Auerbach Group
The Auerbach group had a banner year during 2024 in research and teaching. Our research collaboration with chemical engineering professor Wei Fan yielded two articles on breakthroughs in our understanding of how zeolite crystals form. Importantly, these articles are the first for our present PhD students: SeungBo Hong and Muhammad Ali Shah. Always exciting when a PhD student gets their very first article published!
Here's the backstory for these breakthroughs: zeolites derive their special properties from their regular array of molecule-sized “nanopores,” which make zeolites the most used synthetic catalysts in the world. A zeolite is like a “hotel” for molecules with hallways (channels) and rooms (nanopores). Zeolites must be synthesized with their pores filled with additives (such as fluoride ions or organic molecules) because “nature abhors a vacuum,” meaning that the nanopores must be filled with something. Finding the right mix of additives is critical for a successful synthesis. We have found that using a mixture of different organic additives can speed up synthesis, and by using AI to analyze simulation data (Hong’s paper), we believe that the speedup arises from modifying the entropy of the disordered silica network leading to crystals. We have also found that using ammonium fluoride instead of hydrogen fluoride as the fluoride source can speed up synthesis by as much as 40x (Ali’s paper). All told, what used to take two weeks now takes one hour. Now that’s progress! Congratulations to Hong and Ali on publishing their first articles.
Professor Auerbach recently bumped into former PhD student, Dr. Song Luo at a zeolite conference in Philadelphia, close to Dr. Luo’s postdoc position at the University of Delaware. The photo shows Auerbach and Luo looking very excited about the zeolite meeting.
In closing, we wish all Auerbach group alums a wonderful year. Though we may be living in interesting (and for some difficult) times, we always have one another. Please stay in touch and come back to visit us on campus soon!
J. Chen Group
This past year has been another year of many changes. The biggest of all was saying good-bye to Dr. Zhiguang Jia in November 2024, who moved to Mass General Hospital as a Research Fellow. Zhiguang joined the lab in 2014 and had been the backbone and role model of the lab. He had helped us in so many ways, keeping our computers running, teaching us how to run various types of simulations, and making major discoveries in every project that he had been involved with. The lab won't be the same without Zhiguang. We all wish him and his family the absolute best in Boston!
We are pleased to welcome Jessica Fong Ng as a new PhD student, who joined us through the Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program. Jessica will work on modeling and studies of nucleic acids, an exciting new direction of the lab. We also said goodbye to Aron Korsunsky, who graduated with a BS in Physics with a minor in Chemistry. Aron has taken a math teacher job in Somerville High School. We welcome two undergraduate students Devanshee Sanghvi, a BMB senior, and Hanna Georgiev, a Chemistry sophomore. Both Devanshee and Hanna will learn about molecular modeling and study the dynamics and phase behavior of intrinsically disordered proteins.
Current and former members of the lab have received several recognitions. For example, Jian Huang was selected to give a coveted talk at the Chemistry annual ResearchFest and won the prestigious Dr. Paul Hatheway Terry Endowment Award. Aron won the Uche Anyanwu Memorial Award for Outstanding Research at the 20th Annual Undergraduate Poster Session at UMass Department of Chemistry. Shrishti Barethiya, Kairong Dong and David DoCoeur all passed their prospectus (Shrishti) and ORP (Kairong and David) exams and became official PhD candidates. We congratulate former BS/MS student Samantha Schultz, who has accepted an offer to join the Biochemistry PhD program at UPenn. Jianhan chaired the Molecualr Biophysics in the Northeast (MBN), which was held on campus on April 13, 2024. It was an exciting one-day meeting that brought together experimental and computational molecular biophysicists in the Northeast and emphasized the involvement of student and postdoctoral trainees. The 2024 meeting had over 170 researchers in attendance from ~20 universities and institutions and showcased 80 poster presentations in addition to 14 talks from PIs and trainees. Jianhan also joined the Editorial Board of PLoS Computational Biology, a leading journal of the field. He is also a founding co-Chair of the 2026 FASEB conference on biomolecular condensates.
The group continued to make exciting progress on several active projects in the general areas of computational biophysics and biomaterials this past year. The group has published several original research and review articles on a diverse set of topics including new molecular models, sampling methodology, generative modeling, intrinsically disordered proteins, protein aggregation, ion channels, protein-ligand interactions, and protein-based biomaterials and nano-devices. Several of these papers have appeared in prestigious journals including Nature Communications and eLife and received substantial media attention. The full list of publications can be found on the lab webpage at: http://people.chem.umass.edu/jchenlab.
Research in the Chen lab has continued to be supported by three NIH grants. In addition, we have received an Instrumental Supplement to (partially) refresh GPU computing infrastructure, a UMass Interdisciplinary Research Grant to support a new collaborative project on antibiotic forecasting using biophysics and machine learning, with Anna Green from CICS and Lulu Kang from Math & Stat, and a new 3-year NSF Chemistry grant to support the studies of RNA phase separation. We are grateful for this critical funding support that allows our lab to continue to work on all our interesting projects.
DuChene Group
The DuChene Group recently welcomed the arrival of Anastasija Vasilijevic as the newest graduate student to join our team this year. Anastasija has joined our electrocatalysis subgroup and is working on the electrochemical reduction of NO3 into NH4 in acidic electrolytes. She has just gotten started, but we are already finding that this reaction behaves differently in acidic conditions than in does under alkaline electrolytes and we expect to learn a lot about this reaction. We are very happy to have Anastasija join our group, and we are excited to see what new scientific contributions she makes to our group in the future. I am also very happy to report that Nick Baker and Neumiah Massenat have both passed their qualifying exams and have both progressed towards PhD candidacy; well done to both of them!
The DuChene lab has also been joined by several new undergraduate researchers in the past year. We welcomed Lauren Feige, and Maya Gessman. Lauren is working on our NO3 electrocatalysis team with Will Philips and Anastasija, while Maya is working on our electrodeposition team with Nick. They are both adjusting to the lab environment well and we are excited work with them. We are also very proud to report that two other undergraduates, Joe Picozzi and Athena MacDonald recently received undergraduate research awards in recognition of all their work! These awards are very well deserved, and we look forward to many more semesters of working together with them.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge the hard work of a few of our undergraduate researchers who have recently graduated with their BS degrees in Chemistry: Daniel Tejada Davila, and Connor McCarthy. The DuChene Group sincerely appreciates all the contributions from our senior undergraduates, and we wish them well in their future endeavors!
Farkas Group
Greetings from the Farkas Group! Research in the lab continues to focus on the development of chemical tools for tracking and manipulating circadian rhythms and generating cell-based delivery agents. Most recently, Kaitlyn Chhe completed her dissertation defense in March (“Tracking and Modulating Molecular Determinants of Circadian Rhythms In Vitro”) and is on track to receive her degree and be hooded at graduation in May! Congratulations Kaitlyn! Also graduating from the group this year is senior Biochemistry & Molecular Biology major John Ferriera, who has been in the lab since his freshman year! John will be defending his undergraduate thesis in May. At the other end of the continuum, we are excited that we welcomed first-year chemistry graduate student Rianne Cooney to the group! Rianne comes to us following her undergraduate work at Stonehill College in Easton, MA.
Third year graduate student Aimee Shen successfully advanced to candidacy by passing her Original Research Proposal (ORP) Examination–congrats Aimee! Aimee and Prof. Farkas both attended the Bioorganic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference in the Summer (2024), and graduate student Emmanuel Rivera Iglesias attended the American Chemical Society meeting in Denver, CO. In alumni news, two former graduate students started new positions–Sujeewa Lellupitiyage Don at Cytiva and Tanya (Hui-Hsien) Lin at Genesis Therapeutics. Former undergrads TJ (Thomas) Caira and Bao Le are both in graduate school–TJ joined the lab of Prof. Ashleigh Theberge at the University of Washington and Bao is a 2nd year in Prof. Monika Raj’s lab at Emory University. Our NIH-PREP scholar from last year (2023-24), Josiah Sanchez, is also now in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and just joined the lab of Prof. Tim Johnstone. Former undergraduate student Jessica Furtado recently completed her PhD from Yale University in December (2024)–congratulations Jessica! We always love hearing from alums–so don’t hesitate to reach out to Prof. Farkas! Until next time!
Hardy Group
This year Kristalle Cruz completed her PhD and published two papers on inhibitors of Zika virus protease. The Hardy Lab has also recruited a talented new Chemistry graduate student this year. Abhin Maya Vishnu comes from IISER-Thiruvananthapuram and is working on understanding how the Alzheimer’s Disease protein tau interacts with caspase-6. We also recruited several new undergraduate researchers: Julia Clabbers, Malcolm Courchesne, Eva Liao, and Connor Steele.
Post-doctoral associate Thomas Bregnard presented a flash talk at the Protease Gordon Research Conference in Barga, Italy this year and has initiated a new project developing nanobodies to exploit exosites in caspase-6. Irina (Niña) Sagarbarria also presented a flash talk at the Protease Gordon Research Conference in Barga, Italy in June. She is collaborating with one of our undergraduate students, Jamie Seo, investigating the effect of our best caspase-6 inhibitor and potential Alzheimer’s Disease drug in mice. Nathanael Kuzio was invited to give a talk at the Protein Society Annual Symposium in Vancouver BC describing his work investigating caspase-6 conformational dynamics by NMR and also won the Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Oral Presentation for the top presentation at ResearchFest. Sparsh Makhaik has discovered a new binding site in Chikungunya virus protease which she reported at the Protein Society meeting. Andrew Smith is investigating the dynamics of inhibitor binding to different proteases using HDX-MS. Trisha Brady attended the Protein Society and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Conferences and is exploring conformational heterogeneity of various caspase-9 maturation states using native MS. Last summer she mentored Amherst Regional High School student Isla Cusick assessing caspase-9 stability. Yi Zheng attend the microscopy training program this spring to further his work on phosphorylation-mediated control of caspase-9 aggregation. Muhammad Arslan Rahat was selected for a UMass Biotechnology Training Program Fellowship for his work on Chikungunya virus protease inhibitors. Undergraduate senior Kevin Alexander, Chemistry, Physics, Math and Astronomy quadruple major published his DFT analysis of the potency of Zika virus protease inhibitors and at the time of writing has been accepted to PhD programs at CalTech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and U. Chicago. Senior Zsuzsa Kiss is working to characterize a potential exosite she identified in caspase-8 and earned an outstanding MCAT score. She is applying to medical school this year. A top event in the past year was when our lab hosted Dafydd Owen from Pfizer, winner of the The Breakthrough Science and Innovation Prize, who led the team that developed Paxlovid, at a lab dinner. Dr. Owen’s seminar the following day was a departmental highlight!
Kaltashov Group
2024 was a very busy year in the Kaltashov laboratory. We have published four original research papers and secured a new grant from the National Science Foundation to support our work on characterization of macromolecules of abiotic origin. Daniil Ivanov was awarded an IALS Translational Graduate Student Fellowship from the Institute of Applied Life Sciences to support his work “Development of antibody-based inhibitors for the management of the vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia” in May 2024 upon completing the co-op at the Sanofi site in Framingham, MA. In June the entire group attended the 72nd Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics in Anaheim, CA, where five presentations were made based on our recent work.
Dr. Evgeny Serebryakov (of St. Petersburg University) joined our group as a post-doctoral scholar in March 2024. Kevin Cheung (MS ’24) has completed his graduate studies at UMass and joined Analytical Sales and Services as a Sales Engineer in Boston, MA. Marissa Romano (BS ’24) completed her undergraduate work at UMass and moved on to become a Research Associate in Analytical and Technical Operations at Moderna (Norwood, MA) in May 2024. Daniel Heron (BS ’24) also completed his undergraduate degree work on the Amherst campus and joined the MD program at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, MA. In December we welcomed two new group members (Zhening Zhang and Hossam Ali).
The group’s alumni continue their steady ascend up the career ladders. Ben Mohimen (PhD ’04) has become the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, a company whose mission is to discover, develop, and deliver important new medicines to patients for the treatment of cancer using a proprietary switch-control kinase inhibitor drug discovery platform. This career move follows several exciting years at Repare Therapeutics, where Ben was overseeing development of a robust clinical and pre-clinical pipeline of synthetic lethality-based oncology therapeutics as the Head of Regulatory Affairs.
Lin Group
The Lin Group at UMass Chemistry has completed another dynamic and productive year, thanks to the collective efforts and commitment of all members.
Over the past year, we welcomed undergraduate students Wyatt Fajkowski and Matthew Skarbek Capra (UMass), Puja Chakraborty (Mount Holyoke College), visiting scholars Zhiqiang Wang (Florida Atlantic University) and Dr. Ao Yu (University of Central Florida). Each quickly integrated into research and began making meaningful contributions. We also said farewell to undergraduates Kaijia Liu, Chenxi Jiang, and Shuyi Chen, who have moved on to graduate programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of South Florida, respectively. Their contributions were invaluable, and they will be missed.
Group members, past and present, received several prestigious awards. Prof. Zhou Lin was named a Scialog Fellow in Automating Chemical Laboratories by RCSA and selected as an ADVANCE Faculty Fellow by UMass. Graduate student Siqi Chen won a poster award from the Chemical Engineering Recruitment Poster Session, and undergraduate Chase Presz received the Professor Jack Ragle Endowed Fund in Chemistry award. Former undergraduate Kaijia Liu earned the ACS-Connecticut Valley Section Student Award, ACS Membership Award, and the Richard W. Fessenden Award.
Our research projects continued to push the boundaries of quantum mechanics and machine learning applied to real-world chemical systems. We made progress in decoding photocatalytic and electrocatalytic reaction mechanisms for carbon neutrality and predicting photochemical dynamics in organic electronics. Our integration of machine learning into quantum models represented a cutting-edge approach that is gaining attention across disciplines. Collaborations with computer scientists and experimental chemists at UMass and beyond further enriched our work.
Prof. Lin, alongside Profs. Xin Xu (Arizona State University) and Shuya Wei (University of New Mexico), received a $4,000 Ideation Prize from the Bezos Earth Fund for their proposal "Precise Methane Oxidation on a Vertically Aligned Nanocomposite Membrane." This work outlines a combined computational-experimental design of high-entropy composite membranes to control methane oxidation via separate electron and proton-conducting channels. Prof. Lin also co-led a book chapter project, "Quantum-Chemical Insight into Electronic Excitation," with former postdoc Dr. Jun Yi, and Profs. Yuezhi Mao, Hongzhou Ye, and Luyi Zou. The chapter, accepted in the Elsevier volume Organic Electroluminescence: From Molecular Structure to Device Performance, introduces foundational concepts for modeling excited-state electronic structures in organic electroluminescent materials.
Graduate student Siqi Chen led a project on "Integrating Graph Neural Networks and Many-Body Expansion Theory for Potential Energy Surfaces." Her work introduced the FB-GNN-MBE framework, integrating fragment-based many-body expansion with graph neural networks. Her first-authored paper was accepted as a Spotlight Talk at NeurIPS 2024 AI4Mat Workshop and selected for a Hot Topic Talk at the Gordon Research Conference on Molecular Interactions and Dynamics. Siqi also collaborated with the Yang group (University of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, China) on visible-light-driven E-selective semihydrogenation for glioblastoma treatment. Her co-first-authored paper was accepted in European Journal of Organic Chemistry.
Graduate student Hongshan Bi led a project with Tsinghua University on Nickel-Doped Indium Oxide Nanoparticles for ultra-sensitive NO2 detection. His first-authored paper was published in Applied Surface Science. Former postdoc Dr. Jun Yi and undergraduate Gideon Tzafriri collaborated with the Thayumanavan Group on the role of intramolecular electrostatic interactions in amphiphilic assemblies. Their findings were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Looking ahead, the Lin Group is excited for the future. With a growing team and increased resources, we are well-positioned to tackle ambitious new challenges. We remain committed to advancing computational chemistry and fostering strong collaborations within the scientific community.
Martin Group
The Martin lab has all sorts of exciting news. First, progress towards the development of novel approaches towards the synthesis and manufacturing of RNA medicines has been phenomenal. To remind you, RNA is poised to revolutionize medicine, delivering treatments for a wide variety of diseases and conditions, simply by changing the sequence of the RNA.
Postdoc Purnima Mala has synthesized mRNA as long as 8.4 kilobases in length (the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine mRNAs were about 4 kilobases, but newer applications want still longer) and has developed approaches to make it super easy. She and graduate student Ruptanu Banerjee have transfected multiple different mRNAs into multiple, different cell lines and they are performing much better than mRNA’s made using traditional approaches: higher expression (as much as 60X) and lower innate immune system activation. We’re collaborating with graduate student James Forster in Ashish Kulkarni’s lab for even more stringent tests of function. In our ongoing collaboration with Sarah Perry’s lab, chemical engineering graduate student Diwakaran Rathinam Palaniswamy has developed flow reactor designs for optimal continuous flow production, and postdoc Sonu Kizhakkepura and he have developed clever downstream, in-line processing elements. At the 12th International mRNA Health conference in November (perhaps the premier conference on mRNA), Diwakaran took home first prize, conference-wide, for the best poster presentation!
Efforts to commercialize our work have taken a big jump, as we now have Melissa Moore (accomplished academic and former CSO at Moderna) as a co-Founder of Waterfall Scientific (rebranded from RNA4Tx). With pre-seed funding in place and a new CEO and co-Founder in the lab, Inna Shcherbakova, we have now set up shop in a biotech incubator in Worcester, MA and are starting to make mRNA for evaluation by potential customers.
In a spin-off direction form our UMass efforts, chemical engineering graduate student Khiem Le and Diwakaran have made wonderful progress in developing a novel system for “walking” polymerase along DNA, asking it to stop, in pre-programmed ways, to incorporate modified bases site specifically. This will be the next big thing to come out of the lab and will enable probes of biology that are now difficult or impossible (although we simplistically think of RNA as comprised of the 4 bases A, C, G, and U, our cellular RNAs are precisely decorated with all sorts of important chemical modifications).
Graduate student Amin Abek is wrapping up elegant work on pausing and termination by T7 RNA polymerase. His surprising result that RNA polymerase can release the RNA, remain bound, and begin initiating short RNAs from the pause site is unprecedented and has us re-visiting the literature in this space (sequence-specific pausing/termination is the one aspect of transcription that the lab has not previously studied!).
In these times, it is essential to note that our lab’s recent successes in developing far better approaches to manufacturing mRNA medicines are all the direct result of basic research on a system that was for many years thought to have no commercial or medical value (it was, and is, a simple model system [the “hydrogen atom”] for a key process in biology). Many of our current advances stem from curious results of 20-25 years ago. Our foundational development arose from a “failed” hypothesis from 2004. Then graduate student Eddie Esposito (now working for an mRNA therapeutic company in Boston), in attempting to understand how RNA polymerases “let go” of their initial DNA contacts, hypothesized that “gluing” the protein to the DNA start site would keep the polymerase from making RNA longer than about 8 bases. To our surprise, he showed that the system could happily make long RNA (“long” for us then was 50 bases, but we’ve now made 8 kilobase mRNA!).
Metz Group
It’s been an eventful year in the Metz group. Congratulations to Apakorn Phasuk for completing her dissertation, in which she studied reactions of aluminum oxide cations with ethane; solvation of metal cations and di-cations by acetone, especially how interaction with the metal affects the C=O and C-C bonds in acetone. She also observed that Al+ catalyzes a pinacol coupling reaction between two of the acetone ligands. Undergraduate Oliver Hees (BS, 2025) is carrying out computational studies to assess the potential of other metals to carry out this transformation, while John Dunn (BS, 2025) is computationally studying extensions to coupling esters. Graduate student Arnab Das and undergraduate Joe Gerrior (BS 2024) used vibrational spectroscopy to characterize the products of C-H activation in sequential reactions of Nb+ with methane and are extending these studies to niobium clusters. Graduate students Carmen Wiggin and Gaurav Singh and undergraduate Wyatt Fajkowski (BS, 2025) are using photofragment imaging to measure covalent bond strengths and characterize photodissociation dynamics in metal carbenes and carbonyls.
We love hearing from group alumni — please send us a note to let us know what you’re up to!
Rotello Group
Things are going full speed ahead now in the Rotello Lab. Vince is just back from Turkey, where he presented two plenary lectures, the Atabay Lecturer (Plenary) at the 5th Anatolian Conference on Organic Chemistry, and the opening Lecture at the 13th International Drug Chemistry Conference. He will be heading off to Spain in May to present a keynote lecture at Gold 2025. Additionally, Vince has been named a Clarivate “Highly Cited” researcher again in 2024. The publication total is ticking up, with the current count at 688. Additionally, “Nanosensor-Enabled Detection and Identification of Intracellular Bacterial Infections in Macrophages” was selected as the cover for an issue of Biosensors. Our group was also recognized for its top-cited articles in both Angewandte Chemie and Analysis and Sensing.
Derek Rainboth was awarded the CBI NIH Traineeship. Cristina-Maria Hirschbiegel won the 2024 PPG fellowship. She also won the UMass 3-Minute Thesis competition. Cristina and Muhammad Aamir Hassan joined the RSC LinkedIn Poster conference that Vince judged (but not Hassan’s or Cristina’s posters!). Yagiz Anil Cicek won second place in the office pitch competition of Entrepreneurial Aspects/Biotech class with IALS venture development office. He also won the Paul Hatheway Terry Scholarship as a recognition of his research and academic standing, and was also selected as a finalist in the prestigious Nucleate program with over 2000 applicants. Nucleate is a global initiative that empowers the next generation of biotech innovators.
Our Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Will Ndugire was selected as a Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) fellow. He was also selected for the St. Elmo Brady Postdoctoral Inclusive Excellence Award and presented our nanozyme work at the St. Elmo Brady Postdoctoral Inclusive Excellence Symposium (SEBPIES) Lecture at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Heartiest congratulations!
We welcomed aboard Harini Chandrababu and Joe Truong as graduate students. Our lab was further augmented by four visiting scholars Mohini Shahaji Ghorpade, Sadaf Noor, Humaira Khan, and Cinzia D’Avino. Dr. Pamela Nangmo Kemda joined our group as a visiting Postdoctoral fellow and Dr. Bilgesu Onur Sucu and Dr. Ayse Tan joined as visiting professors, welcome! We said goodbye to our graduating students, Ahmed Nabawy (AstraZeneca), Ritabrita Goswami (BASF), Aritra Chattopadhyay (Tufts University) and Aarohi Gupta (Avient cooperation); may they flourish even more!
For up-to-date news, please check out http://www.umass.edu/rotellogroup/.
Skouta Group
What a year it has been for the Skouta Lab! From pioneering discoveries to welcoming new talent, our team has been making waves in the world of medicinal chemistry and cancer research.
Dr. Rachid Skouta, alongside postdoctoral fellows Thomas K. Dawson and Dr. Rohit Bhadoria, secured a game-changing patent: “Ferroptosis Inducing Compound, Compositions Comprising the Same, and Methods of Inducing Ferroptosis.” They’ve designed a powerful new compound with a well-defined ferroptosis cell death mechanism which may offer a fresh approach to tackling tough-to-treat tumors.
This year, we were thrilled to welcome several new scientists. Dr. Nirmitee Mulgaonkar (Texas A&M PhD) is diving into understanding exactly how our compound destroys cancer cells. Sadia Salsabil Bristy, our newest graduate student, is hard at work designing even more powerful ferroptosis inducers and improving our compound’s drug-like properties. We also welcomed an amazing group of undergraduate researchers, bringing energy and talent to the lab. Chemistry majors Morgan Coutu, Alice Zou, and Brandon Tsang are honing their skills in chemical synthesis and drug development strategies.
Biochemistry majors Rawan Elfawal and Minahil Gul are mastering essential lab techniques, including cell culture, animal studies, and Western blotting. BMB’s Pari Khandhar and Jenna Wooster are diving into experimental design and analysis. Thyla Jarrett, a senior chemistry student from Mount Holyoke, is bringing her expertise and passion for organic chemistry to the lab’s projects.
This year, we also celebrated the accomplishments of two postdocs who wrapped up their time in the lab. Dr. Rohit Bhadoria has now moved to UCSF to start another Postdoc working on oncology research. Thomas K. Dawson has moved to Boston and is now a Patent Agent at Morrison & Foerster LLP. Their work helped shape the future of our research.
With new discoveries on the horizon, the Skouta Lab is ready to push the boundaries of cancer research even further. Our current research is highlighted in our website https://skoutalab.chem.umass.edu/
Thayumanavan Group
The Thayumanavan Group had another productive year in 2024. Below are some of the key updates. For more news and achievements, please visit our website at http://www.umass.edu/thaigroup. The highlight of this year was the group’s 25 year anniversary get together. Many of our alumni joined us in Amherst for 1.5 days of fun and many alumni also joined us via Zoom. It was great seeing them all and it was also great hearing from so many of our alumni, including those who could not make it in person.
Graduate Students Update: Madhumita Pan and Longfei Wang officially joined our group in early 2025 from the Chemistry Department. Susmita Dey joined our group as a joint student between our group and Prof. Min Chen’s group. Allison Lomeli joined our group as an ACS-Bridge student. Dr. Ritam Das has completed his PhD and accepted a position as Lipid Nanoparticle Formulation & Process Development Scientist at Poseida Therapeutics in San Diego.
Undergraduate Students Update: Varun Gopal, Sriya Munugoti, and Izzy Shook have graduated. Varun has started his MD journey at the University of Illinois. Sriya and Izzy are looking to start medical school and graduate school next fall respectively. Anushka Jain, Sunny Periyasamy, and Ananya Narayanan have joined our group for undergraduate research.
Awards and Achievements: Congratulations to Ranit Dutta for winning the William E. McEwen Scholarship Fund Award for his oral presentation at the 2024 Chemistry ResearchFest. Ranit has also been chosen to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting in the summer, where he will be hanging out with Nobel laureates for a few days in Europe. Jingyi Qiu’s application, “Cancer Immune Therapy,” was selected as an awardee for the 2024-2025 IALS Translational Graduate Student Fellowship. Congrats Jingyi! Jithu Krishna received a travel award to attend the Keystone Symposia on Antibody Therapeutics, funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She was one of three recipients and the only one from the USA. Congrats Jithu! Special congratulations to Hung-Hsun (Ryan) Lu and Jithu Krishna for receiving IDS Team Seed Grants. Ryan Lu also secured funding from the ACORN Innovation Grant from Mass Ventures to translate our PolyTACs into clinical applications. Congratulations, Ryan!
Other Alumni News: We are excited to share that Dr. Ziwen Jiang, our PhD alumnus, has accepted a new position as Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas. Congratulations, Ziwen!
One more off to Texas academia – we are also excited to share that Dr. Bin Liu, our PhD alumnus, has accepted a new position as Assistant Professor at The University of Houston. Congratulations, Bin!
Stay Connected: Follow our group on LinkedIn for more updates (links available on our website). We have stopped posting on Twitter/X!
Thompson Group
We enjoyed another great year in the Thompson Lab. Arrivals and departures started with undergraduate Sarah Tobia completing her honors thesis and graduating in May 2023. In Fall 2024 she began her graduate studies in a joint University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon program in Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology. Then in August, MCB graduate student Thomas Tran defended his thesis, and held a graduation party where we all enjoyed meeting his family and friends. Undergraduate Natalie Zhu completed her honors thesis in December 2024 and embarked on a co-op at Beam Therapeutics until her May 2025 graduation. We also welcomed two new undergraduates into the lab in Fall 2024, Valerie Chung and Sammy Mounsif.
Our research is progressing on multiple fronts. Graduate student Katie Wahlbeck Lu-Diaz is completing a solution NMR study of the P1 substrate domain of CheA, and how its binding interactions with signaling complexes contribute to catalysis. It has been fabulous to work with NMR Facility Director Jasna Fejzo on this project. Graduate student Jessica Allen has collected and partially assigned solid-state NMR spectra of the two other component proteins in functional signaling complexes, in collaborations with NMRFAM in Wisconsin and the NHMFL in Florida. She presented her results, which give insights into what residues change to propagate the signals across the protein-protein interfaces, at the Bacterial Locomotion and Sensory Transduction (BLAST) conference in Cancun, Mexico. Graduate student Bella Jankowski is performing hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) experiments to measure how the coupling protein CheW changes upon complex formation and between signaling states. She presented her progress at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) meeting in Anaheim, CA. Bella is also working with Sammy on fluorescent labeling of CheA to measure domain-domain interactions in collaboration with the Schlau-Cohen lab at MIT. Finally, Valerie is continuing our undergraduate-led project to use DNA to direct assembly of functional chemotaxis receptor complexes.
In addition to enjoying all of this cool science, Lynmarie became President of the Biophysical Society at the Annual Meeting in Los Angeles in February. In light of the many cuts to science, federal agencies, and universities, it is a challenging and interesting time to take on this role. Lynmarie finds herself encouraging everyone to Speak Up for Science: take advantage of every opportunity, from informal everyday conversations with friends and family to formal outreach activities, to talk about the many examples of how basic science benefits humanity!
Vachet Group
The Vachet lab continues its development and application of new mass spectrometry (MS) techniques to study protein structure and aggregation and to understand the distributions and biochemical effects of nanomaterials in tissues. In the last year, we have made important contributions in the areas of protein-nucleic acid binding, the imaging of extracellular matrix proteins, and the quantitative imaging of nanomaterials in tissues.
