We're very pleased to share that Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi, who was a member of our group from November 2021 to November 2023, has started a new faculty position as an Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences in the College of Medical and Dental Sciences, University of Birmingham. Hamidreza made many contributions to the SIMBA Project and we wish him great success in his new role.

Many thanks and best wishes to Nadezhda Briantceva who just completed her 3-month visit to our research group. It was great to have Nadya here to start a new collaboration on the fluid dynamics of lab-on-chip systems. The stay was too short but at least we still managed to have some fun (lab group trip to play footgolf in the second photo).

We're very pleased to share that Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi has been promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Focused). Hamidreza has been a valuable member of our group for the last 18 months and this promotion is a great recognition of his many research contributions, plus his commitment to service and teaching.

We're pleased to welcome Dr Ibrahim Isik who joins us as a Visiting Research Fellow to work on fluid dynamics and signal transport for bacteria. Ibrahim has a B.Sc. in Electrical Electronics Engineering from the University of Gaziantep, Turkey, and both an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Electronics Engineering from Inonu University, Turkey. His Ph.D. research was on the impact of amyloid beta on molecular communication.

We're pleased to welcome Mitra Rezaei who joins us with a Chancellor's International Scholarship to do her PhD on communication between cell organoids. Mitra has a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Sahand University of Technology and an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University.

We're pleased to welcome the new research members that have joined the BioPhysComm Lab this year.

Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi joins us as a Research Fellow to work on the SIMBA Project (Signal Propagation and Information in Microscale Biological Applications). Dr Arjmandi was previously an Assistant Professor at Yazd University, Iran, and an ERCIM Postdoctoral Fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran) in 2016.

 Dr Hamidreza Arjmandi

We're also pleased to welcome 2 new PhD students: Yanahan Paramalingam and Mahir Taher. Yanahan is co-supervised by Freya Harrison and Tara Schiller, and is studying signalling within biofilms. Mahir joins us as a member of the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research PhD Program. He is co-supervised by Anne Straube and is studying molecular transport in neurons.

 Yanahan Paramalingam

 Mahir Taher