Graduate Research Symposium

September 26, 2025

Judging Panel:

• Ayman Allian (BS 00, MS 01), Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
• Bryan Boudouris (BS 04), Vice President for Research & Economic Development and Professor, University of Alabama 
• Chandra Raman (MS 02, PhD 05), Innovation Portfolio Manager, CertainTeed 
• Meredith Sellers (PhD 11), Principal Engineer, Exponent Inc.

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Song Yin, Computational Chemistry and Artificial Intelligence Guided Study of Lasso Peptide Folding
• 2nd Place: Feray Buyuktopcu, Tandem Plasma and Electrochemical Treatment for Near-Complete Defluorination of PFOA
• 3rd Place: Michael Taleff, Measuring Termination Rates in Living Polymerizations via the Molecular Weight Distribution

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Ankit Gautam, First-Principles Design of Materials for sustainable Energy Generation and Efficient Separation Technologies
• 2nd Place: Vijay Shah, Enhancing Performance of PDMS Nanomembrane-Based CO2 Capture Through O2 Removal
• 3rd Place: Ashwin Bale, Nanoscale infrared imaging for metabolic mapping in single-cells

September 13, 2024

Judging Panel:

• Fikile R. Brushett (MS 09, PhD 10), Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
• Matt D. Langer (MS 06, PhD 11), Undergraduate Academic Advisor, University of Massachusetts Amherst 
• Sarah L. Perry (PhD 10), Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Lela Manis, From Ab Initio Calculations to Population Balances for Polymer Upcycling
• 2nd Place: Lanie Leung, Development of an Efficient Nonempirical Tight Binding Theory
• 3rd Place: Vijay Shah, Impact of Feed Composition on Nanomembrane-Based CO2 Capture Performance

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Archana Verma, Assessing Molecular Doping Efficiency in Organic Semiconductors with Reactive Monte Carlo
• 2nd Place: Gunnar Thompson, Building a Granular Hydrogel Model for Bone Marrow
• 3rd Place: Wesley Harrison, Photoenzymatic Asymmetric Hydroamination for Chiral Alkyl Amine Synthesis 

October 20, 2023

Judging Panel:

• Chi-Ting Huang (BS 91), Vice President of CMC and Process Development, Pheon Therapeutics 
• Ty Johannes (MS 05, PhD 08), Rumley Chair of Chemical Engineering, University of Tulsa 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Devinda Wijewardena, Further Insights into Kinesin Motility Using MINFLUX: A Super-Resolution Nanoscopic Method (Kinesin Motility: Characterizing the Half-Steps and Backsteps)
• 2nd Place: Rachel Gaines, Glycerol Electrooxidation in Flow Reactors
• 3rd Place: Génesis Ríos Adorno, Printable and viable Gel-SH hydrogels for tendon-to-bone enthesis regeneration

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Victoria Kriuchkovskaia, Acquired temozolomide resistance instructs patterns of glioblastoma cell mobility, cytokine production, and response to continual drug exposure in gelatin hydrogels
• 2nd Place: Tianhao Yu, Enzyme function prediction using contrastive learning
• 3rd Place: Rui Hua Jeff Xu, Leveraging Automated High Throughput Experimentation for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms for Understanding Quantum Dot synthesis

October 14, 2022

Judging Panel:

• Christopher Burcham (BS 91), Executive Director of Engineering, Eli Lilly and Company 
• Ashlee N. Ford Versypt (MS 09, PhD 12), Associate Professor, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York 
• Dale Kyser (PhD 87) Retired; former VP Research and Nutrition Sciences, Mondelez International
• R. Mohan Sankaran, Donald Biggar Willett Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place (tie): Richa Ghosh, Mechanistic insight into flow electrochemical alkene epoxidation kinetics over gold
• 1st Place (tie): Jarom Sederholm, Single-step electrochemical recovery and regeneration of cathode materials
• Runner up (tie): Melanie Brunet, Depth correction of 3D NanoSIMS images show intracellular lipid and cholesterol distributions while capturing the effects of differential sputter rate
• Runner up (tie): Yash Laxman Kamble, Precision of architecture controlled bottlebrush polymer synthesis: A Monte Carlo analysis

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Susannah Miller, Novel encapsulated Pt catalyst
• 2nd Place: Meng Zhang, Z-mRNA as an effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2
• 3rd Place: Ryan Miller, Extending the bioavailability of hydrophilic antioxidants for metal ion detoxification via crystallization with polysaccharide dopamine

October 8, 2021

Judging Panel:

• Daniel Crowl (MS 73, PhD 75), Retired, Michigan Technical University 
• Yongqi Lu (PhD 97), Research Chemical Engineer, Illinois State Geological Survey 
• Qingjun Meng (PhD 04), Discipline Lead, Process Modeling and Simulations, BP 
• Fei Wen (MS 06, PhD 10), Associate Professor, University of Michigan 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Chengyou Shi, Accelerating the Discovery of Novel Ribosomally Synthesized and Post-transitionally Modified Peptides (RiPPs) through Pathway Refactoring and Robotic Automation
• 2nd Place: Apurva Godbole, Raman Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis for Noninvasive Determination of Cell Phenotype in Hydrogel Cultures
• 3rd Place: Azzaya Khasbaatar, Tuning the Molecular Assembly Pathway for Morphology Control in Organic Solar Cells

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Danielle Harrier, Biodegradable latex: the development of an encapsulation technique for the ring-opening polymerization of cyclic esters
• 2nd Place: Whitney Sinclair, Lung-on-a-chip Platform that Enables in situ Imaging
• 3rd Place: Yu-Heng Deng, Self-Locomotive, Antimicrobial Microtorpedo (SLAM) for Biofilm Removal through Swarm-Activating Cavitation

Judging Panel:

Poster Presentation

• Dr. Lisa Hall, (PhD 09), Ohio State University
• Dr. Supreet Saini, (PhD 10), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
• Dr. Christian Junaedi, (PhD 06), Precision Combustion
• Dr. Jing Du, (PhD 12), AbbVie

Oral Presentation

• Dr. Jaeyun Sung, (PhD 12), Mayo Clinic
• Ms. Kit Gordon, (MS & MBA, 83), Tech Innovator and Watershed Protector
• Dr. Laird Forrest, (PhD 03), University of Kansas
• Dr. Allice Hollister, (PhD 10), Lam Research
• Dr. Efie Kokkoli, (PhD 98), Johns Hopkins University

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Vasiliki Kolliopoulos, Modifying mineralized collagen scaffolds to modulate the inflammatory response in craniomaxillofacial defects and enhance bone regeneration 
• 2nd Place: Paola Baldaguez Medina, Electrochemically-mediated remediation of Perfluorinated Pollutants
• 3rd Place (tie): Jialing Caroline Li, Single Molecule Charge Transport in Redox-active Molecules 
• 3rd Place (tie): Talha Al-Zoubi, Non-Precious Group Metal Oxygen Reduction Electrocatalysts of Single-Atom Clusters from Atomically Dispersed Precursors 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place (tie): Mai Ngo, Development of a Biomaterial Model of the Glioblastoma Perivascular Niche 
• 1st Place (tie): Uzoma O. Nwabara, Towards Durable, Selective Cathodes for the Electroreduction of CO2 to Value-added Chemicals and Fuels
• 3rd Place (tie): Andrew N. Kuhn, Copper-based Nanomaterials for the Selective Reduction of Oxygen towards the Purification of Carbon Dioxide from Flue Gas
• 3rd Place (tie): Charles Young, Coupled effects of concentration, chain architecture, and flow on polymer solution dynamics and rheology

October 19, 2019

Judging Panel:

• Ryan Stephens (PhD 08)
• Marc Viera (PhD 02) 
• Ritika Mohan (PhD 14)
• Wenjuan Zha (PhD 07)

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Liliana Bello, The Structure and Dynamics of Redox Active Polymers for Flow Battery Applications 
• 2nd Place: Prapti Kafle, Dynamic-template-directed crystallization of 2D conjugated polymer thin films and their distinct electronic properties
• 3rd Place: Matthew Chan, The Substrate Import Mechanism of the Human Serotonin Transporter 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Bijal Patel, Nonequilibrium Assembly of Bottlebrush Block Copolymers for Tunable Nanoscale Morphology and Photonic Properties through 3D Solution Printing 
• 2nd Place: Jiangyan Feng, Role of substrate recognition in modulating strigolactone receptor selectivity 
• 3rd Place: Kartik Kamat, Diabat Method for Polymorph Free-Energy Differences 

October 15, 2018

Judging Panel:

• Robert Ferguson (BS 91), Senior Upstream Marketing Manager, Medtronic’s Heart Valve Therapies
• Dr. Lili Deligianni (PhD 88), Retired; former Research Scientist, IBM 
• Dr. Lon Chubiz (PhD 10), Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Jiangyan Feng, Characterizing Protein Conformational Dynamics Using Evolutionary Couplings 
• 2nd Place: Whitney Sinclair, Lung-on-a-chip enables dynamic imaging of pulmonary lung tissue in response to aerosolized nanoparticle 
• 3rd Place: Jason Adams, Mechanistic Insights into the Direct Synthesis of H₂0₂: How Solvents Facilitate Proton-Electron Transfer 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Emily Chen, The Effect of Extracellular Hyaluronic Acid and Hypoxia on Glioblastoma Stem Cell Invasiveness 
• 2nd Place: William Ballance, Active Skin: Eliminating Biofilms Through Drug Release and Mechanical Vibration  
• 3rd Place: Prapti Kafle, Solution Coating of Pharmaceutical Nanothin Films and Multilayer Nanocomposites with Controlled Morphology and Polymorphism 

October 31, 2017

Judging Panel:

• Dr. Qingjun Meng (PhD 04), Simulation Team Lead, Refining Technology and Engineering, BP 
• Dr. Meredith Sellers (PhD 10), Managing Engineer, Materials and Corrosion Engineering Practice, Exponent, Inc. 
• Dr. Josh Tice (PhD 07),  Product Development Engineer, R&D Division, Scientific Device Laboratory 
• Dr. Gregory Underhill, Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, University of Illinois 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Charles Young, The Rheology of Semidilute Polymer Solutions 
• 2nd Place: Pei-Chieh Shih, Iridium-based Pyrochlores for Efficient Oxygen Evolution Reaction in Acid 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Dylan Walsh, Topology Control of Bottlebrush Polymers
• 2nd Place: Saurabh Shukla, How Multiple Molecular Motors Transport Cargo in Cells 
• 3rd Place: Thao Ngo, Studying the Durability of Pt-based Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Reduction Reaction Using in situ X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy

October 28, 2016

Judging Panel:

• Dr. Cory Berkland (PhD 03), Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas  
• Dr. John Gohndrone (PhD 88), Process Engineering Specialist, Dow Corning Corporation 
• Dr. Khushnuma Koita (PhD 12), Development Specialist, Praxair 
• Dr. Matthew Liberatore (PhD 03), Associate Professor, University of Toledo  

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Arkaprava Dan, Breathe In, Breath Out: Lung Endothelial Monolayers Respond to Cyclic Stretch 
• 2nd Place: Ge Qu, Understanding Interfacial Alignment of Solution Coated Conjugated Polymers
• 3rd Place: Hyunjoong (Tim) Chung, Molecular Cooperativity in Single-Crystal-to-Single-Crystal Polymorphic Transitions of an Organic Semiconductor 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Daniel Bregante, Understanding Olefin Epoxidation with H₂0₂ in Transition-Metal Substituted Zeolites
• 2nd Place: Kai-Wen Hsiao, Microfluidic-based Direct Measurement of Normal Stress in Semi-Dilute Polymer Solutions 
• 3rd Place: Emily Chen, Biomaterial Models of Cancer: Invasion and Cancer Stem Cells 

October 23, 2015

Judging Panel:

• Dr. Josh Gray (PhD 04), Program Manager, Surface and Analytics Lab, Boeing
• Dr. Ibrahim Sendijarevic (PhD 02), Business Development Manager, Troy Polymers
• Dr. Anastasia Vaia (PhD 03), PTA Process Optimization Manager, BP 
• Dr. Yongbo Yuan (former Illinois ChBE postdoc), Scientist III, ADM

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Katelyn Dahlke, Kinetics of DNA-binding Dimeric Proteins
• 2nd Place: Andy Chang, Deconvoluting the Effects of Solvation and Acid Strength on Zeolite Catalysis: Model Systems for Complex Materials 
• 3rd Place (tie): Sumit Verma, Electrochemical Reduction of CO₂ to Value Added C₁-C₂ Chemicals and Fuels 
• 3rd Place (tie): Kai-Chieh Tsao, Continuous Production of Uniform Carbon-Supported Catalysts of Metal Nanocubes and Nanooctahedra Using Carbon Monoxide-Mediated Processes

