UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Shu Chien, director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, will deliver the commencement address at the College of Engineering's baccalaureate degrees program ceremony at 8 p.m. on Friday, May 6, at the Bryce Jordan Center on the University Park campus of Penn State.
His speech is titled, "The Sky is the Limit; The World is Yours!"
Chien received his medical degree from National Taiwan University and his doctorate in physiology from Columbia University, where he remained as a faculty, rising to full professor in 1969.
He took a sabbatical leave in 1987 to establish the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
In 1988, Chien joined UC San Diego, where he founded the Department of Bioengineering in 1994.
He was named the inaugural holder of the Y.C. Fung Endowed Chair in Bioengineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering in September 2006.
In 2008, Chien became the founding director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine, which includes more than 130 faculty from UC San Diego's Schools of Medicine, Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences and Jacobs School of Engineering, who are translating creative ideas into clinical medicine and novel products that will transform patient care and improve their health and well-being.
His research emphases are blood rheology in health and disease and effects of mechanical forces on signal transduction and genetic/epigenetic regulation in relation to atherogenesis. His inventions include the use of Ras negative mutant to prevent artery restenosis, the development of a microarray system to determine the optimum microenvironment for stem cell proliferation and differentiation, and an acoustic mechanogenetic system for remote controlled gene expression and cell activation.
Chien is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 2011 recipient of the US National Medal of Science.
More than 1,200 students are expected to receive their baccalaureate degrees from the College of Engineering at Penn State.