It was a pleasure to discuss our research with physicians and researchers working on children's health, including pediatric oncology, respiratory diseases including COVID, and others. Looking forward to setting up new collaborations to make a difference for these patients!
Chemistry Alumni Open House events
The Pompano lab was delighted to meet alumni from the Department of Chemistry, ranging from recent grads to folks who graduated 50 years ago. PhD student Sophie Cook presented a poster at the research fair, and Hannah Musgrove ran a booth about the Chemistry Science Communications booth. Later, Sophie led tours of our lab for interested alumni! Thanks all for visiting, and please let us know if you would like more information about our research.
Prof. Pompano Chairs the inaugural Immunoengineering GRC
Prof. Pompano was honored to Co-Chair the meeting with co-chair Bali Pulendran and vice chairs Susan N. Thomas and Madhav Dhodapkar. Tochi and Katerina both presented their research in posters. This was great time and opportunity to connect with this growing community!
Parris Anbaei wins 3rd place in Chemistry Rising 5th year Poster session
Big congratulations to Parris for her wonderful presentation! Good job also to Sophie Cook and Jon Zatorski for their excellent presentations in the 4th year session!
Dr. Pompano presents keynote at MRS symposium
MRS 2020: On December 2, 2020, Dr. Pompano presented one of two live keynote talks in the symposium, “Biomaterials for Studying and Controlling the Immune System,” organized by Evan Scott, Kara Spiller, Eric Appel, and Derfogail Delcassian. The talk was followed by a thought-provoking panel discussion on the role of biomaterials in directing immunity, particularly for COVID-19 vaccination and against autoimmune diseases, with Joel Collier, Ben Keselowsky, Lonnie Shea, Ankur Singh, and Chris Jewell.
Presentations at MicroTAS and BMES
The Pompano lab was out in force at the virtual MicroTAS 2020, with the majority of the group attending. PhD student Sophie Cook presented her poster on a modular micro-culture system with a novel media pump. Prof. Pompano presented in the pre-conference workshop on Organs-on-Chip, with a tutorial on incorporating tissue and immune functions into microphysiological systems. Plus she had fun as a poster judge!
The next week, PhD student Megan Catterton presented a virtual on-demand talk at virtual BMES 2020. She spoke on her and undergraduate Tim Freeman’s work measuring diffusion through inflamed lymph nodes.
Congrats to everyone for their involvement! We look forward to returning to these conferences in person next year.


Congrats Andrew Kinman, PhD, & Austin Dunn, MS
July was an eventful month for the Pompano lab, with two defenses and graduations!
First, Andrew Kinman successfully defended his dissertation and earned his PhD, then stayed a few more weeks to wrap up and pass on his projects to Pargat Singh. His excellent presentation was titled, “Modification and Application of Antibodies and Their Fragments for Immunostaining in Live Lymphatic Tissue Slices.”
Next, Austin Dunn defended his Master’s thesis and earned his MS degree! Look for his paper coming soon on his exciting project, “Spatially Resolved Measurement of Dynamic Glucose Uptake in Live Ex Vivo Tissues”.
CMBE 2020 in Puerto Rico
Dr. Pompano traveled to beautiful Puerto Rico to present our lab’s work on micropatterned 3D cultures at CMBE 2020. This conference featured a fascinating mix of chemical and molecular analysis and engineering, and new and old friends.
Pompano lab in Switzerland
We had a great time presenting at MicroTAS 2019, in Basel, Switzerland, where Meg and Andrew each presented a poster on their research. Prof. Pompano served on the Technical Program Committee and also the Poster Judging committee, and so got to see a wide array of excellent work.
Pictures coming soon.
Meg presents at SciX
In October 2019, PhD student Megan Catterton represented the lab at SciX 2019 in the ANACHEM Award award session, a session in honor of Prof. Robert Kennedy receiving the ANACHEM award. Held in Palm Springs, CA, this special symposium included leaders in the field of microfluidics for bioanalysis. Meg made us proud!