Three UC San Diego graduate engineers will enter their final year with $35,000 Siebel Scholars awards and three very different ways of making health research computational. Shayesteh Arasti studies evolutionary relationships, Muhammad Waleed Khalid works where light meets magnetic materials, and Yuhan Sherlyn Weng builds tools for understanding microbial communities.
All three are affiliated with UC San Diego's Institute of Engineering in Medicine and were named to the program's 2027 class Friday. The award recognizes academic performance and leadership as well as research. It supplies flexible support at a stage when students are finishing dissertations, publishing results and deciding whether their methods will move into laboratories, companies or clinical collaborations.
Arasti, a computer science and engineering student, develops algorithms for phylogenetic inference: reconstructing how genes, organisms or other biological units are related through evolution. Network approaches can represent histories that a simple branching tree misses, including recombination or gene transfer. UC San Diego credits her with seven publications and undergraduate mentoring. The practical value of the tools will depend on accuracy, computation time and the quality of the biological data supplied to them.
Khalid, in electrical and computer engineering, combines nanophotonics, ultrafast magnetism and machine learning. His work includes shaped pulses of light for optical and magnetic memory and a deep-learning method for correcting wavefronts in a single shot. Those projects address how information can be written, measured or repaired at small scales. They are research platforms, not finished medical devices, and translation would require manufacturing, reliability and safety work beyond a laboratory demonstration.
Weng works in bioinformatics, where a sample may contain thousands of microbial species and far more genes than researchers can examine one at a time. Her computational tools span gut and skin microbiomes as well as soil and marine environments. UC San Diego says she has contributed to 17 manuscripts. Comparing those environments can expose shared analytical problems, while any health claim still has to distinguish association from a causal effect.
Her service work also changes who can use the methods. Weng co-designed the institution's first bioinformatics bootcamp for physician-scientists and has helped lead workshops reaching more than 120 girls, according to the university. Teaching clinicians to handle computational evidence can reduce the gap between a model's output and the biological question being asked. Outreach figures measure participation, however, not long-term entry into the field.
The award places the students in a network that spans bioengineering, business, computer science and energy programs. Networks can open collaborations and jobs, but the $35,000 is most immediate: it can buy time to finish experiments or analysis without adding a separate appointment. The program announcement does not specify how each recipient will spend the money, so its exact effect on their projects is not yet known.
A prize is a judgment about promise and past work, not independent validation of every result or forecast. The three projects will be tested in different ways: Arasti's algorithms against known and simulated evolutionary histories, Khalid's devices against physical performance, and Weng's tools across new biological datasets. Their common task is to make complicated systems legible without pretending that a cleaner computation removes uncertainty from the underlying biology.