CIVELEK LAB - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- NIH Summer Research Internship Program Participant / Department of Natural Sciences / University of Puerto Rico
Job Titles:
- NSF REU Multi - Scale Systems Bioengineering Program Participant / Department of Biochemistry
Job Titles:
- Department of Physiology and Integrative Biology
Job Titles:
- Lab Manager and AtheroGEN Network Coordinator
Ashlyn Cowan received a B.S. in Microbiology and minor in Spanish from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. While in school she worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant for biology introductory courses and as an undergraduate research assistant in the microbiology department focusing on microorganisms with novel properties to clean the environment, counter the damage done to ecosystems by humans, and improve environmental health. Since graduating she worked as a Lab Assistant at Syntezza Bioscience lab in Jerusalem, Israel.
Bilge Yaylak Gediksiz completed her PhD in the laboratory of Dr Bunyamin Akgul at Izmir Institute of Technology. During her Ph.D. studies, she characterized circular RNAs that modulate drug-triggered apoptosis in HeLa cells. Her current work is focused on identifying the sex-specific mechanisms of the transcription factor KLF14 on adipocyte function.
Job Titles:
- NIH Summer Research Internship Program Participant
Caroline Willi received a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Tech. She then worked as a lab manager in Dr. John Chappell's developmental vascular biology research laboratory at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke, VA. She conducted research on ischemia reperfusion injury by developing an ex vivo murine tissue microfluidics platform. Her current focus is on understanding the mechanistic drivers of sex differences in cardiometabolic diseases by using relevant iPSC-derived cells with diverse sex chromosome constitutions. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Job Titles:
- NIH Summer Diabetes Research Internship Program Participant / Department of Biomedical Engineering / University of Virginia
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Faruk Erin completed his medical degree at Bahçeşehir University School of Medicine, where he developed a strong interest in cardiovascular physiology, cardiovascular genetic mechanisms, and translational research. His research background includes echocardiographic assessments of left ventricular hypertrophy and its correlation with inferior vena cava parameters. His current work is focused on immune cell-vascular wall interactions and the molecular mechanisms driving atherosclerosis in diabetic patients.
Job Titles:
- in Cellular and Molecular Biology
Job Titles:
- NIH Summer Research Internship Program Participant / Department of Biology / Howard University
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Kelsey Watts completed her PhD in the laboratory of William Richardson at Clemson University. During her PhD studies, she modeled sex differences in cardiac fibroblast morphology and signaling activities in vitro and in silico, including a sex-specific drug screen. She was also involved in significant research in STEM education. Her current work is focused on understanding sex differences in atherosclerosis. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Cardiovascular Training Grant between 2023 and 2025. She is currently supported by an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- NSF REU Multi - Scale Systems Bioengineering Program Participant / Department of Biomedical Engineering
Lexi Wallace received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the Ohio State University and did undergraduate research in the engineering education department on surfacing deeply held beliefs about gender and race based minoritization in engineering and with Cincinnati Children's Hospital focused on how demographic information affects Lupus severity. Her current focus is sex-biased eQTL loci in vascular smooth muscle cells as a way to understand the sex biased phenotypic switching of vascular smooth muscle cells in the development of atherosclerosis. She is supported by a Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Lisa Chen, Undergraduate Research Assistant
B.S. in Biomedical Engineering
2015-2019 Undergraduate Research Assistant
2018 Harrison Undergraduate Research Award
2018-2019 Capstone Design Project
Life after Lab: Master of Engineering in BME at the University of Virginia
Mete Civelek joined the University of Virginia after a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular genetics in the laboratory of Jake Lusis at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studied the genetic regulation of gene expression in vascular cells and adipose tissue in human and mouse populations. He identified novel candidate genes that can play causal roles in the development of atherosclerosis, obesity and insulin resistance. He is currently a Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Robert M Berne Cardiovascular Research Center and has secondary appointments in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is an elected Fellow of the American Heart Association and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He is currently the co-chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He served as the chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the Department of Biomedical Engineering for six years. He is a member of the Program Committee of the American Heart Association's Vascular Discovery Conference and served as the chair of the Program Committee of the American Society of Human Genetics.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Ngozi Akingbesote, Undergraduate Research Assistant
B.S. in Biology with Distinction
2017-2020 Undergraduate Student Opportunities in Academic Research (USOAR) Program
2018 Harrison Undergraduate Research Award
2019 Caltech Wave Fellow
2019-2020 Department of Biology Distinguished Majors Program
Life after Lab: Ph.D. Program in Molecular Medicine, Pharmacology, and Physiology at the Yale School of Medicine
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- NSF REU Multi - Scale Systems Bioengineering Program Participant / Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science
Nik Barbera completed his PhD in the laboratories of Drs. Belinda Akpa and Irena Levitan at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During his PhD studies, he studied interactions between lipids, sterols, and membrane proteins in a dynamic membrane environment using molecular dynamic simulations. His current work is focused on identifying causal genetic variants in loci associated with coronary artery disease susceptibility. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Cardiovascular Training Grant between 2020 and 2022 and was supported by an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship between 2022 and 2024.
Noah Perry received a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and did undergraduate research in biomechanics and imaging, creating computational eye models to study the impact of glaucoma conditions on the biomechanics of the eye at Georgia Tech and Emory University. His current focus is understanding the flow of genetic information in vascular smooth muscle cell gene expression networks using causal inference modeling. He was a Predoctoral Fellow of the Cardiovascular Training Grant between 2020 and 2021. In 2022, he was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute as well as a Teaching Fellowship from UVA Engineering.
Job Titles:
- Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology / Biberach University of Applied Sciences
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- NIH Summer Research Internship Program Participant / Department of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology / Emory University
Job Titles:
- Department of Physiology and Integrative Biology
Yonathan Aberra received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. He studied systems neurobiology and microscopy, designing miniaturized fluorescence microscopy cameras to study regulatory circuitry in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in awake mice with the support of the National Institute of Mental Health. His current focus is identifying the causal genes in genomic regions associated with body fat distribution with a focus on the CPEB4 locus. He was a Fellow of The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program between 2019 and 2021. He was a Predoctoral Fellow of the Cardiovascular Training Grant between 2020 and 2022.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Research Assistant