Four faculty members in the Department of Biomedical Engineering earned promotions from Oregon Health & Science University’s School of Medicine in recognition of their outstanding work. 

Kyle Ellrott, Claudia S. López and Zheng Xia were promoted to the position of associate professor and Erik I. Tucker was promoted to research associate professor.  

Ellrott, who joined OHSU in 2015, specializes in computational biology and his lab is based in the Knight Cancer Institute. His research involves integration and analysis of large-scale cancer datasets with the goal of finding effective treatment targets. He also serves on the National Institutes of Health’s Bridge2AI project, an ambitious effort to increase and improve the use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research. He also helps lead OHSU’s Genomic Characterization Center as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Genomic Data Analysis Network. 

López, who specializes in electron microscopy research, is the director of OHSU’s Multiscale Microscopy Core and co-director of the Pacific Northwest Center for cryo-EM, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Transformative High-Resolution Cryoelectron Microscopy Program. Her expertise includes the analysis of both biological and non-biological materials by a variety of electron microscopy techniques. Her current research involves correlative light and electron microscopy techniques for cultured cells and tissues, as well as 2D and 3D electron microscopy. 

Tucker graduated with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from OHSU in 2009 and co-founded Aronora, Inc. based on his graduate school research into anti-clotting medicines. He led his team in developing two investigational drugs, oversaw four clinical trials and holds more than 90 patents. His current research continues to explore blood clotting at the molecular level, working toward safer treatments for thrombotic diseases. 

Xia joined the OHSU School of Medicine faculty in 2016, specializing in both computational biology and cancer biology. His lab develops bioinformatics tools for next-generation sequencing data analysis and machine learning algorithms for large-scale biomedical data interpretation. More than 70 peer-reviewed papers have been published through his methodology development and extensive collaborations (Nature 2022, Nature Biotechnology 2022).