Eight Berkeley engineers honored as 2021 Siebel Scholars

Eight Berkeley engineers have been named to the Siebel Scholars Foundation’s 2021 class. The graduate students — five from bioengineering, two from computer science and one from energy science — are among more than 90 selected worldwide for their academic achievements and demonstrated leadership.

The Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes top students at the world’s leading graduate schools of bioengineering, business, computer science and energy science. The program, now in its 20th year, comes with a $35,000 award. Today, more than 1,300 of the world’s brightest minds are Siebel Scholars.

“My congratulations go to these outstanding students for earning this prestigious honor from the Siebel Scholars Foundation,” said Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean and Roy W. Carlson professor of engineering at Berkeley. “By providing such critical scholarship support, this program encourages young researchers to explore high-risk, high-reward directions that address the world’s most pressing challenges. I look forward to learning about the advances they’ll make in their fields.”

Meet the 2021 class of Siebel Scholars at Berkeley:

• Nicolas Altemose is developing microfluidic and molecular tools for studying genome regulation in single cells.
• Tiffany Chien is building a flexible simulation framework for calcium neuron imaging, simulating the 3D physical sample and the lens-less imaging system.
• Anjali Gopal is investigating the progression and resistance mechanisms of HER2 isoforms in HER2+ breast cancer via simultaneous single-cell proteoform and RNA sequencing measurements.
• José Daniel Lara is exploring the analysis and simulation of power systems, microgrid design and mathematical programming under uncertainty.
• Marc Lim is studying the physiological transport of three-helix-micelle (3HM) nanocarriers in solid tumors.
• Zoë Steier has developed totalVI, a computational framework for the joint probabilistic analysis of paired transcriptome and proteome measurements in single cells.
• Alison Su is designing and validating measurement tools and workflows for biomedical applications ranging from bench to bedside.
• Jason Zhou is interested in swarm intelligence, deep learning and robotics; his research has applications toward defense and disaster relief.

The Siebel Scholars Foundation made the announcement today.