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November 10, 2006 Vol. 77,
no. 13F
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| CAL CONNECTIONS: Along
with eating pizza at the Cheeseboard and running the Fire Trail,
alumna Michelle Khine’s favorite memories of Berkeley
are late night games of ping pong in BioE professor Luke Lee’s
lab. PHOTO
COURTESY OF MICHELLE KHINE
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“Crazy smart” and enterprising, BioE alumna pioneers a new career for herself at UC Merced
“If someone told me a year ago that I was going
to be a professor, I would’ve just laughed,” says Michelle
Khine (B.S.’99 ME, M.S.’01 ME, Ph.D.’05 BioE). “As
a student, being a professor was probably the last thing I thought
I would do, mostly because I thought professors were crazy smart, and
I didn’t think I was.”
But crazy smart she is. Khine develops microsystems for single-cell
analyses, researching tools to understand how cells respond to various
stimuli so doctors and drug manufacturers will one day have better
methods to cure diseases. She even spun off a company based on her
research while in graduate school. Now, she’s a new assistant
professor at the new School of Engineering on the new UC Merced campus
and in a career that never occurred to her.
She loves it.
Khine came to Berkeley as a junior transfer student because she wanted
the research experience that Berkeley Engineering offered. Once here,
the ME/PreMed student found her niche in ME professor Dennis Lieu’s
biomechanics lab. The experience was so positive that she scuttled
medical school. “I was interested in how the human body worked
and I loved doing research in the lab,” she explains.
In graduate school, Khine became curious about MEMS (MicroElectro Mechanical
Systems) and, as a Ph.D. student, joined BioE professor Luke Lee’s
lab. There, she and fellow researchers developed a platform to trap
individual cells. Once the cells were singled out, researchers applied
an electric field to open each cell, insert DNA or RNA and close the
cell membrane, all the while monitoring the cell’s response.
In this way, they can accurately and controllably insert various factors
into the cell and observe how the cell reacts. Khine and other researchers
got such good results that they started their own company with funds
from the National Institutes of Health.
Entrepreneurship suits Khine. She’d been in VERTEX, the engineering
entrepreneurial club, and had taken classes in the College’s
Management of Technology program. She relished starting a company and
pioneering a product.
But academia wasn’t through with her. “I was about a year
away from graduating when Luke encouraged me to apply for a few academic
positions,” she recalls. “I wasn’t sure if I was
ready to be a professor or even if I wanted to go into academia, but
he thought I had a shot. One of the positions was at UC Merced. I totally
fell in love with the school. It felt like a startup. Everyone was
really impassioned, so when they offered me a job, I took it. For me,
it was the best of both the academic and startup worlds. It’s
exciting to help found a university.”
And challenging. She had to wait for her building to be finished in
order to set up her lab. And she’s assumed an unusual number
of extra responsibilities because there are only 22 engineering faculty
on board so far.
“Although it’s busy and hectic, I love being here,” she
says. “I will enjoy seeing this place evolve over time.” Then
she adds, “It still feels weird when students call me professor.
I tell them to just call me Michelle.”
Read more about Khine at www.ucmerced.edu/faculty/facultylist.
Read more about Lee’s lab at http://biopoems.berkeley.edu.
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