October 20, 2025
The Pompano lab enjoyed apple cider slushies, apple cider donuts, beautiful views, and apple picking at Carter Mountain Orchard!
The Pompano lab has been busy at the start of 2024! Check out our two new preprints on BioRxiv:
Ozulumba et al
One on biomaterials for immune cell photo-patterning:
by Tochukwu Ozulumba et al
And one on a bioanalytical method to map out oxygen consumption and hypoxia in live tissue explants:
Spatially resolved quantification of oxygen consumption rate in ex vivo lymph node slices
by Parastoo Anbaei et al
Anbaei et al
We welcome feedback on these manuscripts and look forward to sharing the revised versions again after peer review!
Congratulations to Sophie Cook on an excellent PhD and defense last week! Here are some pictures from the event. We are all very proud of her!
We are excited that our work to build multi-organ models of immunity will be funded for the next five years by a $2.4 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. This award will fund exciting collaborations with the Throckmorton lab at Drexel University and Drs. Melanie Rutkowski and Anne Sperling here at UVA!
Interested in what we are studying? Read on below.
Communication between the lymph node and the organs it drains is imperative for predicting immune responses to vaccination, infection, and chronic disease, but have been difficult to study in vivo or in vitro.
To address this gap, we will develop a user friendly, microscale system designed specifically to co-culture intact samples of live tissue from the lymph node with other organs, while allowing recirculation of white blood cells as occurs in vivo. After determining the effects of various modes of fluid motion on intact lymph node tissue for the first time, we will generate a simple model of the response of the murine lymph node to vaccination, as a proof-of-principle of this new system for modeling multi-tissue immunity outside the body.
Katrina’s project, The impact of tumor-draining lymph node remodeling on tumor cell invasiveness, was selected as an awardee for the UVA Cancer Center Trainee Fellowship! This was a competitive process, and her significant and exciting progress on her research progress in the past year was cited as a major strength of the renewal application. Congratulations to Katerina on this well-deserved recognition of your accomplishments and plans!
This award will fund her work this summer, as she pivots from her nearly-completed project on analyzing the crosslinking of biomaterials, to using those biomaterials to advance cell responses in our lymph node chip system. She and her mentor Jon Zatorski took a big leap to write up the proposal on the next project, and it paid off. Congratulations Izzy on this great accomplishment!
Parris Anbaei and Prof. Pompano travelled to Philadelphia for the first in-person Pittcon since 2020. We had a great time catching up with colleagues, and getting feedback on our research after two invited talks. Prof. Pompano presented in a symposium organized by lab alumna, Prof. Ashley Ross (Univ. Cincinnati), and Parris presented in a session organized by Sally Gowers from the Boutelle lab (Imperial College, UK).
This is a very prestigious award that recognizes her excellence in research and leadership in the department. We are so proud of her many accomplishments!
This award will fund Tiffany's work this summer to look at the impact of oxygen availability and culture conditions on long-term human tonsil tissue culture. It's an area that we are all excited to move into, and also synergizes well with the experiments that Sahana and Erin are planning in mouse tissue. I am looking forward to seeing what we learn from these experiments! Congratulations Tiffany!
This award will fund their work together this summer to look at how the tumor draining lymph nodes are remodeled before and after metastasis in a breast cancer model. This exciting project will lay a foundation for understanding the factors that drive tumor cell invasion into the lymph nodes during metastasis, and enable improved models of metastasis and therapies in the future. Congratulations Morgan and Katerina!
pompanogroup@virginia.edu
Department of Chemistry
University of Virginia
PO BOX 400319
Charlottesville, VA22904
409 McCormick Road
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA22904
(434) 924-7723
Chemistry 107
See Getting Here for a map and directions to the Chemistry building.
Lab Summit, 2025
Lab Summit, 2024
Lab Summit, 2023
Lab Summit, 2022
Lab summit, Feb 2020
Group Picture, 2016