Bio

Amy D. Waterman, PhD, Professor in Residence, Deputy Director.

Amy D. Waterman, PhD, is a national transplant innovator and a Professor in Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Division of Nephrology. She is Director of the Transplant Research and Education Center (TREC) and Deputy Director of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI). In addition to many national transplant leadership positions, Dr. Waterman is a Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation and serves as the Research Committee Chair for the National Kidney Registry. In 2018, she received the ClearMark Award of Distinction from the Center for Plain Language for her interactive digital application, My Transplant Coach, as well as a National Health Information Merit Award for two educational initiatives developed by Explore Transplant, a nonprofit consortium Dr. Waterman founded. In 2016, Dr. Waterman was invited to be the keynote speaker at the White House Organ Donation Summit. In 2019, Dr. Waterman received the American Society of Transplantation 2019 Clinician of Distinction Award. 

Through her research and educational initiatives, Dr. Waterman seeks to 1) understand the critical, modifiable patient, provider, and system barriers to donation and 2) design interventions to overcome them. Dr. Waterman’s research has been supported by over $25 million in federal grants, and she has authored approximately 100 research articles and book chapters. She has designed 13 educational programs to help patients and potential living donors make informed transplant decisions. These programs have been disseminated to patients in hundreds of dialysis and transplant settings in the United States, Canada, and South Africa, in multiple languages.  Dr. Waterman received her PhD in Social Psychology from Washington University, St. Louis, MO.

HanJun Kim, Assistant Professor

Dr. HanJun Kim received his D.V.M. from Konkuk University, South Korea in 2012. He then obtained a Ph.D. in Veterinary Pathology from Konkuk University in 2018. During the Ph.D. degree, he studied the long-term implantation of the nerve electrode for the purpose of rehabilitation of a denervated patient. He analyzed long-term biocompatibility studies by implanting various biofunctional material coated electrodes. In 2017, he was selected as a Young Scientist by the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST). And he was also named a Young Scientist at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 2018.

As a biomedical researcher, Dr. HanJun Kim analyzed the effects of biomedical technology on implanted hosts using animal models of human disease. Through this effort, he has focused on research that allows newly developed technologies to became “biologically applicable” by analyzing “how” and “why” that affect biological systems. In this process, he has been working with many biomedical researchers to make an impact study. He joined the Khademhosseini lab in August 2018 as a postdoctoral scholar at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He has been seeking to apply his experience and training in regenerative efficacy and biocompatibility of biomaterials to a new and exciting field in the Khademhosseini lab.

Samad Ahadian, Assistant Professor 

Dr. Samad Ahadian is an Assistant Professor at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation. Previously, he was a development engineer at the Department of Bioengineering, UCLA. He has done extensive research on skeletal muscle tissue engineering, cardiac tissue regeneration, nanobiomaterials, hydrogels, and antimicrobial materials. He received his Ph.D. in materials science from Tohoku University (Japan). He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and then an Assistant Professor at Tohoku University. Following that, he held positions as a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto (Canada) and then as a Biomaterials Scientist at Covalon Technologies Ltd., Canada.

Mehmet R. Dokmeci, Associate Professor

Dr. Dokmeci is Associate Professor at the Institute. Previously, he was an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Radiology Department at the University of California-Los Angeles from November 2017 to June 2020. Prior to that he was an Instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, a position he has held for 7 years. Before then, he was on the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. Before joining academia, he had 4 years of industrial experience at Corning-Intellisense Corporation, Wilmington, MA, developing MEMS-based products for the telecommunications and life science industries. He has served as the program organizer and chair for many conferences, such as organizer and chair of the 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS Technical Committee on Bio-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (TC-BioMEMS) and Session Chair of Society of Experimental Mechanics Annual Conference, Springfield. he has extensively published in refereed journals and conferences in the areas of MEMS, Micro- and Nanotechnology, and Bio-Chemistry. He is also a long term member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Materials Research Society (MRS), American Chemical Society (ACS), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has a strong background and more than a decade of experience in designing and fabricating micro and nanoscale sensors and systems, biomedical devices, tissue engineering, and implantable biosensors. He has been actively involved in research areas such as flexible electronics for monitoring and modulation of wound healing, electrical/electrochemical biosensors and microfluidic systems for organs-on-a-chip applications and 3D bioprinting. He has authored more than 158 journal papers, 6 patents/disclosures; 112 conference publications/abstracts, has an h-index=66, citations > 16,300.