Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

The Sohn Lab had an incredible 2025 year.  A few highlights:

• We pushed forward with our projects, particularly assessing breast cancer susceptibility with mechano-NPS and capturing and analyzing salivary EVs with the CandyCollect for Alzheimer’s Disease. With these projects, we have deepened our collaborations with the LaBarge group at the City of Hope and the Theberge group at the University of Washington.  We are particularly excited to have started a new collaboration with the Yates group (Scripps Research Institute) in analyzing salivary EVs and the Guo group (UCSF) in developing microfluidic platforms to investigate the pathophysiology of Parkinson’s Disease.  We also look forward to collaborating more with the Randles (Duke) and Lustig (Berkeley) group on mechano-NPS in the new year.
• We have several papers that are in various stages of submission/revision (we hope to hear positive news about these papers soon!) and several more that are in the pipeline toward submission.
• Under Chang Chen’s mentorship, undergraduates, Carolina Cabezas, Sabrina Fang, and Qiaoyu Wang presented their work on measuring EVs using node-pore sensing at the 2025 Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting.
• Changwoo Song, PhD (Korea University) joined our lab in Fall 2025 and Dakota McMillan officially joined as a lab associate, after having spent a year in our lab as a CIRM intern.
• Undergraduates Jenna Patel and Emma Horne also joined the lab and are now working on a very cool project on nuclear mechanics. Emilie Petit was a great mentor to the new students in the lab and instrumental in completing projects from past graduate students.  Aaron Lee learned fabrication and explored mechanophenotyping applications in immunology.  Hani Houssaini (Berkeley High School) interned in our lab in the summer, investigating the influence of cancer-derived EVs on non-malignant cells.
• Prof. Sohn completed her 3-year commitment on the Academic Senate Budget and Interdepartmental Relations Committee in July 2025 and gave several talks on the lab’s research, including at the Microfluidics Consortium MF-15 Meeting, the Harrington Symposium, and the Laboratory Automation VE Series.

We also said goodbye to a few wonderful people in our lab:

• Senior research scientist, Corey Pierce, left during the summer and is now a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.
• Will Rosas-Liu, Trinity Ellis, Woochul Kim, and Pritika Acharya—all undergraduate researchers in the lab—graduated.

We are excited about 2026 and wish everyone a Happy New Year!