News

Med Student Focusing on Gut Microbiome awarded 2019 O'Connor Research Grant

Simran Sandhu, a medical student at UC Davis School of Medicine, has been honored with this year’s Daniel T. O’Connor, M.D., Memorial Research Grant. Sandhu earned the award for his translational research examining how different pathologies may result in gut and skin microbiome imbalance in patients. Sandhu works on human microbiome research with Raja Sivamani, associate professor of Clinical Dermatology at UC Davis Health.

Robot Arm Tastes With Engineered Bacteria

A robotic gripping arm that uses engineered bacteria to “taste” for a specific chemical has been developed by engineers at the University of California, Davis, and Carnegie Mellon University. The gripper is a proof-of-concept for biologically-based soft robotics.  “Our long-term vision is about building a synthetic microbiota for soft robots that can help with repair, energy generation or biosensing of the environment,” said Cheemeng Tan, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis. The work was published June 26 in the journal Science Robotics. 

Graduate Student Nick Jensen Awarded The Danone North America Fellowship Grant

Nick was one of two recipients of the Danone North America Gut Microbiome, Yogurt and Probiotics Fellowship Grant, which awarded each recipient a $25,000 scholarship. The scholarship will help Nick pay for RNA sequencing services in order to identify the genes that Bifidobacterium strains use to grow on specific HMOs (human milk oligosaccharides). Nick Jensen is a graduate student in the Microbiology Graduate Group working in the laboratory of Professor David Mills. Nick’s research focuses on the genomic and ecological basis of carbohydrate metabolism in beneficial microbes such as Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus.