of molecules, metabolism and organisms. andy.ellington@mail.utexas.edu

Ilya Finkelstein
Molecular Biosciences
Research Interests: Tools that merge micro-/nano-engineering, single molecule biophysics, and genomics to understand the mechanisms of genome maintenance and CRISPR gene editing.
ifinkelstein@cm.utexas.edu

Debadyuti Ghosh
Pharmacy
Research Interests: Biologically inspired, rational design of biomolecules (i.e., antibodies and peptides) and nanoscale materials for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. dghosh@austin.utexas.edu

Vernita Gordon
Physics
Research Interests: How physical factors, such as spatial structure and mechanics, impact pathogenicity and disease course of bacterial biofilm infections. gordon@chaos.utexas.edu

Li Shi
Mechanical Engineering
Research interests: We investigate transport and nano sciences to advance energy, information, biomedical, and security technologies. lishi@mail.utexas.edu

Jason Shear
Chemistry & Biochemstry
Research interests: Biomaterials, Cellular Engineering, Chemical Microanalysis, Microscopy. jshear@mail.utexas.edu

Hugh Smyth
Pharmacy
Research interests: Conrolled release pulmonary drug delivery, dry powder device design, nano-bio interactions. hsmyth@mail.utexas.edu

Max Snodderly
Human Ecology
Research interests: Vision, the effects of aging on vision, and the potential for nutrition to slow or prevent age-related eye disease.max.snodderly@mail.utexas.edu

Non-BME, Non-UT Austin Faculty

Gregory Reece
Plastic Surgery, MD Anderson
Research Interests: Angiogenesis in wound healing, tissue engineering and vascular biology. greece@mdanderson.org

Technical Area 3, Computational Biomedical Engineering

BME Faculty

Kenneth R. Diller
Research Interests: Low-temperature biology, thermal modeling, tissue banking, burn injury, computer vision. kdiller@mail.utexas.edu

Jenny Jiang
Research Interests: Systems immunology, genomics, single cell analysis, immune repertoire sequencing, bioinformatics, infection, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. jiang@austin.utexas.edu

Mia K. Markey
Research Interests: Machine learning and statistical techniques for detection, classification and prediction in biology and medicine, biomedical image analysis. mia.markey@mail.utexas.edu

Pengyu Ren
Research Interests: Molecular modeling of biological systems, computational biology. pren@mail.utexas.edu

Michael Sacks
Research Interests: Cardiovascular biomechanics; computational simulation of the behavior of the cardiovascular system; advanced constitutive models; biomechanical interactions of cell, tissue, and organ in native and engineered heart valves and myocardium. msacks@ices.utexas.edu

Thomas Yankeelov
Research interests: cancer imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, tumor modeling, predictive oncology, patient-specific modeling, computational oncology. thomas.yankeelov@utexas.edu

Bo Zhao
Research interests: Computational imaging, medical imaging, magnetic resonance imaging. 

Non-BME Faculty at UT Austin

Lawrence D. Abraham
Kinesiology and Health
Research Interests: Neural control of movement, human biomechanics. l.abraham@mail.utexas.edu

Chandrajit L. Bajaj
Computer Science
Research Interests: Computer models of physical domains with associated physics. bajaj@cs.utexas.edu

Ronald E. Barr
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Biosignal analysis, computer graphics, biomechanics. rbarr@mail.utexas.edu

Alan Bovik
 Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests: Biomedical image processing, computer vision. bovik@mail.utexas.edu

Joydeep Ghosh
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests: Large-scale data mining and intelligent data analaysis for high-throughput systems; bioinformatics; health-care system modeling. ghosh@ece.utexas.edu

Robin Gutell
Integrative Biology
Research Interests: The analysis of RNA sequences from an RNA structure and a molecular phylogenetic perspective can reveal the secondary and tertiary structure of RNA molecules, most notably for the 16S and 23S ribosomal RNAs, and phylogenetic relationships for organisms that span the entire tree of life. robin.gutell@mail.utexas.edu

Edward Marcotte
 Chemistry and Biochemistry
Research Interests: Bioinformatics; functional genomics, proteomics; mass-spectrometric detection of protein expression; protein microarrays; protein-network-guided drug discovery; high-throughput protein interaction screening; high-throughput discovery of gene function.  marcotte@icmb.utexas.edu

Tess J. Moon
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Cellular and tissue biomechanics and biophysics. tmoon@mail.utexas.edu

Sriram Vishwanath
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Interests: Data mining and machine learning for health care, health care predictive modeling, casual inference, graphical modeling. sriram@utexas.edu

Non-BME, Non-UT Austin Faculty

John Byrne
Neurobiology & Anatomy, UT Health Science Center-Houston
Research Interests: Analysis and synthesis of neural circuits and biochemical and genetic networks mediating learning and memory. John.H.Byrne@uth.tmc.edu

Technical Area 4, Molecular, Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics

BME Faculty

Aaron Baker
Research Interests: Cardiovascular biology, vascular mechanotransduction, and vascular drug delivery. abbaker@austin.utexas.edu

Nanshu Lu
Research Interests: Mechanics of thin films on compliant substrates; mechanics of flexible electronics with extreme deformability and compliance; mechanics at bio-electronics interface; development of novel bio-integrated soft electronics for cardiac, neural and epidermal applications. nanshulu@utexas.edu

Kenneth R. Diller
Research Interests: Low-temperature biology, thermal modeling, tissue banking, burn injury, computer vision. kdiller@mail.utexas.edu

Sapun Parekh
Research Interests: Chemical and nonlinear microscopy; molecular basis of pathology; microscopy instrumentation; molecular physics of biomaterials; mechano-chemical coupling in cancer. sparekh@utexas.edu

Manuel Rausch
Research Interests: Deep vein thrombosis, mechanics of thin biological membranes (skin, heart valves, fetal membranes), damage and failure in soft tissues. manuel.rausch@utexas.edu

Chris Rylander
Research Interests: Manufacturing and design, biomechanical engineering and thermal/fluid systems. cgr@austin.utexas.edu

Michael Sacks
Research Interests: Cardiovascular biomechanics; computational simulation of the behavior of the cardiovascular system; advanced constitutive models; biomechanical interactions of cell, tissue, and organ in native and engineered heart valves and myocardium. msacks@ices.utexas.edu

Jeanne Stachowiak
Research Interests: Biological membranes, biophysics, construction of minimal cell-like systems, biomaterials, drug delivery. jcstach@austin.utexas.edu

Non-BME Faculty at UT Austin

Lawrence D. Abraham
Kinesiology and Health
Research Interests: Neural control of movement, human biomechanics. l.abraham@mail.utexas.edu

Ronald E. Barr
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Biosignal analysis, computer graphics, biomechanics. rbarr@mail.utexas.edu

Nicholas Fey 
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Neuromuscular biomechanics, rehabilitation robotics, prostheses and orthoses, ambulation. nfey@utexas.edu

Tess J. Moon
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Cellular and tissue biomechanics and biophysics. tmoon@mail.utexas.edu

James Sulzer
Mechanical Engineering
Research Interests: Development of technology for understanding and addressing significant issues in physical rehabilitation following neurological injury such as stroke. james.sulzer@austin.utexas.edu