We heartily congratulate Sophie, who was awarded a Spring 2021 research grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council. These are competitive awards and an honor to receive. She wrote a compelling proposal to further her development of a miniaturized recirculating pump with a brand new 3D printer that is safe to use from home during the ongoing pandemic, plus parts for a new type of motor. Excellent work, Sophie!
CIC Collaborative Research Award
We are honored to be awarded a Collaborative Research Award from the Carter Immunology Center, together with colleagues Kimberly Kelly (Prof. of Biomedical Engineering) and Tajie Harris (Prof. of Neuroscience). This substantial seed funding for a unique collaboration gives us a chance to develop a brand new technology to see into cell-cell communication in tissue. Look for more details in a few months!
Summer Research Fellowships for Emma, Alyssa, and Erica
Rising 2nd-year Emma Parker was awarded a CAD Bio Summer Internship, for remote research this summer on new analytical procedures to assess the extent of gelation in a photocrosslinked hydrogel. With this funding from the UVA Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing, she will be diving into literature and drafting detailed protocols to test out when she returns to lab.
Rising 4th-year Alyssa Montalbine was awarded the Lester Andrews Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship in Chemistry, which would have funded experiments on new methods to guide T cell motility in hydrogels. As all research must go remote this summer, we’ll be retooling the project to make progress remotely.
Finally, rising 2nd-year Erica Kem was awarded a summer fellowship from USOAR, a UVA program from the Office of Undergraduate Research, which uses work-study for meaningful research experience. Erica will be researching methods to culture ex vivo tissues under flow for long-term culture.
We are proud of you all!
Pompano receives UVA Research Excellence Award
We are very honored that Dr. Pompano was recognized with an inaugural Research Excellence Award from the University of Virginia Vice President for Research Office!
Read more in the UVA Today article from Jan. 31, 2020.
The Research Excellence Award recognizes University of Virginia faculty members who have generated scholarship of high quality and are emerging in their fields as leaders and acknowledged as such by their peers. A candidate must not be more than 10 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree, by December 31st of the year in which they are nominated.
NIH U01 for Lymph Node Chip
This week we learned that we have officially been awarded a $3.3 million dollar grant to generate the world’s first spatially organized micro-physiological model of a human lymph node. This U01 award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Heath provides 5 years of funding for this project.
We are delighted to work with a stellar team of researchers, including:
Jennifer Munson, PhD at Virginia Tech
John Luckey, MD, UVA Pathology
Tom Braciale, MD PhD, UVA Pathology
As new members of the NIH-sponsored Organ-on-chip Consortium, we are looking forward to bringing a lymph node to the burgeoning human-on-chip system!
Protein conjugation chip funded by NIH
Today the Pompano lab is celebrating a notice of funding for our focused R03 proposal. In collaboration with the Landers lab, we are building a microchip to help researchers efficiently add fluorophores to proteins without trial and error.
Many thanks to the National Institutes of Health, specifically the NIBIB (National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering), for funding this exciting work.
Kudos to PhD student Andrew Kinman for leading this project and helping craft a successful grant proposal.
1st-yr Jon Zatorski wins NSF GRFP
We are thrilled and honored that first-year PhD student Jon Zatorski was awarded an Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation this week. This is a major accomplishment that reflects Jon’s hard work throughout his college career, in our lab over the summer before grad school officially began, and in the fall semester to draft a strong proposal and personal statement while also juggling coursework and teaching commitments. We are very excited to see what he achieves over the next few years!
Hutcheson undergraduate award
We are very proud of Eirini Stylianopoulos for being awarded a Hutcheson Undergraduate Research Fellowship for summer 2019! This competitive award is generously funded by a charitable gift from Randy and Rossie Hutcheson, for top undergraduates working in Carter Immunology Center labs on immunology projects. We look forward to Eirini’s work on antibody-based reagents to sense cytokines!
Harrison & DoubleHoo research awards
We are very proud of our stellar undergraduate researchers, who continue to win competitive awards for their work:
Alyssa Montalbine was awarded a Harrison Grant to fund her research on a synthetic lymph node scaffold this summer
Tim Freeman and Meg Catterton were awarded a DoubleHoo award to fund their collaborative work to measure the diffusion of proteins through inflammed tissues
Congratulations!
Prof. Pompano named a 2019 CMBE Rising Star
Rebecca was one of six new Rising Stars recognized with a plenary talk at the 2019 CMBE conference. What an honor to be among this prestigious group of assistant professors! The conference convened in San Diego, California at the start of the new year, and was a fantastic meeting filled with creative new approaches to engineering molecules, cells, and tissues to mimic the complex in vivo environment.