School of Engineering PhD student Hojat Rezaei will further develop microfluidic systems in Cambridge, Mass.
UBC School of Engineering PhD student Hojat Rezaei.
School of Engineering PhD student Hojat Rezaei recently won a prestigious $37,000 Friedman Scholarshipfrom UBC’s Faculty of Medicine.
The award allows Rezaei to study for one year at Harvard as part of his PhD on the topic of developing microfluidic systems for tissue-engineering applications. He starts at Harvard in September 2014.
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Over the past two years, under the supervision of Dr. Mina Hoorfar in the Advanced Thermo-Fluidic Laboratory at UBC Okanagan, Rezaei developed a technique that utilizes non-uniform electric fields to isolate or accurately position a particular particle or cell on a microchip.
Rezaei’s research proposal describes the emerging science of tissue engineering as “a significant potential alternative or complementary solution, whereby tissue and organ failure is addressed by implanting natural, synthetic, or semisynthetic tissue and organ mimics that are fully functional from the start, or that grow into the required functionality.
“The ability to isolate micron-size colloidal particles and cells on a microchip enables researchers to practically redesign the standard macroscopic assays on microfluidic platform for many bio-engineering applications, most importantly in the field of tissue engineering.”
Rezaei started his PhD in January of 2012 and is expecting to finish his doctorate by December 2015. He is from the city of Shiraz in Iran.
The Friedman Scholars Program is open to scholars working in Health Sciences, which is broadly interpreted to include any student doing work on any health-related matter that promotes and disseminates health-related education or research.
The Constance Livingstone-Friedman and Sydney Friedman Foundation Scholarships in Health Sciences are named after the first two faculty members in the UBC Faculty of Medicine. Drs. Constance and Sydney Friedman believed that a full well-rounded education requires students to learn from different perspectives and learn from different cultures.
The goal of the Friedman Scholars program is to provide funding to graduate students or medical residents so that they can pursue a learning opportunity to further their career or to bring new perspectives to the education they have already received.