A paper in collaboration with the Scarcelli Lab, titled, "Mechanical Characterization of 3D Ovarian Cancer Nodules using Brillouin Confocal Microscopy" was accepted for publication in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering! Christina Conrad from the Scarcelli lab was first author, and Kelsey Gray from our lab was second author. Great job, everyone!

Read paper here.

Congratulations to undergraduate researcher Thea Ornstein (BIOE '19) who received an Honorable Mention for her National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship application! Thea's research in our lab has been supported by an HHMI Fellowship and she will be continuing on to complete a PhD later this year. We are proud of Thea and all of her accomplishments!

See other posts on Thea's work:
stroka-lab-presents-at-bmes-meeting.html
thea-wins-bmes-student-travel-award.html
congrats-to-thea-greg-and-brittney.html
thea-awarded-aspire-fellowship.html

Kelsey's paper titled, "Quantitative phenotyping of cell-cell junctions to evaluate ZO-1 presentation in brain endothelial cells" has been accepted for publication in Annals of Biomedical Engineering! In this paper, we present a novel "Junction Analyzer Program" (JAnaP) to quantify the phenotypes of cell-cell junctions in cells, and use it to evaluate the effects of matrix stiffness on brain endothelial cell-cell junction presentation. The paper was co-authored by former lab undergraduate students Dakota Katz (currently in WashU BME PhD program) and Erica Brown (currently at MedImmune). Congrats, team!

Read the paper here.
Visit our lab GitHub site here. (JAnaP, along with its user guide, will be posted here soon!)
Read the UMD BIOE news story here.

Congratulations to (the new) Dr. Ajmeeta Sangtani, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, titled "Actuation of multifunctional hard nanoparticles for actively controlled drug release." Ajmeeta completed her PhD research at the U.S. Naval Research Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Jim Delehanty and was co-advised by Dr. Stroka. Great job, Ajmeeta!

Today Dr. Stroka gave an invited seminar, titled "Cues from the blood-brain barrier alter the migration of metastatic breast tumor cells," in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University (alma mater of PhD student Ariana DeCastro). Thanks to VCU BME for this opportunity to share our lab's research and learn more about research going on at VCU!