The ISTU Student Board helps plan and lead student activities and guide student participation in the Annual Symposium meeting. The Student Board will also plan unique opportunities for student engagement between the Annual Symposia.

The Student Board consists of PHD students from each of the geographic areas (North America, Asia, and Europe) that come together as a leadership group, under the guidance the Student Membership and Awards Committee.

Members of the Student Board are nominated and selected by members of the Student Membership and Awards Committee, and will serve for a period of 2 years.

Meet The Student Board

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Alessandro De Maio

Alessandro De Maio is a third-year PhD Candidate in Dr. Meaghan O Reilly’s lab at the University of Toronto. His graduate research investigates how different tissue architectures interact with customized blood-brain barrier treatment strategies to improve drug delivery to the brain. Alessandro earned his medical degree from La Sapienza - University of Rome where he worked on the musculoskeletal applications of focused ultrasound for metastatic thermal ablation compared to current standards of care. His interests span from neuroimaging to light sheet fluorescence microscopy and image-guided therapeutics.

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Manu K S

Manu K S is a PhD student in the Medical Ultrasound Engineering (MUSE) Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. His research focuses on designing and fabricating focused ultrasound transducers (HIFU) and developing acoustic metamaterials for advancing ultrasound-based therapy. He is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship, awarded by the Government of India. Before joining for PhD in 2022, he completed his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University in 2020 and later worked as a Research Assistant at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.

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Yashwanth Nanda Kumar

Yashwanth Nanda Kumar received his B.E in Biomedical Engineering from Anna University, Chennai in 2012 and an MS in Biomedical Engineering (Thesis) from Arizona State University, Tempe in 2015. Following this, he worked as a Biomedical Engineer in the Advanced R&D group at Ulthera., Inc, Merz North America, Mesa, Arizona, developing the next generation HIFU based facelift device. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, working at the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound, Applied Physics Laboratory, on optimizing treatment paradigms for effectively ablating Benign Prostate Hyperplasia. His research interests are in Therapeutic Focused Ultrasound, Histotripsy, Cavitation Bubble Dynamics, Ultrasonic Bioeffects, Tissue Mimicking Materials, Transducer Design and Development, GPU based scientific computing and Medical Device Development. He also currently serves as the Student Representative for the Ultrasonics division of IEEE UFFC society worldwide.

Suzi Liang

Suzi Liang
Suzi Liang is a PhD student in Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London. I have had an interest in medical imaging, especially ultrasound since my Bachelor’s degree. This interest drove me continue my studies and choose medical ultrasound transducer design and fabrication as my research interest in my Master’s degree. While applying the use of hand-made transducers to various biomedical applications, such as Intravascular Ultrasound Imaging (IVUS), and Acoustic Droplet Ejection (ADE), I was curious about the wavefield propagation. That curiosity motivated me towards further PhD study. I am doing the research in Biomedical Ultrasound Group from University College London (UCL) to investigate the acoustic properties of the frozen materials, which aims to develop the new medical application of ultrasound. Very happy to become one of the ISTU student board members, and hopefully more students’ activity will be held soon.

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Zehra E. F. Demir

Zehra E. F. Demir is a fourth-year PhD Candidate and a member of the Sheybani Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). Her graduate research centers on developing rational therapeutic paradigms combining FUS with myeloid- targeted immunotherapies in breast cancer and breast cancer brain metastasis. She is a recipient of the Sharon Davie Fellowship, John T. Casteen II Diversity-Equity-Inclusion Leadership Award, and a trainee of the NIH T32 Cancer Biology Training Program. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at UVA, Zehra received her BS at Virginia Tech in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering with minors in biomedical engineering and biology.

