Aaron Streets named Pew Scholar in biomedical sciences

Aaron Streets, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Bioengineering Department, is one of 22 early-career researchers joining the 2019 Pew Scholars Program in Biomedical Sciences. This honor also comes with four years of funding for exploratory research to advance human health and tackle some of biomedicine’s most challenging questions.

Streets will explore how obesity leads to unhealthy changes in the cellular, molecular and structural composition of adipose tissue.

“Much of our lab’s research is technology driven and exploratory by nature which means there is a level of risk involved in our proposals. I am honored that the Pew Charitable Trust is invested in our ideas and I look forward to joining this inspiring and ambitious cohort of scientists in the Pew Biomedical Scholars program,” said Streets.

Streets earned his B.A. in fine arts and B.S. in physics from UCLA in 2004, then a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford in 2012. He was named a UC Presidents Fellow in 2016, the same year he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley. His lab currently applies lessons from math, physics and engineering to invent tools that will help make precise measurements of single cells. His team hopes their tools will help to uncover the laws the govern interactions of molecules inside of a cell and the interaction between cells in a tissue or organisms.

In addition to Streets, Michel DuPage of UC Berkeley’s Molecular and Cell Biology Department is also a Pew Scholar.