Congratulations to undergraduate student Nate Manukyan, who was selected to receive the MTech ASPIRE Award! This award will provide funding for her summer 2025 research in our lab. Congrats, Nane!!

Huge congratulations to Esha Chopra, who has been selected to receive the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!! This highly selective fellowship will fund Esha's first 3 years of graduate school. Congratulations, Esha!!!

Huge congratulations to PhD student Ian Smith, who successfully defended his dissertation today! Ian's dissertation was titled, "Functional roles of Aquaporin 5 in breast cancer metastatic initiation modeled in vitro." 

Ian’s dissertation focused on engineering in vitro systems to study the initiation of metastatic phenotypes in cells and the role that aquaporins play in that process. From his PhD work, we are expecting at least 15 publications (7 already published, 4 submitted, 4 in preparation), 7 of which he is first author on. Ian received a provisional patent for the Spheroid-Associated Angiogenesis Vascularization System that he developed and has presented his work at 3 national conferences (BMES and AACR annual meetings). Ian has received several graduate fellowships to support his research, including the Clark Doctoral Fellowship, the International Foundation for Ethical Research Graduate Fellowship, and the Fischell Fellowship. He was selected as one of 25 students from across the nation to attend the NIH Biophysics Fellows Research Conference, and he also received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the UMD Graduate School. Ian has also been a wonderful mentor for many undergraduate students in the lab, and his undergraduate mentees have had many accomplishments including co-authored papers, an Honors thesis, UMD department awards, and entrances into graduate school. Ian also completed the Future Faculty Program in preparation for a career in academia and has been an active member in the Bioengineering Graduate Student Society, serving as President and in other leadership positions. Congratulations, Ian! 

Congratulations to senior undergraduate student, Esha Chopra, who has been selected to receive the Outstanding Research Award from the Fischell Department of Bioengineering! Esha has been working with Shohini Banerjee on a project investigating the mechanobiology of endometriotic cell migration. After graduation, Esha plans to pursue a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. Congratulations, Esha!

Congratulations to PhD student Ian Smith who has been selected to receive the Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the UMD Grad School! 

A huge congratulations goes to PhD student Ken Brandon, who has been awarded the NIH F31 predoctoral fellowship! This fellowship will provide the majority of his stipend for the remainder of his PhD work over the next  ~1.5 years. Receiving this fellowship is a huge accomplishment, and we are thankful for this new support! Congrats, Ken!

Congratulations to Ian Smith, whose first-author paper was accepted for publication in the journal Microfluidics and Nanofluidics! This paper is titled, "High throughput cell mechanotyping of cell response to cytoskeletal modulations using a microfluidic cell deformation system." Congrats also to other lab member co-authors, including Pranav Majeti, undergrad), Nikka Givpoor (previous undergrad and current PhD student), Shohini Banerjee (current PhD student), and Autumn Hengen (former undergrad). Also, thanks and congrats to our collaborators at UMB, including Jeanine Ursetti, Megan Stemberger, Chris Ward, Stuart Martin, and Joe Stains. 

Congratulations to PhD student Ian Smith, who has been selected as the recipient of the department's Fischell Fellowship this year! This award will provide full stipend funding for 1-2 semesters this year. Congrats Ian, and thanks to the BIOE department for their support!

We are excited that Nikka Givpoor (UMD BIOE '24) will be joining us as a new (direct admit) graduate student this August! Nikka worked in our lab as an undergraduate student (Feb. 2023 - May 2024) and has already co-authored a recent bioRxiv paper. She will be funded by a NIH Cancer Research Training Award (CRTA), which is through our new NCI/UMD Partnership for Integrated Cancer Research seed grant in collaboration with Dr. Meera Murgai at NCI. Welcome to the lab, Nikka! We are so excited to have you back in the lab!

We are grateful for new funding awarded from the NCI/UMD Partnership for Integrated Cancer Research! This seed grant award will provide funding for one graduate student for up to two years. The project will be a collaborative effort with Dr. Meera Murgai at NCI and will focus on developing a niche-in-a-dish platform for quantitatively analyzing the role of stromal components on disseminated tumor progression. Thank you to the NCI/UMD Partnership program for this new funding!