Dr. Stroka has been selected as this year's winner of the Winston Family Honors Outstanding Faculty Award! A huge thank you to the Winston Family for endowing this award and supporting Honors programs at UMD. Dr. Stroka has been the Director of the Bioengineering Honors Program since 2017.

Also noteworthy is that Erfan Jabari, a BIOE undergraduate student in the Honors Program, won the Outstanding Honors Thesis Award for his thesis and work in Dr. John Fisher's lab!

Read more here in the BIOE news story: ​
https://bioe.umd.edu/news/story/dr-stroka-erfan-jabari-receive-winston-family-honors

Congratulations to Shohini Banerjee (PhD candidate), who has been selected as a finalist in the M.S./pre-candidacy category for the Clark School of Engineering's 3-Minute Thesis Competition! She will now move on to the university-wide 3MT competition. Congratulations, Shohini!

Congratulations to PhD student Ariana DeCastro who has been awarded the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship from the UMD Grad School! This $15,000 fellowship will support her dissertation research this fall. Congrats, Ariana!

Congratulations to undergraduate researcher Cole Dwiggins, who has been awarded an MTech ASPIRE Award for the spring 2022 semester! This award will support his research on fabrication and analysis of a 3D endothelialized vascular structure. Congrats, Cole!

Congratulations to Ariana DeCastro (PhD candidate), whose first author paper was just accepted for publication in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology as an invited contribution for a special issue on "Mechanical and Structural Phenotypes of Cells and Extracellular Matrices Govern Cell Adhesion and Migration"! This paper is titled "Morphological phenotyping of organotropic brain- and bone-seeking triple negative metastatic breast tumor cells." Co-authors include former PhD students Marina Pranda and Kelsey Gray, along with undergraduate researchers  John Merlo-Coyne, Nate Girma (REU summer 2018), and Maddie Hurwitz (REU summer 2019). A huge congratulations to the team!

A huge congratulations to former Dr. Becca Moriarty, former lab PhD student, whose first-author paper titled "RNA localization in confined cells depends on cellular mechanical activity and contributes to confined migration" was just accepted for publication in iScience as an invited contribution for a special issue on "Microsystems and Mechanobiology." Becca was supported by the NCI/UMD Partnership for Cancer Research and also worked collaboratively in Dr. Voula Mili's lab at NCI on this exciting project! 

Congratulations to PhD student Ariana DeCastro, who has been selected as one of this year's Outstanding Graduate Assistants by the UMD Graduate School! Excellent job, Ariana!!!

Our collaborative paper with Dr. Meg Scull's lab has been accepted for publication in PLOS Pathogens! Congratulations to Stroka Lab co-authors Dr. Kelsey Gray (PhD, 2019) and Jae Jung (UMD BIOE '21)!

This paper also made the cover image! Check it out here.

Dr. Stroka was invited to give a talk in the "Rising Star Faculty" session in Boston University's Cell Mechanobiology and Translational Medicine Symposium! The symposium was held today in hybrid format and was fantastic - thanks to the organizers for the invitation to participate and share our research!

Congratulations to first-author Dr. Mary Doolin (PhD alum, 2020) and second-author Ian Smith (PhD student) on the acceptance of their paper titled "Fibroblast to Myofibroblast Transition is Enhanced by Increased Cell Density" in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Great job!!!