2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium
The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering held the 2024 Undergraduate Scholarship and Awards Ceremony on April 12, 2024, at the Illini Union Ballroom. The annual event honors the department's scholarship recipients and donors, and recognizes the judges, participants and winners of the Undergraduate Research Symposium held earlier that day.
2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium Winners:
First Place:
Sydney Nelson
“Impact of Hypoxia and Perivascular Niche-derived Conditioned Media on Hematopoietic Stem Cell Fate in Gelatin Hydrogels”
Second Place:
Joseph Clark
“Substrate Prediction for RiPP Biosynthetic Enzymes via Masked Language Modeling and Transfer Learning”
Third Place:
Amy Louise Bond
“PGM Recover by Redox Co-Polymers”
Congratulations to the winners!
2024 Judging Panel
John Bartels (BS 89) is a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chemical Engineering program. He started his career with BP in 1989, and has worked at the company in over a dozen different roles over the past 35 years. These have been primarily positions in oil refining, including operations and technical team leadership, process engineering, process design, commercial optimization, technology consulting and major projects. Bartels currently works in BP New Energy as an Appraisal Manager, where he leads the front end integrated development of a multi-billion-dollar strategic investment in a world scale Low Carbon Hydrogen Hub to be located next to the BP Whiting, Indiana Refinery near Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. They are a family of four Illini, and enjoy watching all Illini sports, especially basketball.
Sujit Jagtap is a research scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), where his research focuses on developing non-model organisms for chemical and fuel generation, leveraging cutting-edge advances in genomics, synthetic biology and computational biology. Jagtap served as a research scholar in ChBE Illinois (2012-2014), and earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea, in 2015. He has made major contributions to academia, having worked as an Associate Editor and Editor for prestigious publications such as Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts and Biotechnology for the Environment. His research includes over 35 peer-reviewed research papers, three book chapters and three patents.
Thank you and congratulations to all of the 2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium Participants:
Joseph Clark, “Substrate Prediction for RiPP Biosynthetic Enzymes via Masked Language Modeling and Transfer Learning”
Huamin Gao, “Optimizing a Biomaterial Injury Model for Craniomaxillofacial Defect Repair”
Sydney Nelson, “Impact of Hypoxia and Perivascular Niche-derived Conditioned Media on Hematopoietic Stem Cell Fate in Gelatin Hydrogels”
Ariel Byun, “The Effects of Radiation Treatment on Rat Brain”
Michael Xu, “Evaluating Bulk and Localized Mechanical Properties of an Interfacial Tendon-to-Bone Scaffold for Rotator Cuff Repair”
Cade McAndrew, “Stereochemical Effects of Small Molecules on Physical Properties of Photopolymerized Networks”
Sriya Sridhar, “Covalent-Bonded Electrode-Electrolyte Composites for Next-Generation Flexible Batteries”
Edgar Dobra, “High-throughput Bottlebrush Block Copolymer Synthesis for Accessing 3D Photonic Structures”
Daniel Hernandez, “Visualizing the 3D Distributions of Biomolecules of Interest in Cells After Depth Correcting 3D NanoSIMS Images”
Amy Louise Bond, “PGM Recover by Redox Co-Polymers”