Graduate Student Spotlight

Students from the top engineering programs around the world seek out Penn’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Graduate Program for both its excellence and its broad opportunities.  Ph.D. students draw on Penn’s multifaceted research environment which may include cross-disciplinary collaboration with research groups across the University, including the Medical School, Materials Science, Physics, Bioengineering, Chemistry, and many more.  The full resources of this Ivy League University together with the cultural and athletic opportunities of the City of Philadelphia make Penn CBE a prime choice to pursue a chemical and biomolecular engineering advanced degree.

Jose Andres Vidal
Mexicali, Mexico
B.S. Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley
M.S.E. Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. Candidate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

Advised by Professor Bomyi Lim

Andres’ hometown is Mexicali, Mexico, where when he was a kid he knew that he wanted to be a scientist. He recalls that “I really didn’t understand what a scientist did back then. I just thought they did cool experiments and wore lab coats which to be honest was not very far off”. As time went on and university applications came he still didn’t know what he wanted to do in undergrad, but knew that he wanted to do something in STEM. Andres’ chemistry teacher in high school was a senior process engineer at Dow and advised him that chemical engineering might be right for him since his favorite classes were chemistry and physics.

Andres obtained a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2022 and a Masters of Science in Engineering in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from UPENN in 2023. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UPenn working with Professor Bomyi Lim. 

Andres’ first and only internship was during the summer of his junior year at a small biotech startup in the bay area called Pow.bio. There he worked in contract research and manufacturing doing bench scale and some pilot scale upstream and downstream bioprocessing. This is where he fell in love with biotechnology and was absolutely sure that he wanted to work in this field. After the summer, Andres was hired as a research associate at the same company to work part time during his senior year. 

Andres decided to pursue a PhD early in his senior year at UC Berkeley when the CTO of Pow.bio and a professor he had taken multiple classes with encouraged him to pursue a doctorate. His research area is focused on investigating how the transcription factor Runt in drosophila regulates genes. This gene is important since mutations of this gene in its human homolog lead to developmental and hematopoietic disease.

As far as his future plans, Andres would like to pursue a career in the biotech industry as a scientist or engineer. He dreams of finding a nice rural area to live in and have a house of his own.