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!
Posts filed under People
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.
Ovi is off to Intel!
Yesterday we bid a fond farewell to postdoctoral scholar Amirus (Ovi) Saleheen, PhD. He has been a big contributor to our lymph-node chip project since arriving in fall 2020. He’s a whiz at microfabrication and the driving force behind some cool new technology that will be published soon. Now, he will be taking those skills to an exciting new position at Intel!
Congrats Ovi, we will miss you!
Sophie Cook named a Presidential Fellowship for Collaborative Neuroscience
This award will enable exciting work to study brain immunity in collaboration with Prof. Tajie Harris in the School of Medicine, as well as unique career development opportunities!
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!
Hannah enters PhD candidacy!
Congratulations to 2nd year student Hannah Musgrove, who earned a Pass on the PhD candidacy exam this month. She is now officially a PhD candidate. We look forward to seeing her research develop in the area of 3D printed microchips and hybrid tissue-chips. Congrats Hannah!
Welcome new group members
Despite the pandemic slow down, the Pompano Lab was able to welcome three new group members this fall! We are delighted to work with each of these talented scientists and to see them take charge of new research directions.
Amirus Saleheen, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Dr. Saleheen joined the lab in August, 2020. He obtained his BS in Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Univ. of Dhaka, Bagladesh, and his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His graduate work consisted of developing a novel microfluidic chip to mimic rotary tube culture of rodent brain slices, to improve the temporal resolution of downstream perfusate analysis. He also developed a smartphone based quantitative analysis method for epinephrine in expired or discolored auto-injectors, to help those old EpiPens stay usable. In the Pompano lab, Amirus will be working on robust fluidic control methods and stimulation of a lymph-node-on-a-chip model.
Dr. Ozulumba joined the lab in October, 2020. She obtained her BS and MS degrees in Biochemistry at the Univ. of Nigeria, and then completed a PhD in Biomaterials Science at the Univ. of Brighton, United Kingdom. Her PhD project investigated the potential of two-dimensional graphene and titanium carbide MXene nanomaterials to target biological toxins and the incorporation of these materials into composite systems for use in medical devices. In the Pompano lab, Tochukwu will be working on controlling immune cell interactions with biomaterial in a spatially organized microphysiological model of a lymph node.
Tochukwu Ozulumba, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Lavoisier Akoolo, PhD, DVM
Immunology Research Scientist
Dr. Akoolo joined the lab in October, 2020. He graduated with a DVM and MS from the Univ. of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya, and worked as a Veterinarian in the Ministry of Livestock, Kenya, before moving to Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he graduated with a PhD in Veterinary Pathology in 2015. Lavoisier completed postdoctoral training in microbial pathogenesis at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, leading to several publication in microbiology and immunology. In the Pompano lab, he will be expanding the use of live slices of lymph node tissue as an ex vivo model of immunity.
Congrats Andrew Kinman, PhD, & Austin Dunn, MS
July was an eventful month for the Pompano lab, with two defenses and graduations!
First, Andrew Kinman successfully defended his dissertation and earned his PhD, then stayed a few more weeks to wrap up and pass on his projects to Pargat Singh. His excellent presentation was titled, “Modification and Application of Antibodies and Their Fragments for Immunostaining in Live Lymphatic Tissue Slices.”
Next, Austin Dunn defended his Master’s thesis and earned his MS degree! Look for his paper coming soon on his exciting project, “Spatially Resolved Measurement of Dynamic Glucose Uptake in Live Ex Vivo Tissues”.
Summer Research Fellowships for Emma, Alyssa, and Erica
Congrats
to our excellent undergraduates for receiving competitive summer research fellowships this year.
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!
Congratulations, Dr. Maura Belanger
We are very proud of Dr. Maura Belanger for successfully defending her PhD in April, 2020, and graduating today in UVA Chemistry’s virtual graduation ceremony!
Maura was one of the first two graduate students to join the laboratory. She helped establish much of the foundational science that now informs our efforts to study immunity ex vivo. Along the way, she was awarded a fellowship on the Immunology Training Grant, contributed to 2 co-author papers, 2 first-author papers, and is currently leading the writing of a comprehensive review for submission this summer. Congratulations Maura for all of your achievements!
