Announcements

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowships were announced today and Christopher Wiedeman has been selected as a winner of the NSF fellowship. Chris is a first year graduate student who works under the supervision of Dr. Ge Wang.

In addition to the fellowships, two current/former students, have revived honorable mentions: Derek Nelson and Sara Harper.

Deva Chan has been issued an award by the National Science Foundation for her proposal "CAREER: Regulation of Hyaluronan Production and Function by Biomechanical Signals". This is a five year award for close to $600k and is considered NSF's flagship award for new investigators. A detailed description of the summary of the proposed work can be found below.

About the NSF CAREER award:

The paper "Biomarker Identification of Complex Diseases/Disorders: Methodological Parallels to Parameter Estimation" was featured on the cover of the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. The authors are Genevieve Grivas, Troy Vargason, both of who are students in Juergen Hahn's group, and their supervisor.

The abstract of the paper is shown below:

The annual graduate symposium was held on Wednesday, January 15, 2020. The graduate students presented their research as either podium or poster presentation to their peers, the faculty, and a group of judges. The presentations were of very high quality reflecting the research performed by the students. Several awards were presented to the students at the end of the symposium. Specifically, these were:

Podium talks:

1st Place:  Genevieve Grivas
2nd Place:  Devan Puhl
Honorary mentions: Cassandra Roberge and Ahmad Arabiyat

Posters:

Three biomedical engineering faculty have been selected to receive awards from the School of Engineering. Xavier Intes will receive the Research Excellence Award and Uwe Kruger will win a Research Excellence Award in the clinical faculty category while Xun Wang will receive an Education Innovation Award. The award ceremony will be held at the SoE Faculty Achievement and Recognition Dinner on Thursday, November 21st, 2019.

Elizabeth Blaber has recently been awarded a NASA Space Biology grant to participate on the BionM2 spaceflight mission with RosCosmos. The title of her grant is "Single cell analysis of bone marrow progenitor and differentiated progeny populations in response to long-duration spaceflight" and the mission is scheduled to launch in 2022.

The paper "Vastly Extended Drug Release from Poly(pro-17β-Estradiol) Materials Facilitates in vitro Neurotrophism and Neuroprotection" was published in Nature Communications. The paper is a collaboration between Ryan Gilbert's group in Biomedical Engineering and Ed Palermo's group in Materials Science. The authors are Anthony D'Amato, Devan Puhl, Samuel Ellman, Bailey Balouch, Ryan Gilbert, and Edmund Palermo.

The abstract of the paper is shown below:

Four biomedical engineering students will be honored with Rensselaer's Founders awards. The award recipients are: Jessica L. Funnell, Jonathan Kulwatno, Nicos Prokopiou, and Haokang Zhang The Founders Award of Excellence was established in 1994 to honor students who embody qualities of creativity, discovery, leadership, and the values of pride and responsibility at Rensselaer. The award consists of a special certificate, recognition by faculty, staff, and peers at the Honors Convocation ceremony, and a cash prize.