This spring, we say a bittersweet goodbye to 11 incredible seniors who have each left their mark on our lab. Watching them grow as researchers and people has been one of the greatest privileges of this work.

Phiphi Dinh, Yasmin Eltwafsha, and Shubhra Singhal were the first students to join the lab when we moved to UCR from Oklahoma, and each made foundational contributions. Phiphi set up our Particle Image Velocimetry system from scratch and developed a method for creating aneurysm phantoms. Yasmin worked on biaxial testing of heart valves, material degradation studies, and the right heart simulator, and was instrumental in organizing the lab and onboarding new students. Shubhra studied how elastase degradation in heart valves affects their mechanical properties.

Andrea Bowling spent long hours researching how multiple compressions affect Shape Memory Polymer performance. Gillian Sebald contributed to rat aorta dissections and PIV work on aneurysm bifurcations. Tiffany Ian worked on the right heart simulator. Carly Yen, Rishika Ghandhi, and Katrina Cating tackled biaxial mechanical testing of heart valves as well as image segmentation used to train an AI model to recognize heart valve function from 4D ECG data. Katelyn Kuba and Bill Pham established our histology workflows, developing SOPs for multiple stains and working on heart dissections and imaging.

We are so proud of everything you've accomplished and can't wait to see where your paths lead.