Twins’ research helps advance bioengineering project

Aspiring physicians Adam and Amine Azizi were hoping for an introduction to bioengineering research when they joined Dr. Shashank Sirsi’s lab at The University of Texas at Dallas.

As undergraduates, the fraternal twin brothers have achieved much more, all before the beginning of their senior year this fall. The biomedical engineering majors co-wrote peer-reviewed articles for academic journals and presented research at the Biomedical Engineering Society’s annual conference.

The brothers also helped develop experimental techniques that provided crucial data for Sirsi to secure a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant (1RO1EB039167). The goal of the project is to develop an ultrasound-based contrast agent that could allow doctors to monitor oxygen levels continuously in the brains of newborns with hypoxic brain injury, a condition caused by oxygen deprivation before, during or after birth.

“Adam and Amine’s dedication, effort and enthusiasm were remarkable,” said Sirsi, associate professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Sirsi’s approach relies on tiny air-filled microbubbles coated with hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen. Once the microbubbles are injected into the bloodstream, they respond to changes in oxygen levels and can be detected and monitored with standard ultrasound.

Tracking changes in oxygen levels from the bedside could help doctors identify areas of the brain that are in distress, monitor how well treatments are working and make more informed decisions about care. Doctors currently have limited ways to monitor oxygen levels continuously in specific regions of a newborn’s brain.

For his grant application, Sirsi needed to demonstrate that the ultrasound approach could work in a living animal, one of the first steps toward assessing its potential use in humans.

That’s where Adam and Amine came in. The brothers helped design and carry out the experiments and collect the necessary data.

“The reproducible data the brothers obtained directly answered grant reviewers’ questions, ultimately pushing our proposal over the top and into the fundable range while generating significant excitement in the scientific community,” Sirsi said.

In Sirsi’s Image-Guided Drug Delivery Lab, Amine mastered the process of delivering the microbubble agents, while Adam worked closely with Katherine Brown PhD’21, associate professor of instruction in bioengineering, to program the ultrasound scanner, capture the imaging and analyze the results.

“Experiment after experiment, with a lot of failures along the way, we gathered the data we needed,” Amine said.

The brothers said they are grateful for the mentoring and experience they have received and for the opportunity to work on high-impact research as undergraduates.

“What’s really special is we are given freedom to do our own projects,” Amine said. “It really challenges us. We’ve grown a lot.”

The brothers said they chose UT Dallas for its strong premed program and because it’s close to their home in Frisco, Texas. In 2025, UT Dallas was the No. 15 medical school feeder school in the country and No. 3 in Texas, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The University supports premed students through its Health Professions Advising Center.

Adam and Amine have taken many of their classes together, play soccer together and are applying to medical schools together, aiming to become the first physicians in their family. Both have taken the MCAT and hope to go to the same medical school.

Adam said their experience playing soccer taught them to never quit.

“It’s that mentality that failure is not an option,” he said. “When one of us wants to call it quits for the day, the other will say, ‘Let’s try one more thing.’ It’s like a two-factor authentication system: Unless we’re both ready to check out, we’re probably going to be staying. We push each other to be better.”

Sirsi said providing research opportunities to undergraduate students early in their academic careers is one of the benefits of working at a research institution like UT Dallas.

“Mentoring undergraduate researchers is one of the most important and fulfilling parts of my work,” Sirsi said. “For me, research and education are inseparable. Teaching doesn’t only happen in a classroom; it happens through hands-on discovery.”

Inside the Lab: A Matter of the Heart

As University of Texas at Dallas researchers sought funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop their concept of an ultrasound-based tool to monitor oxygen levels continuously in the brains of newborns with hypoxic brain injury, they first had to demonstrate the sensors worked in a living body.

Because oxygen levels naturally differ between the heart’s left and right chambers, researchers turned to the heart to validate the technology before applying it to the brain.

Dr. Shashank Sirsi, associate professor of bioengineering, credits biomedical engineering seniors Adam and Amine Azizi, fraternal twin brothers who work in his lab, with designing and conducting the heart research in rodents, which provided the necessary data to secure the $2 million grant.

“Adam and Amine went above and beyond to develop the crucial proof-of-concept experiments needed to advance our research,” Sirsi said.

Sirsi’s team has since developed methods to measure brain oxygenation and calibrate the sensors. He said the technology eventually could be used to monitor other conditions, including traumatic brain injury, stroke, brain dysfunction after cardiac arrest and oxygen-deprived tumors.

“We hope this becomes a high-impact tool with applications well beyond what we initially envisioned,” Sirsi said.