September 2024: Karim got a chance to present work from his summer LSAMP fellowship at a symposium hosted at UMass Boston. Congrats on a job well done!

April 2024: Congrats to lab members Maggie and Andrew on their success with 3MT! They shared the winning stage with Jillian, another student from our Bioengineering department.

April 2023: Congrats to Ramina on her 3MT grand prize!

April 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Taraneh Rezaee on successfully defending her PhD dissertation. We are excited to learn about the work you will be doing as a post-doc at CCNY! Here is a picture of Taraneh and Rachana waiting to receive their doctoral hoods at commencement.

March 2022: Kudos to Ramina Behzad on passing her qualifying exams! Here is a picture of her getting to know her osteocyte cells.

August 2021: We have two great things to celebrate as we wrap up the summer. Congratulations to Dr. Rachana Vaidya on her excellent PhD thesis defense. We are going to miss this rockstar as she moves on to bigger and better things as a post-doc at WUSTL! Also, a big congrats to Taraneh Rezaee, who received the Dissertation Writing Fellowship from the Office of Graduate Studies to support her during her final semester of her PhD mission.

May 2021: Congratulations to Lauren Conlon and Morgan Hays on their successful MS thesis defenses! Here’s Lauren working on her last osteocyte experiment!

January 2021: We ended 2020 and started out the new year with Rachana Vaidya presenting her work at an ASBMR workshop (watch here) and with both Lauren Conlon (see left) and Morgan Hays presenting their MS thesis proposals.

September 2020: Check out Taraneh’s interview with IFMRS HubLE (International Federation of Musculoskeletal Societies) on her first 1st author paper that came out in Bone recently on how fluoride affects bone.

June 2020: Congrats to Taraneh on completing her proposal defense via Zoom (see image to the left)! Her work focuses on microdamage formation and propagation in diabetic bone using a combination of experimental and computational methods.

May 2020: Despite the challenges of going remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, we had several lab successes this past month - Rachana Vaidya published her first book chapter with co-author BNG undergrad Anna Church, Taraneh Rezaee had her first first-author journal article accepted in Bone, and Tianna Edwards successfully defended her MS thesis via Zoom (see image to the left)!

January 2020: Congrats to Rachana on a successful proposal defense. Her work aims to understand how osteocyte cells respond to high sugar & inflammatory environments and contribute to bone fractures. Officially a PhD candidate! Check out some of her Ocy454 cells in the image to the left.

November 2019: Our paper on how cortical bone fracture toughness is affected by high sugar environments has finally been published. Congrats to Kelly Merlo*, Jake Aaronson*, Rachana Vaidya, and Taraneh Rezaee for their hard work and their perseverance during 13 months (!) of revisions. [*co-first authors]

September 2019: Rachana Vaidya and Taraneh Rezaee both had their abstracts accepted and presented their work at their very first ASBMR conference in Orlando. (And then they went to Disneyworld.)

August 2019: Our review on how type 2 diabetes affects bone biomechanics is in press in Current Osteoporosis Reports - go team! Check it out here.

June 2019: Rachana Vaidya and Taraneh Rezaee both successfully passed their PhD qualifying exams! On to the next stage!

May 2019: We celebrated the success of several students this month. Jake Aaronson successfully defended his MS thesis - hooray! He and his labmates, Tianna Edwards and Matt Phou, all walked across the commencement stage for their MS degrees (in the pouring rain). We are going to miss this bunch as they move on to bigger and better things!

April 2019: Tianna Edwards and Rachana Vaidya won 1st and 2nd place, respectively, in the grad division of the 3-Minute Thesis competition this year - congrats on keeping our lab’s 3MT presence going strong!

April 2019: Congratulations to Jake Aaronson and Rachana Vaidya for their tag-team 1st place win for best presentation in the grad division at the Sigma Xi research symposium! They presented their work on osteocyte behavior in hyperglycemic conditions.

June 2018: Our lab headed up to the Center for Skeletal Research core in Boston to get trained on how to grow and take care of Ocy454 osteocytes. Thanks to Dr. Paola Divieti Pajevic for her training sessions!

May 2018: Kudos to Zach Herrera for receiving the summer internship award from the Office of Undergraduate Research! He is working on 3D printing polylactic acid and titanium dioxide composites that could be used as part of biomedical implants.

April 2018: Jake Aaronson won the grand prize in the undergraduate division of the 3-Minute Thesis competition at UMassD - congrats! Listen to his 3MT talk here.

November 2017: Jake Aaronson had an abstract accepted for the Orthopaedic Research Society meeting on the effects of an in vitro diabetic environment on bone microindentation properties. Have fun in New Orleans in March!

July 2017: Congratulations to Talia D'Ambruoso and the rest of the "Bone Notcher" senior capstone team for their abstract acceptance at BMES. We’re proud to have UMassD represented at the meeting!

May 2017: Kudos to Jake Aaronson for receiving the summer internship award from the Office of Undergraduate Research. Learn more about his summer project here.

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