2021 Graduate Research Symposium winners announced

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Graduate Student Advisory Council hosted the 20th annual Graduate Research Symposium on October 8, 2021, at the Chemical and Life Sciences Laboratory and Noyes Laboratory. 

The event included poster and oral presentations by the department's graduate students on wide-ranging topics from robotic automation to coarse-grain modeling, developing organic solar cells, engineering cell factories, and speeding up COVID testing.

The presentations were judged by a panel of alumni: Daniel Crowl (MS ’73, PhD ’75), who is retired from Michigan Technical University; Yongqi Lu (PhD ’97), a research chemical engineer at the Illinois State Geological Survey; Qingjun Meng (PhD ’04), a discipline lead of Process Modeling and Simulations at BP; and Fei Wen (MS ’06, PhD ’10), an associate professor at University of Michigan. Thank you to the organizers, participants, and judges for making this event possible. 

Congratulations to this year's winners, who were recognized at the Graduate and Alumni Awards Ceremony held that evening.

	Poster Presentation Winners			Oral Presentation Winners
First place		Chengyou Shi Zhao Group "Accelerating the Discovery of Novel Ribosomally Synthesized and Post-transitionally Modified Peptides (RiPPs) through Pathway Refactoring and Robotic Automation"			Danielle Harrier Guironnet/Kenis Groups “Biodegradable latex: the development of an encapsulation technique for the ring-opening polymerization of cyclic esters”
Second place		Apurva Godbole Kraft Group “Raman Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis for Noninvasive Determination of Cell Phenotype in Hydrogel Cultures”			Whitney Sinclair Leckband/Kenis Groups “Lung-on-a-chip Platform that Enables in situ Imaging”
Third place		Azzaya Khasbaatar Diao Group “Tuning the Molecular Assembly Pathway for Morphology Control in Organic Solar Cells”			Yu-Heng Deng Kong Group “Self-Locomotive, Antimicrobial Microtorpedo (SLAM) for Biofilm Removal through Swarm-Activating Cavitation"