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.

New paper: Mapping glucose uptake in live tissues

Our newest paper is out in Analytica Chimica Acta. Austin Dunn and Meg Catterton established a robust, optimized protocol to image glucose uptake in living tissues ex vivo. You can see heterogeneity across the tissue, and changes over time! We tested it in lymph node slices and were able to detect the response to T cell stimulation. Congrats Austin and Meg for this very useful work!

Austin F. Dunn, Megan A. Catterton, Drake D. Dixon(#), and Rebecca R. Pompano. “Spatially resolved measurement of dynamic glucose uptake in live ex vivo tissues.” Analytica Chimica Acta (2020). Online before print. [link].

Presentations at MicroTAS and BMES

The Pompano lab was out in force at the virtual MicroTAS 2020, with the majority of the group attending. PhD student Sophie Cook presented her poster on a modular micro-culture system with a novel media pump. Prof. Pompano presented in the pre-conference workshop on Organs-on-Chip, with a tutorial on incorporating tissue and immune functions into microphysiological systems. Plus she had fun as a poster judge!

The next week, PhD student Megan Catterton presented a virtual on-demand talk at virtual BMES 2020. She spoke on her and undergraduate Tim Freeman’s work measuring diffusion through inflamed lymph nodes.

Congrats to everyone for their involvement! We look forward to returning to these conferences in person next year.

Meg at BMES 2020

Sophie at MicroTAS 2020

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”.

Paper: Quantifying protein functionalization

New bioanalytical paper online last week! If you work with modified protein-based biomaterials, especially gelatin, this paper is for you. We describe optimized, validated methods to see just how modified it really is.

Read it here.

“Quantification of fractional and absolute functionalization of gelatin hydrogels by optimized ninhydrin assay and 1H NMR”

This work is extra special because it originated as a summer project for then brand-new graduate student, Jon Zatorski, and talented undergrad Alyssa Montalbine. They took the idea of improving the ninhydrin assay and ran with it. Jon pioneered the NMR work, the first to do so in our lab. (Thanks Jeff Elena in NMR core!)

Honored to have this work featured in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry as part of the "Female Role Models in Analytical Chemistry" topical collection, alongside Jill Venton, Ashley Ross, and ~60 other inspiring women.

CIC Collaborative Research Award

CIC Collaborative award to begin July, 2020!

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

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!

Paper: Blue particles to label cells

Congratulations to Maura Belanger and Meng Zhuang from the Fraser lab for the publication of their work in Biomaterials Science. This project was initiated by talented undergraduate Kristen Richey several years ago.

We show that boron based, blue-fluorescent nanoparticles make good labels for endocytic immune cells in fluorescence imaging or flow cytometry. 

Take advantage of that underutilized blue channel on your microscope.

Advance article accessible here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2020/BM/C9BM01572H

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.