News

A recent CSN publication in the journal Chem, “Lipid Corona Formation from Nanoparticle Interactions with Bilayers,” has been featured on the National Science Foundation news feed with the headline “Study provides insight into how nanoparticles interact with biological systems.” With a total of 36 co-authors, the article’s first author was Laura Olenick, working in the lab of Professor Franz Geiger. You can read the original press release from Northwestern University here and the online article on the Chem site here.

Two CSN graduate students recently received awards at the annual conference of the National Organization for the professional advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE). UW-Madison student Izzy Foreman-Ortiz won a NOBCChE poster award, which provides $500 and support to attend Pittcon in 2019, for her poster, “Anionic Nanoparticles disrupt Gramicidin A (gA) Activity in Model Phospholipid Bilayers.” University of Iowa student Diamond Jones received an Advancing Science Conference Grant to attend the conference and present her talk, “Modeling the Dissolution of Compositionally-Tuned Complex Metal oxides from First Principles.”

Professor Cathy Murphy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was recognized in the recent “Women in Nanotechnology” virtual issue of the journal ACS Nano. The description of the issue says, “Growing numbers of exciting nanoscience and nanotechnology projects led by women scientists are increasing our knowledge of fundamental physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials and applying these advances across science, engineering, and medicine. In this virtual issue, ACS Nano highlights the work of research groups led by women investigators worldwide in a celebration of their contributions to excellent science.” See the full virtual issue here.

Jason White’s News & Views article, entitled “Achieving food security through the very small,” has been published in Nature Nanotechnology. Read the manuscript online here. Jason C. White and Jorge Gardea-Torresdey, Nature Nanotechnology, 2018, 13 (8), 627-629.

Professor Christy Haynes (University of Minnesota) won the Theophilus Redwood Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry “for interdisciplinary work at the interface of analytical, biological, and materials chemistry and skills for passionately and effectively communicating science to broad audiences.” Christy was featured by the Royal Society here, and in a University of Minnesota press release here.

Congratulations to Christy Haynes, who has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which will help fund her sabbatical in Spain next year. The Guggenheim Foundation website states that “Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

Congratulations to Kelly Zhang on being named a recipient of this year’s Paul Bender Memorial Award by the UW-Madison Department of Chemistry! Kelly is being recognized particularly for her CSN work investigating the morphology and dynamics of polymer-wrapped nanoparticles using most of the alphabet soup of NMR techniques, which you can read in her Analytical Chemistry paper linked here.

Congratulations to Meghan Cahill (Haynes group), an undergraduate researcher co-mentored by Natalie Hudson-Smith and Peter Clement, on being chosen as a winner of the Thomas DuBruil Undergraduate Research Award for 2018!

Leslie Sigmon (Fairbrother group) has been selected as an awardee for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)! Peter Clement (Haynes group) and Naomi Dalchand (Geiger group) were also recognized with honorable mentions. Congratulations to Leslie, Peter, and Naomi!  Kudos as well to everyone who submitted a GRFP proposal – they require a lot of hard work and thought, and those of us who have served on review committees can attest that there are many more outstanding proposals than awards for this extremely competitive program, so many excellent proposals are not funded.