Ying Wang, a student in Scott Simon’s lab, is a winner of the BMES 2011 Graduate Student Awards (Extended Abstract).

The awards are designed to provide encouragement and recognition for students’ academic achievements. This is a very high honor for Ying and her mentor, Scott Simon.

The BMES Awards Committee selects up to 5 graduate students on the basis of scientific merit, originality, and quality of written presentation.

Graduate Student awards include a certificate, a complimentary registration for the Annual Meeting, and a stipend of $500 to assist with travel expenses.

The awards will be presented to the awardees at the BMES Annual Business Meeting in Hartford, Conn, Oct. 12-15.

Ying received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2005 and M.S. in 2007. Her undergraduate and master thesis research involved studying the role of neuron hemichannels in ischemia-mediated neuronal injury. She also worked on a project that studied neuron nitric oxide production upon ischemia and reperfusion in vivo and in cultured hippocampus neurons. Ying is now a 4th year graduate student at UC Davis pursuing a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. She is now interested in endothelial inflammation and the molecular mechanisms of antherogenesis. A key question is how atherosclerosis and heart disease develop in obese individuals over years of repetitive exposure of endothelium to cholesterol laden lipoproteins. Her current approach is establishing an in vitro microfludics based vascular mimetic system to study how lipoproteins from subjects with different lipid profiles and anthropometric characteristics can differentially regulate endothelial inflammation and to identify contributing components (i.e. apolipoproteins, fatty acids ) on heterogeneous lipoprotein complex that modulate endothelial inflammatory pathway.