Author Archives: Sarah Rogozen

August 22, 2011 – You might be looking at Facebook on your mobile device, but Professor Aydogan Ozcan wants to use your cell phone to look at your cells. Ozcan is a bioengineer who likes to make medical equipment small and affordable. Once, he invented a lenseless microscope (pictured) you could attach to your phone.

Now he’s used mobile technology to create a flow cytometer, a device that diagnoses diseases and measures their progress. Most cytometers are enormous and expensive, but Ozcan’s machine costs $5 and it’s small enough for medical professionals in developing countries to transport to families who don’t have access to hospitals.

If you want to learn more about how the flow cytometer works, check out Ozcan’s paper. [2:20]

July 10, 2011 – If you thought you had bad neighbors, consider the small towns in Germany that Assistant Professor of Economics Nico Voigtlaender studies. He was coauthor on a recent paper that found the descendants of people who lived in areas that persecuted their Jewish populations during the medieval Black Death were more likely to collaborate with the Nazis 600 years later. [2:17]

June 26, 2011 – The past few months of Leah Esquenazi’s life have gone from calm to scary and back to calm, over and over again. And this has been most of her life. The four-month-old lives in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, suffering from an unusual group of symptoms that her doctors have been unable to diagnose.

Esquenazi has become something of an Internet sensation. There are prayer groups for the baby all over the world, and members of the Star Wars community ““ of which her parents are an enthusiastic part ““ have reached out to the family with donations.

You can read more about Leah or donate to her family here. [3:35]

This piece is part of the Daily Bruin’s Orientation Issue 2011 coverage. To view the entire package of articles, columns and multimedia, please visit: