Patricia Zamora Diaz, Undergraduate Researcher 2023-2025, completed her B.S. majoring in Biomedical Engineering in 2025. Proactive, responsible, and passionate about her career, Patricia always seeks opportunities to expand her knowledge and experience in the professional field. In the Breslin Lab, she led a project investigating the effect of alcohol on human mesenteric arteries; more specifically, altered human artery responsiveness to the sigma receptor agonist PRE-084 with alcohol use, using through wire myography. This was a team study over several years that Patricia brought to completion. The study was published in the American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology. PubMed ID: 41324990. Patricia is currently working in industry as a manufacturing engineer.
Laura Hurtado Osorio, Undergraduate Researcher 2023-2025 and Research Scientist 2025-2026, graduated with her B.S. from the University of South Florida in 2025 majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Passionate about advancing medical knowledge and dedicated to innovative research, she initially joined the Breslin Lab in her sophomore year. In her early years in the lab, she investigated how arterial reactivity in small intestines is affected by various factors, including hypertension, diabetes, obesity, age, and sex, using wire myography. After graduation, she pivoted to support the ARPA-H-sponsored project investigating how obesity, diabetes, and other factors impact lymphatic pumping, engaging in studies of the multi-omic signatures of lymphatic vessels under healthy and diseased conditions. Laura is currently in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.
Annelle Utegen, AHA SURF Fellow, Summer 2026, graduated with her B.S. from the University of South Florida in 2026, majoring in Computer Science. Her research focuses on developing and applying artificial intelligence and deep learning methods to problems in biology and education. Her work as a student spanned brain tumor classification using deep learning, an LLM-based system for generating pedagogy-aligned practice questions, and disease classification with fine-tuned transformer models on single-cell RNA sequencing data. Through the AHA SURF Fellowship, she worked on fine-tuning scGPT, a 51-million-parameter pretrained transformer model, to classify disease versus non-disease states across 12 cell types using a private single-cell RNA sequencing dataset of 150,000 cells from human lymphatic vessels. This involved implementing hierarchical and per-cell-type model architectures, addressing class imbalance, and cross-validating across donors so the model learns genuine disease-associated signal. Anne is currently a graduate student at Simon Fraser University.