Kate Huang
Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine (PhD)
Research Topic
Mutations in the giant protein titin and risk of heart rhythm disorders
Zachary Laksman
Assistant Professor
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Research Options
I am available and interested in collaborations (e.g. clusters, grants).
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
Recruitment
Master's students
Doctoral students
Any time / year round
2023
Development of iPSC-based tissue models to study and model contributions of genetics to heart disease. You will be mentored in tissue engineering, microscopy, cardiac electrophysiology, and more.
Candidates should have undergraduate records demonstrating strong critical thinking and communication skills.
Previous experience in:
-mammalian tissue culture; demonstrated success with human stem cell lines strongly preferred
-molecular and cellular techniques (qPCR, flow cytometry, western blotting, etc)
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
Check requirements
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
Focus your search
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
Make a good impression
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
Attend an information session
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Supervision Enquiry
If you have reviewed some of this faculty member's publications, understand their research interests and have reviewed the admission requirements, you may submit a contact request to this supervisor.
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Development and validation of optical mapping instrumentation and data analysis software for use with stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (2022)
Introduction: Proper characterization of cardiac tissues is a complex problem, as in addition to the metabolic and transcriptional machinery that may govern the activity of other cell types, cardiomyocytes also possess important electrical and mechanical properties. Optical mapping is a fluorescence microscopy technique which uses fluorescent voltage and calcium sensitive dyes and high-framerate imaging to capture electrical behaviors. This technique is uniquely valuable because of its ability to provide both temporal and spatial data at high-resolution, which can be useful when considering the importance of tissue engineering techniques to modern research in cardiovascular regenerative medicine. The challenge with optical mapping is that data analysis software is inaccessible to many groups. A lack of open-source options requires research groups to develop in-house expertise in software development, image processing and signal processing to employ the technique. The impact of this inaccessibility is that many groups are unable to adequately characterize electrical activity, which due to excitation-contraction coupling is a fundamental precursor to any discussion of contractile activity and therefore limits future utility in regenerative medicine applications. Methods: Our group has developed an analysis package for the analysis of optical mapping data. The package is written in Python and uses open-source packages such as numpy, scipy, opencv and scikit-image. The package enables the user to manually explore data for parameter optimization and perform automated batch analysis. The tool is flexible; it can be used with a variety of model systems and can be scaled to use modern cloud computing infrastructures for analyzing high-throughput experiments at scale. Results: Our analysis system has been validated using tissue from three model systems: cardiac monolayers, embryoid bodies, and engineered heart tissues. The tool can extract feature space representations describing both repolarization and depolarization dynamics within time-series recordings. Our results validate our implementation by recapitulating known differences between different biological preparations (ex. atrial and ventricular cells). We also present results from novel feature engineering techniques for the characterization of diastolic depolarization to distinguish pacemaker and working cardiomyocytes.Conclusion: Our tool will help biologists in the cardiovascular research space accelerate their discoveries by more holistically characterizing their samples.
View record
Current Students & Alumni
This is a small sample of students and/or alumni that have been supervised by this researcher. It is not meant as a comprehensive list.
Membership Status
Member of G+PS
View explanation of statuses
Location
St. Paul's Hospital
Program Affiliations
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.
