Dima Fishman and Eric Potma receive grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
"It's a worldwide competition where only the best win," said Fishman upon receiving the new grant.
Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced that Associate Adjunct Professor Dima Fishman and Professor Eric Potma will receive one of its highly competitive Dynamic Imaging research grants. “Through worldwide open competitions CZI searches for new ideas to help researchers and clinicians see and measure biological processes underlying health and diseases,” said Fishman. “It is a great honor and a wonderful opportunity to advance, share and apply our technology.” As a team, Fishman and Potma are developing cutting-edge approaches to make visualizations of the chemical composition of materials using light in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The CZI grant will award the team $1 million and will advance a collaborative effort and partnership with Edwards Lifesciences, a healthcare industry giant headquartered in Irvine, Calif. that is widely recognized for being at the frontier of cardiovascular research. The company’s flagship product, heart valve implants, relies on understanding the chemical morphology of tissues and materials used in its production. “Seeing live chemistry is crucial for the development and production as the valve implant’s lifetime has to exceed 80 billion cycles, or heartbeats. New imaging approaches developed by our team at UCI are ideally suited to identify current weaknesses in valve design and will help to improve the valves of the future,” said Potma. Fishman added: “The better the valve, the more lives we save.”