Meet the BEST Trainees
2026-2027 Trainees
Donya Shahamati
Donya is in the School of Public Health. Her Ph.D. advisor is Matthew Landry. Her research focuses on nutrition and chronic disease prevention, with experience in primary and secondary prevention of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular health.
Juelle Ford
Juelle is in the School of Social Ecology. Her Ph.D. advisor is Jessie Borelli. Her research explores how aspects of the early caregiving environment (such as family size and structure) shape attachment, emotion regulation, and stress reactivity, particularly within marginalized communities. Her goal is to design interventions that improve mental health outcomes within family systems and increase help-seeking behaviors among those at risk.
Ahalya Prakash
Ahalya is in the School of Public Health. Her Ph.D. advisor is Annie Ro. Ahalya’s research focuses on health disparities and health outcomes among vulnerable populations, using infomatics and real-world data to improve how inequities are measured and monitored within public health and health system surveillance.
Daniela Arcos
Daniela is in the School of Social Ecology. Her Ph.D. advisor is Jessie Borelli. Her research is investigating how social connections influence well-being. Her aim is to explore how connection-based interventions can enhance psychological and physical health across diverse populations, particularly in minoritized communities.
Nobuyoshi Unno
Nobuyoshi is in the School of Medicine as an MD/PhD candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program and his Ph.D. advisor is Zhongping Chen in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on utilizing Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) to characterize coronary artery disease from the retina.
Jadon Buller
Jadon is in the School of Medicine, in the Department of Radiological Sciences, and is interested in image-guided atrial fibrillation treatment using EAT/US. His Ph.D. advisor is Shawn (Liangzhong) Xiang.
2025-2026 Trainees
Katie Lord
Katie is a third-year clinical psychology PhD student at the University of California, Irvine, and a BEST Fellow. Her research focuses on improving the physical and psychological health of parents of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) infants, including testing psychosocial interventions that promote parent-infant bonding.
Christian Andrade Herrera
Christian is a rising 4th-year Ph.D. student in biomedical Engineering who works under the mentorship and guidance of Professor Pim Oomen. Christian studies extreme preterm birth and the impact it has on the cardiopulmonary system as somatic growth occurs, and also studies exogenous sex hormone treatments and the impact on cardiac growth and remodeling.
Grace Fishback
Grace is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Psychological Science Department under the guidance of Dr. Sarah Pressman. Her research primarily focuses on understanding how psychological factors, such as emotion regulation, influence health through multiple physiological systems (e.g. cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and circadian). She is especially interested in examining how these mechanisms impact racial/ethnic health disparities and investigating potential protective factors.
David Anthony Jr. Quiroz
David is a third-year Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering. His Ph.D. advisor is Gurneet Sangha. Red blood cell (RBC) mechanotransduction enables RBCs to sense and respond to hemodynamic forces by regulating cell volume, deformability, and vascular signaling. Quantifying this response is essential for identifying mechanotransduction defects in RBCs that may contribute to cardiometabolic disease. David's research aims to develop functional methods that quantify RBC mechanotranduction during cardiovascular disease onset and progression.
Tasneem Mustafa
Tasneem is a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering. Her Ph.D. advisor is Dr. Naomi Chelser, where her research focuses understanding how vasculature responds to changing mechanical stimuli in pulmonary hypertension disease progression. Specifically, she uses in vitro models to investigate biological pathways and hope to identify better therapeutic targets to mitigate disease progression.