Moore Inventor Fellowship

Congratulations to Prof. Pompano and the whole lab on receiving the 2022 Moore Inventor Fellowship! As one of five annual recipients, she was awarded for the development of a microscope to observe the interactions between cells in order to develop pharmaceuticals and therapies to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. Congratulations!!

http://as.virginia.edu/rebecca-pompano-wins-moore-inventor-fellowship

https://www.nbc29.com/2022/10/04/uva-professor-wins-moore-inventor-fellowship/

https://dailyprogress.com/uva-moore-inventor-fellow/collection_a5644c9e-4653-11ed-8ab2-fb791587bda7.html

Katerina wins a UVA Cancer Center fellowship!

Katerina Morgaenko, a PhD student in the Biomedical Engineering program, was awarded a 2022 Trainee Fellowship from the UVA Cancer Center. In her proposal, “Ex vivo Model of Lymph Node Metastasis in Breast Cancer,” She'll be making the first-ever model of tumor cell infiltration into the lymph node parenchyma, using lymph node slices. The award will support Katerina's training and research in this area. Big congratulations, Katerina!

Congratulations to Nadia Cheng with mentor Jonathan Zatorski and Dorienne Hochard with mentor Parris Anbaei for the nano-STAR Summer Fellowship!

Every year, nanoSTAR invites undergraduate students to apply to spend a summer in their UVA laboratory. They match students to nanoscience projects based on their interests and abilities and students will get hands-on laboratory experience while learning the subject. They will prepare for a culminating oral and poster presentations at the end of the program. We are proud of Nadia and Jon for winning this!

Congratulations to Peyton Hamlett and Tochukwu Ozulumba for the GIDI-UP Fellowship!

GIDI-UP is a Summer Research award for undergraduate/postdoctorate fellow pairs. The pair has been granted the award in their research this summer for developing a 3D hydrogel based model of the human lymph node to study vaccination. We are very proud of them!

Jonathan Zatorski and Isabellą Lee Awarded the UVA DoubleHoo Award!

Congratulations to Jon and Izzy who were awarded the UVA DoubleHoo (https://undergraduateresearch.virginia.edu/our-opportunities/grants/double-hoo-award) for their shared project to quantify the extent of photocrosslinking in gels by proton NMR!

Sophie Cook Awarded the Sidney M. Hecht Graduate Fellowship in Chemistry for next year!

The Hecht Fellowship was established by Professor Sidney Hecht whose mid-career spanned 28 highly prolific and influential years in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia. The Hecht Fellowship secures one full year of living support with a $2000 additional award as well as the standard healthcare and tuition & fees support. It goes to a single student each year based on excellence in their graduate studies and research. Congratulations Sophie!! This is well deserved.

Parris Anbaei wins 3rd place in Chemistry Rising 5th year Poster session

Big congratulations to Parris for her wonderful presentation! Good job also to Sophie Cook and Jon Zatorski for their excellent presentations in the 4th year session!

Welcome, award-winning summer researchers

We welcome Meredith Davis, Bond Sittipongpittaya, and Erica Kem to the lab IN PERSON for the summer! It is a delight to have our talented undergraduates in the lab again after a long COVID-driven year.

All three won awards to fund their summer work!

• Meredith received a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing

• Bond received a Dept of Chemistry Summer Research Fellowship

• Erica received a DoubleHoo award, together with her graduate mentor Alex Ball.

Congrats to all three on this incredible set of accomplishments.

Meredith and Bond are working on computational and experimental models of cytokine transit and capture in the lymph node, and Erica is working on a new probe to measure glucose uptake in vaccinated lymph nodes. We are looking forward to all that you will learn this summer!

New R21 funding for protein mapping

We are thrilled to announce that that our work on mapping protein distribution in living tissues has been awarded two years of funding by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health. This R21 funding will support a new collaboration between Prof. Kimberly Kelly in BME, Prof. Tajie Harris in Neuroscience, and ourselves, to develop a novel method to see where proteins used to communicate in the immune system are released in live tissues. We are looking forward to this adventurous project!

Alex + Erica win Double Hoo Research Grant

We heartily congratulate undergraduate researcher Erica Kem and graduate student Alex Ball, who were awarded a well-deserved Double Hoo Research Grant! This will fund their research together to measure the response of lymph nodes after vaccination with different adjuvants. They conceived of and drafted their proposal themselves, so we are extra proud of them.

The Double Hoo Research Grant supports between 10-15 pairs of undergraduate and graduate students from across the university each year. The program is intended to build collaborative interactions between the undergraduate and graduate communities throughout the University. These collaborations provide opportunities for more advanced research by undergraduates and valuable mentoring experiences for graduate students.