Blog posts

Staff and Student Successes: Autumn 2025

It’s been a fantastic summer for the Department of Bioengineering, with staff and students recognised for their hard work and achievements.

This Staff and Student Successes is packed with highlights, including funding awards, fellowships, competition wins and runner-up places.

We encourage you to read through the full list and, if you spot a familiar name, take a moment to congratulate them. Sharing in each other’s successes is a great way to share pride in the achievements of our staff and students!

UK Future Leaders Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr Sophie Morse, one of the newest Assistant Professors in Bioengineering, who has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

News You Can Use: Spring 2025

Stay in the know with the Bioengineering Shared Calendar

Keeping track of key departmental events just got a lot easier!

Bioengineering has launched a new shared calendar as a go-to planning resource for staff to stay informed and improve coordination across the department. The live calendar has seven categories you can filter to find the events that matter to you:

  • 🎟️ Department Events, including Department Seminars, the Annual Bioengineering Lecture, staff and student socials, Away Days, and more.
  • 🏫 Academic Staff Meetings: the monthly meeting specifically for academic staff.
  • 👥 Professional & Technical Staff Meetings: dedicated professional and technical staff meetings.

Events: Spring 2025

Registration for the Great Exhibition Road Festival is now OPEN!🎉

The Festival takes place on 7-8 June 2025, and will be full of exciting free events for all ages: from hands-on workshops to fascinating talks, and immersive performances to amazing art🎨🧬

Enjoy a relaxing yoga workshop inspired by insect movements, paint the northern lights with astronomers, or discover the science behind Bollywood dance. Design butterfly carnival costumes, take to the tiniest disco floor in the universe to explore quantum, discuss the new space race or experience chemistry brought to life through amazing reactions, slime and explosions at the interactive family-friendly show.

AI Autophagy: Understanding the Risks and Solutions

by Dr Xiaodan Xing

The latest paper by the Yang Lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, delves into a pressing issue in AI development: what happens when generative models train on their own synthetic data? This phenomenon, known as AI autophagy, leads to model collapse, loss of diversity, and ethical risks.

As the awareness of AI autophagy grows, so does the call for a comprehensive framework to understand, detect, and mitigate its effects. Our research brings together conflicting findings, theoretical perspectives, and empirical evidence to highlight the risks and propose potential solutions.

One key takeaway is that technical fixes alone, like watermarking or detection methods, aren’t enough.

Saliva-based Menopause Test Wins Hackstarter

Congratulations to Karina Cheng, Biomedical Technology Ventures BSc student, and teammate Yihan Pu, on winning Imperial College’s Advanced Hackspace Hackstarter Grand Final with their Menosense device which monitors menopause via saliva!

Women experiencing menopause undergo hormonal changes that affect their mood, metabolism, and health. Traditional hormone tests need blood or urine samples, which can be invasive and take a long time to produce results.

Menosense introduces a portable saliva-based hormone detector for menopause that uses Lateral Flow Immunoassay technology for home use. It provides quick, noninvasive, and accurate hormone readings in just 20 minutes. A handheld reader analyses disposable test strips, and results appear on the device and a Bluetooth-connected mobile app, allowing users to track their health.

Science on Pointe

Dr Eleonora Moratto, a postdoctoral researcher and professional ballet dancer in the Microbiome-Microscopy and Microfluidics Lab, showcased her SciBallet Project at an Imperial Late event themed “Weird Science” in February.

Eleonora initiated the SciBallet project after choreographing and performing a dance that illustrated her PhD research. This experience earned her a spot as a finalist in the Dance Your PhD competition. It sparked her fascination with the intersection of science and art, particularly the use of ballet’s storytelling capabilities to convey complex research to the public.

Her dance wrapped up the event, featured a presentation on the historical relationship between science and art, and demonstrated how electric fields can be utilised to prevent plant root infections.

Meet the team: Bioengineering’s Student Support team

In the Meet the Team series, we’ll be introducing to staff and students the people behind the teams in our Professional Services Staff that help keep the Bioengineering department running smoothly. We’ll gain an insight into each team member, what their roles are within their team and what they get up to when they’re not at Imperial!

This month, we’ll be meeting the department’s Student Support team. The Student Support team aims to deliver efficient support services that facilitate a seamless student journey. They do this by supporting effective networks between academics and students and enabling the best academic and pastoral care.

Meet the team: Bioengineering’s laboratory, electronics and workshop technicians

In this new series, we’ll be introducing to staff and students the people behind the teams in our Professional Services Staff that help keep the Bioengineering department running smoothly. We’ll gain an insight into each team member, what their roles are within their team and what they get up to when they’re not at Imperial!

This month, we’ll be meeting the Technical team which is made up of laboratory, electronics and workshop technicians. Led brilliantly by Ken Keating, our Technical Operations Manager, the technical team are a multi-skilled group of staff that supports the department at both our South Kensington and White City offices and research spaces.

Bioengineering Thank You Awards: Edit Toth

The Bioengineering COVID-19 awards were developed to recognise the extraordinary efforts of students and staff in the Bioengineering department in the context of COVID-19.

Staff in the department were invited to nominate their colleagues and students for a Bioengineering Thank You Award. In their nomination, staff members had to state why they felt the work and actions of their nominee were so exceptional. These reasons could be: delivering critical departmental services despite challenging circumstances, working additional hours to ensure new processes were delivered, being involved in activities outside their role to support staff or students, or contributing to College and national COVID-19 related efforts.

Bioengineering Thank You Awards: Reiko Tanaka

The Bioengineering COVID-19 awards were developed to recognise the extraordinary efforts of students and staff in the Bioengineering department in the context of COVID-19.

Staff in the department were invited to nominate their colleagues and students for a Bioengineering Thank You Award. In their nomination, staff members had to state why they felt the work and actions of their nominee were so exceptional. These reasons could be: delivering critical departmental services despite challenging circumstances, working additional hours to ensure new processes were delivered, being involved in activities outside their role to support staff or students, or contributing to College and national COVID-19 related efforts.