CIC Collaborative award to begin July, 2020!
We are honored to be awarded a Collaborative Research Award from the Carter Immunology Center, together with colleagues Kimberly Kelly (Prof. of Biomedical Engineering) and Tajie Harris (Prof. of Neuroscience). This substantial seed funding for a unique collaboration gives us a chance to develop a brand new technology to see into cell-cell communication in tissue. Look for more details in a few months!
Congrats
to our excellent undergraduates for receiving competitive summer research fellowships this year.
Rising 2nd-year Emma Parker was awarded a CAD Bio Summer Internship, for remote research this summer on new analytical procedures to assess the extent of gelation in a photocrosslinked hydrogel. With this funding from the UVA Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing, she will be diving into literature and drafting detailed protocols to test out when she returns to lab.
Rising 4th-year Alyssa Montalbine was awarded the Lester Andrews Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship in Chemistry, which would have funded experiments on new methods to guide T cell motility in hydrogels. As all research must go remote this summer, we’ll be retooling the project to make progress remotely.
Finally, rising 2nd-year Erica Kem was awarded a summer fellowship from USOAR, a UVA program from the Office of Undergraduate Research, which uses work-study for meaningful research experience. Erica will be researching methods to culture ex vivo tissues under flow for long-term culture.
We are proud of you all!
We are very proud of Dr. Maura Belanger for successfully defending her PhD in April, 2020, and graduating today in UVA Chemistry’s virtual graduation ceremony!
Maura was one of the first two graduate students to join the laboratory. She helped establish much of the foundational science that now informs our efforts to study immunity ex vivo. Along the way, she was awarded a fellowship on the Immunology Training Grant, contributed to 2 co-author papers, 2 first-author papers, and is currently leading the writing of a comprehensive review for submission this summer. Congratulations Maura for all of your achievements!
Congratulations to Maura Belanger and Meng Zhuang from the Fraser lab for the publication of their work in Biomaterials Science. This project was initiated by talented undergraduate Kristen Richey several years ago.
We show that boron based, blue-fluorescent nanoparticles make good labels for endocytic immune cells in fluorescence imaging or flow cytometry.
Take advantage of that underutilized blue channel on your microscope.
Advance article accessible here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2020/BM/C9BM01572H
We are very honored that Dr. Pompano was recognized with an inaugural Research Excellence Award from the University of Virginia Vice President for Research Office!
Read more in the UVA Today article from Jan. 31, 2020.
The Research Excellence Award recognizes University of Virginia faculty members who have generated scholarship of high quality and are emerging in their fields as leaders and acknowledged as such by their peers. A candidate must not be more than 10 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree, by December 31st of the year in which they are nominated.
Our lab is growing. Recently we welcomed Dr. Pargat Singh to the group, from CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology in India, to work on methods to detect cytokines in tissue. His expertise in protein modification and microfluidics is a wonderful addition.
We also welcomed two new undergraduates, Erica Kem and Emma Parker. They will contribute to our work with lymph node slices and to protein modification projects, respectively. We are delighted to have their energy and enthusiasm in the lab.
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.
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.
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!
This week we learned that we have officially been awarded a $3.3 million dollar grant to generate the world’s first spatially organized micro-physiological model of a human lymph node. This U01 award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Heath provides 5 years of funding for this project.
We are delighted to work with a stellar team of researchers, including:
Jennifer Munson, PhD at Virginia Tech
John Luckey, MD, UVA Pathology
Tom Braciale, MD PhD, UVA Pathology
As new members of the NIH-sponsored Organ-on-chip Consortium, we are looking forward to bringing a lymph node to the burgeoning human-on-chip system!
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