The Comparative Oncology Research Laboratory is housed at the Animal Cancer Care and Research Center at the Roanoke Virginia Tech campus, and includes clinician scientists and researchers who embrace the One Health concept to improve cancer outcomes for veterinary and human patients. The overall goal of my research is to improve cancer outcomes for veterinary and human patients via tumor ablation and immunotherapy. Specifically, our research team investigates the use of two non-thermal tumor ablation techniques – histotripsy and high-frequency irreversible electroporation (H-FIRE). Our research focuses on developing histotripsy as a tumor ablation modality for the primary tumor in osteosarcoma, and on developing H-FIRE as a tumor ablation modality for metastatic tumors in osteosarcoma. Additionally, our research also evaluates the immune response after histotripsy and H-FIRE ablation of tumors. Our research team utilizes veterinary clinical trials, preclinical models and in-vitro systems to explore the ablative and immunomodulatory effects of histotripsy and H-FIRE. Additionally, I work in partnership with other researchers at Virginia Tech and at the Duke Cancer Institute with expertise in orthopedic and computational mechanobiology, comparative pathobiology, immunology, comparative oncology, cancer and evolutionary biology. The strength of the dog as a comparative oncology model in osteosarcoma enables our veterinary clinical trial work to inform future studies focusing on developing histotripsy for human osteosarcoma patients.

Elliana Vickers, Ph.D.

Elliana Vickers is a Ph.D. candidate in Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She is co-mentored between Drs. Eli Vlaisavljevich (Therapeutic Ultrasound and Non-Invasive Therapies Laboratory) and Joanne Tuohy (Comparative Oncology Research Laboratory) and has a unique role in developing histotripsy for veterinary applications, particularly canine osteosarcoma. She received a B.S. degree in Biology with minors in Chemistry and Neuroscience from Gettysburg College in 2020 and plans to continue on to veterinary school after her Ph.D. to become a clinician-scientist at the forefront of translating focused ultrasound for veterinary and human medicine.

Meet the Faculty Advisors

Under the leadership of Faculty Advisors, the ISTU Board was originally formed in 2022 to further the engagement of students in ISTU.

Fenfang Li

Fenfang Li

Fenfang Li is a junior principal investigator in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Shenzhen Bay Laboratory. Fenfang Li received her PhD degree at Nanyang Technological University Singapore in 2015. She then did her postdoc training at Duke University from 2015 to 2019. She was awarded the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine Dean’s Postdoc Fellowship in 2019 in a joint program between Nanyang Technological University and Imperial College London. Since 2022, she joined Shenzhen Bay Laboratory as a faculty member. Her principal research interest is in ultrasound and microbubbles induced bioeffects, sonoporation, calcium signaling and ultrasound neuromodulation. Her focus is on the mechanism by which microbubbles and low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) interact with biological cells and the brain. She has published several papers in PNAS, Theranostics, Physical Review Fluids and Biophysical Journal on the physics and bioeffects of ultrasound and microbubbles.

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Himanshu Shekar

Dr. Himanshu Shekhar is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India, where he co-leads the Medical Ultrasound Engineering (MUSE) Laboratory. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, India (2008), and a Master’s (2010) and Ph.D. (2014) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, U.S.A. Dr. Shekhar trained as a postdoctoral fellow (2014 – 2019) at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, U.S.A. His research is focused on ultrasound-mediated therapy, molecular imaging, and sensing. His research has been recognized with the F. V. Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship and best paper awards from the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Star Ambassador Lectureship Award from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society (UFFC-S), and the Har Govind Korana Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award from the Government of India. Dr. Shekhar is a member of IEEE UFFC-S, ASA, and the International Society of Therapeutic Ultrasound.

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Natasha D. Sheybani, Ph.D.

Dr. Sheybani is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and (by courtesy) of Radiology & Medical Imaging and Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia. Dr. Sheybani leads a translational research program centered on advancing focused ultrasound into the era of precision immuno-oncology for solid tumors of the brain and periphery. Her research interests include immunotherapy delivery, immuno-modulation, liquid biopsy, molecular imaging and imaging informatics. The Sheybani laboratory interfaces closely with multiple ongoing clinical trials at UVA that are evaluating combinatorial focused ultrasound and immunotherapy in metastatic breast cancer and other solid tumor settings.

 

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Eli Vlaisavljevich, Ph.D.

Dr. Eli Vlaisavljevich is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include focused ultrasound, non-invasive tissue ablation (HIFU, histotripsy), cavitation physics, nanoparticle-mediated histotripsy (NMH), biomaterials, tissue regeneration, cancer, non-invasive neuromodulation, and clinical translation. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Vlaisavljevich conducted his graduate degrees in the Histotripsy Lab at the University of Michigan (2010-2015) and then spent two years working at HistoSonics (2015-2017) on the development of histotripsy for the treatment of liver cancer.