Three bioengineering PhD students earned a College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship for 2026, honoring top doctoral applicants. They receive one year of fellowship funding. This year’s Dean’s Fellows are:

• Annel Andrea Leon Tenorio, born to an indigenous Quechua family in Ayacucho, Peru, learned early how rarely medical advances reach communities like hers. She has worked to close that gap through genome-edited stem cell therapies and bilingual community science programs. As part of Professor Kelly Stevens’ research team, she will work to reduce immune rejection in liver transplantation, making stem cell-based therapies safer and more accessible to historically excluded communities like the one she comes from.
• Muyun Hu research focuses on developing optical coherence tomography technologies, including polarization-sensitive OCT and OCT angiography. She will be part of Professor Ricky Wang’s research team, improving the visualization and characterization of ocular tissue structure, organization, and function.
• Yuan-Zhen Yang, who is also part of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, previously conducted research in tumor imaging diagnostics and will move his focus from animal models to clinical applications. Yang looks forward to developing his teaching and lab management skills. He will be part of Professor Albert Folch’s research team.