The Hecht Fellowship was established by Professor Sidney Hecht whose mid-career spanned 28 highly prolific and influential years in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia. The Hecht Fellowship secures one full year of living support with a $2000 additional award as well as the standard healthcare and tuition & fees support. It goes to a single student each year based on excellence in their graduate studies and research. Congratulations Sophie!! This is well deserved.
Posts filed under Grants & Awards
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!
Welcome, award-winning summer researchers
We welcome Meredith Davis, Bond Sittipongpittaya, and Erica Kem to the lab IN PERSON for the summer! It is a delight to have our talented undergraduates in the lab again after a long COVID-driven year.
All three won awards to fund their summer work!
Meredith received a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Biomanufacturing
Bond received a Dept of Chemistry Summer Research Fellowship
Erica received a DoubleHoo award, together with her graduate mentor Alex Ball.
Congrats to all three on this incredible set of accomplishments.
Meredith and Bond are working on computational and experimental models of cytokine transit and capture in the lymph node, and Erica is working on a new probe to measure glucose uptake in vaccinated lymph nodes. We are looking forward to all that you will learn this summer!
New R21 funding for protein mapping
We are thrilled to announce that that our work on mapping protein distribution in living tissues has been awarded two years of funding by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health. This R21 funding will support a new collaboration between Prof. Kimberly Kelly in BME, Prof. Tajie Harris in Neuroscience, and ourselves, to develop a novel method to see where proteins used to communicate in the immune system are released in live tissues. We are looking forward to this adventurous project!
Alex + Erica win Double Hoo Research Grant
We heartily congratulate undergraduate researcher Erica Kem and graduate student Alex Ball, who were awarded a well-deserved Double Hoo Research Grant! This will fund their research together to measure the response of lymph nodes after vaccination with different adjuvants. They conceived of and drafted their proposal themselves, so we are extra proud of them.
The Double Hoo Research Grant supports between 10-15 pairs of undergraduate and graduate students from across the university each year. The program is intended to build collaborative interactions between the undergraduate and graduate communities throughout the University. These collaborations provide opportunities for more advanced research by undergraduates and valuable mentoring experiences for graduate students.
Sophie wins GSAC Research Grant!
We heartily congratulate Sophie, who was awarded a Spring 2021 research grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council. These are competitive awards and an honor to receive. She wrote a compelling proposal to further her development of a miniaturized recirculating pump with a brand new 3D printer that is safe to use from home during the ongoing pandemic, plus parts for a new type of motor. Excellent work, Sophie!
CIC Collaborative Research Award
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!
Summer Research Fellowships for Emma, Alyssa, and Erica
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!
Pompano receives UVA Research Excellence Award
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.
NIH U01 for Lymph Node Chip
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!
