2013 Graduate Research Symposium

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering graduate students and members of the Graduate Student Advisory Council organized the 12th annual graduate research symposium on October 25, 2013.

Bill Grier, a chemical engineering graduate student with Dr. Brendan Harley’s research group, helped to organize this year’s symposium.

“The symposium offered a great opportunity for some of our students to showcase a portion of all of the exciting work that is under way in the department,” he said. “All three of our alumni judges enjoyed the opportunity to come back and interact with both faculty and students while also getting a chance to see the current state of the department where they spent so much time when they were graduate students.”

During the symposium there were eight poster presentations and 10 oral presentations given by students. Those presentations were judged by three chemical engineering alumni who returned to their alma mater. Those judges were Professor Josh Ramsey, Ph.D. ’06 (Pack), from Oklahoma State University, Professor Subramanian Ramakrishnan, Ph.D. ’01, (Zukoski) from Florida A&M University/Florida State University, and Dr. Tim Drews, Ph.D. ’04, (Alkire), from OSIsoft, LLC.

This year’s winners of the 12th annual Graduate Symposium are:

Poster Presentations

First Place (tie): Todd Freestone (advisor Dr. Huimin Zhao), “Metabolic Engineering for increased production of the anti-malarial FR900098;” and Danielle Mai (advisor Dr. Charles Schroeder), “Flexible Branched Polymers for Single Molecule Rheology.”

Third Place: Eitan Barlaz (advisor Dr. Edmund Seebauer), “Challenges in Defect Engineering of Undoped Titanium Dioxide.”

Oral Presentations

First place: Cartney Smith (advisor Dr. Hyunjoon Kong), “A Bio-inspired Assembly Strategy for Formulation of Enhanced MRI Diagnostic Probes.”

Second place: Utsav Agrawal (advisor Dr. Charles Schroeder), “Super-resolution Imaging of the Bacterial Chemotaxis System in Bacillus subtilis.”

Third place: Vahid Mirshafiee (Dr. Mary Kraft), “Protein Corona Significantly Reduces Active Targeting Yield.”

Other graduate students who participated in this year’s symposium are: Poster Presentations: Nicholas Clay, Prashun Gorai, Jacquelyn Pence, Daniel Reilly, and Tong Si. Oral Presentations: Laura Mozdzen, Matt Byrne, Mei-Hsiu Lai, Dawn Eriksen, Mayank Behl, Muhammed Oruc, and Tong Si.