In an effort to combat a major source of serious bacterial infections, chemical engineers Jessica Schiffman and Lauren B. Andrews at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are studying how bacteria attach themselves to polymer materials used in biomedical devices such as catheters, implants, wound dressings and contact lenses. The goal is to help prevent infections by developing new biofouling resistant materials.

The research is funded with a three-year, $515,473 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that supports fundamental research on how bacteria attach to polymer materials and how to re-engineer hydrogel-coated biomedical devices. Read more

The College of Engineering for the first time has five faculty members who have been awarded National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grants. Four of the recipients of the five-year grants, Lauren B. Andrews, Peter J. Beltramo, Jungwoo Lee and Sarah L. Perry, are assistant proferssors in chemical engineering, while Xian Du is an assistant professor in mechanical and industrial engineering.

Andrews, the Marvin and Eva Schlanger Faculty Fellow in chemical engineering, will do research studying how communities of bacteria can be engineered to have coordinated behaviors. This will have numerous applications in biomanufacturing, cell-based therapies, and medical diagnostics. Andrews’s $589,060 grant will fund research into developing a new approach for effectively programming how cells in a bacterial community work together in a predictive and highly controllable way.

Lee says his $549,710 grant will fund research that could lead to a greater understanding through which bone remodeling and blood forming processes are functionally coupled in porus, or trabecular bone cavities, by creating tissue engineered stem cell bone marrow models. Read more

There is a little-understood realm inside cells that cell biologist Tom Maresca likes to think of as the cell’s dark matter, something like the largely unknown stuff that is so abundant in space. Maresca recently received a four-year, $1.3 million grant renewal from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to use specialized tools to learn more about this less-studied inner universe of the cell.

For the new grant, Maresca and colleagues will collaborate with biophysicist Nathan Derr at Smith College to focus on unstructured proteins in an essential structure called the kinetochore. It ensures that chromosomes are evenly split between cells when they divide. Failure to achieve this, Maresca explains, leads to cells acquiring an incorrect number of chromosomes, which is known as aneuploidy ­– a condition that causes miscarriage, genetic disorders, tumorigenesis and possibly cancer metastasis. The long-term goal is to identify basic cell processes that can be targeted by therapies to control aneuploidy. Read more

Thursday, March 19, 2020
9:30 AM
Zoom link:  https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/7247417123
Dissertation Title:  "The Lon protease integrates protein quality control with DNA damage responses in Caulobacter crescentus"
Advisor:  Peter Chien