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Danielle Mai, Single Molecule Dynamics of Branched DNA Polymers 
• 2nd Place: Ran Chao, Building “iBioFAB” for automated synthetic biology 
• 3rd Place: Neil Wilson, Mechanism and Factors that Determine Selectivity for H₂0₂ Formation on Pd and AuPd clusters via Direct Synthesis  

October 24, 2014

Judging Panel:

• Dr. Amit Kulkarni (PhD 01), GE 
• Dr. Rahul Keswani (PhD 12), University of Michigan 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Joe Whittenberg, Microreactors for click chemistry-based synthesis of molecular imaging probes 
• 2nd Place: Ankur Taneja, Unified approach for function based geologic modeling, simulation reservoir and production history matching  
• 3rd Place: Yelena Ilin, Identifying the differentiation and cell cycle state of hematopoietic stem cells using Raman Spectroscopy 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place (tie):  Vivek Kumar, Development of high-throughput reactors for continuous synthesis of semiconductor nanoparticles  
• 1st Place (tie): Tong Si, Enabling multiplex genome engineering in yeast by RNAi and CRISPR  
• 3rd Place: Ming Li, Control of point defect behavior in metal oxides via surface band bending  

October 25, 2013

Judging Panel:

• Josh Ramsey (PhD 06), Professor, Oklahoma State University 
• Subramanian Ramakrishnan (PhD 01) Professor, Florida A&M University/Florida State University
• Dr. Tim Drews (PhD 04), OSIsoft, LLC. 

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place (tie): Todd Freestone, Metabolic Engineering for increased production of the anti-malarial FR900098 
• 1st Place (tie): Danielle Mai, Flexible Branched Polymers for Single Molecule Rheology 
• 3rd Place: Eitan Barlaz, Challenges in Defect Engineering of Undoped Titanium Dioxide 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Cartney Smith, A Bio-inspired Assembly Strategy for Formulation of Enhanced MRI Diagnostic Probes   
• 2nd Place: Utsav Agrawal, Super-resolution Imaging of the Bacterial Chemotaxis System in Bacillus subtilis   
• 3rd Place: Vahid Mirshafiee, Protein Corona Significantly Reduces Active Targeting Yield   

October 26, 2012

Judging Panel:

• Eric Hukkanen (PhD 04), The Dow Chemical Company  
• Eric Choban (PhD 04), DuPont 
• Mohan Karulkar (PhD 07), Ford Motor Company 
• Neel Varde (PhD 04), Roquette

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Ritika Mohan, A Combinatorial Microfluidic Approach for Point-of-Care Applications 
• 2nd Place: Sudipto Guha, X-ray Compatible Microfluidic Platforms for Screening, Crystallization and Structure Determination of Proteins 
• 3rd Place: Molly Jhong, Catalyst and Electrode Design for CO2 Electrolysis to Value-added Products 

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Yunzi Luo, Apply a Synthetic Biology Approach to Demystify the Target Cryptic Pathway for Novel Natural Product Discovery   
• 2nd Place: Maryam Sayyah, Composite Metal Oxide Materials Synthesized by Ultrasonic Spray Pyrolysis for CO2 Capture    
• 3rd Place: Sachit Goyal, Solvent Compatible Microfluidic Platforms for Solid Form Screening of Pharmaceutical Parent Compounds   

October 7, 2011

Judging Panel:

• Ahmad Hilaly, Archer Daniel Midland Company   
• Brian Anderson, Abbott Laboratories 
• Abdelqader Zamamiri, Abbott Laboratories
• Dennis Guthrie, Dow Chemical Company

Poster Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Matthew Naughton, Effects of Hydrophobicity and Catalyst Binder on Alkaline Fuel Cell Electrode Performance  
• 2nd Place: Steven Caliari, The Effect of Scaffold Microstructure and Soluble Factor Presentation on Cell Bioactivity for Tendon Tissue Engineering 
• 3rd Place: Ross DeVolder, Directed Blood Vessel Growth Using an Angiogenic Microfiber/Microparticle Composite Patch  

Oral Presentation Winners:

• 1st Place: Ryan Cobb, Characterization and Directed Evolution of FrbF for Combinatorial Biosynthesis of Novel FR-900098 Derivatives  
• 2nd Place: Sachit Goyal, Microfluidic Platform for Evaporation-Based Solid Form Screening of Pharmaceutical Compounds 
• 3rd Place: Bhushan Mahadik, Multigradient Hydrogels to Decode Extrinsic Regulation of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Fate