In March, Pompano Lab member Maura Belanger volunteered as a judge for the 2019 Virginia Piedmont Regional Science Fair, where hundreds high school and middle school students from all over the state came and shared their projects! This annual event is a great way to get students interested in science and interact with the community at large. It’s always an inspiration to see these students get excited about sharing their experiments! Congrats to all the winners this year!!
Spring conference season
The Pompano lab sent a cohort both to Pittcon and to the Society for Biomaterials annual meeting last month.
Pittcon 2019, Philadelphia, PA — Maura, Andrew, Austin, Parris, Jon, and Alyssa all presented posters or oral presentations. Dr. Pompano also gave two invited symposium talks. Our presentations ranged from microfluidics to bioanalytical chemistry for live tissue.
Society for Biomaterials 2019, Seattle, WA — Jenn presented a poster and Dr. Pompano started her term as Treasurer and Secretary of the Immunoengineering Special Interest Group.
It was great to hear so much exciting science. Everyone returned very motivated!
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!
Welcome Alex Ball
A warm welcome to Alex Ball, a first-year PhD student in the Biomedical graduate program (BIMS), specializing in Immunology. We are delighted to have Alex join the group and look forward to his work looking at vaccine responses in lymph node slices. Check out this photo from the BIMS “white-coat” ceremony, where Alex got his lab coat!
Two-tissue microfluidic chip published
Congratulations to Dr. Sangjo Shim for his paper published his paper in Lab on a Chip, and featured in the Organ-, body-, and disease-on-a-chip thematic collection. This is the first microfluidic chip to connect two living tissues in a recirculating loop of media. We hope that this technology will enable many exciting studies of multi-tissue interactions. As a start, in collaboration with the Munson lab at Virginia Tech, he showed that it models one key feature of tumor immunity -- T cell immunosuppression.
See our Publications page for more.
Andrew's Fab paper published!
Do you use antibody fragments? Check out Andrew Kinman's systematic, thoughtful, and very useful protocol for generating fragments at tiny (microgram) scales by pepsin cleavage, now published in Bioconjugate Chemistry. This work should save a lot of time for researchers who fragment antibodies for any purpose.
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.
Welcome Jon, Sophie, and Aditya!
The Pompano lab is growing. We welcome 3 new Chemistry PhD students this fall: Jon Zatorski, Aditya Rane, and Sophie Cook. Looking forward to what they will accomplish in the coming years!