We recently celebrated the successful defenses of Akaansha Rampal and Jeerapat ‘Ping’ Doungchawee. They are the 35th and 36th PhD students to graduate from the group. Akaansha is headed to Chicago and will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Akaansha successfully navigated having two advisors (Prof. Shelly Peyton [Chemical Engineering] and Richard) and recently published very nice work that describes a new method to image the biodistributions of extracellular matrix proteins by MALDI-MS. Ping is headed back to Thailand to be a professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Ping had some of her MS imaging work highlighted as an ACS Editor’s Choice article. Michael Moore also finished up his Master’s degree in 2024 and took a position as a scientist at Alexion Pharmaceuticals in New Haven, CT. Akaansha, Ping, and Michael will be missed.
We welcomed three new graduate students to the group: Isabella Rossetti, Gnana Ponguru, and John Smith. Bella graduated from Stonehill College and will study protein amyloid formation. Gnana is originally from India, and he came to UMass Amherst after getting a Master’s degree at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and working for Veranova in Devens, MA for two years. Gnana will develop new MS imaging methods based on laser ablation ICP-MS. John graduated from Hampshire College and is using MS to study protein complexes.
In other group news, Dr. Ina de la Fuente (postdoc in the lab) and her husband welcomed their daughter Gia Kristen on December 5, 2024. In alumni news: Mahalia Serrano (PhD 2019) got married on June 8, 2024, and Orn Yukird (former visiting scholar) got married on October 13, 2024. Joshua Lauterbach (BS 2022) began grad school at the University of Washington in the Fall of 2024.
Venkataraman Group
The Advanced Laboratory for Iontronic, Electronic, and Nanomaterials (ALIEN) group, aka DV group, had a fantastic 2024-2025 academic year. Dr. Tim Gehan, an alumnus of both DV and Lahti Groups, delivered the keynote address at the 2024 ResearchFest. He shared his professional journey and highlighted the critical role of PhDs as problem solvers. During the event, Zhaojie Zhang was honored with the Alumni Best Poster award. He also received the prestigious Marvin D. Rausch Fellowship in recognition of his research achievements. Additionally, Mitchell Willsey was recognized with the best poster award at the annual Materials Science and Engineering poster session at UMass.
The group welcomed Neilgreib Nandi as a new graduate student. Neil, who holds a Master’s degree in chemistry, brings expertise in inorganic thermoelectrics. We are also pleased to welcome Apoorva Singh, a Fulbright Scholar and doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, under the guidance of Prof. Praveen Ramamurthy. Apoorva is working on hybrid semiconductors (Perovskite) solar cells and, along with Zhaojie, has introduced some state-of-the-art solar cell architectures to our lab. James Landeryou, an Amherst resident and undergraduate from Brandeis University, rejoined us this summer and laid the groundwork for photochemical doping of organic semiconductors. Additionally, we welcomed several new Chemistry undergraduates: Lara Soliman, Owen Ball, Eli Cole, and Christine Bombard. Cooper Richman from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department also joined us, collaborating with Zhaojie on using machine learning to predict the coordination geometry of elements.
The group bid farewell to two undergraduate researchers, Matthew Lowe and John Dunn. We also said goodbye to Dr. Michael Lu-Díaz, who has joined Wolf Greenfield, an IP law firm in Boston, to pursue a career in patent law.
In terms of research, Zhaojie’s work on the impact of bilayer hole transporting layers (HTLs) on ion transport in hybrid solar cells has provided deep insights into the role of accumulated charges at the interfaces on ion transport. This research, conducted in collaboration with Prof. Tomoyasu Mani at UConn and Prof. Ron Grimm at WPI, demonstrated why the bilayer HTLs introduced by Dr. Hamza Javaid (PhD 2022) stabilize perovskite solar cells.
From the alumni side, Dr. Emily Smith (PhD 2022) completed her postdoc at the Naval Research Labs in Washington, DC, and has now moved to Global Foundries near Albany, NY. Dr. Gautam Satishchandran, one of our undergraduate alumni, visited Amherst in January 2025. He recently completed his PhD in physics and is now a postdoc at Princeton, actively seeking an academic position. It was wonderful catching up with him.
DV is proud of your achievements and loves to hear from all of you. Please drop us a line via email at [email protected]. For group updates and news, visit our website at dvgroup.umasscreate.net or follow us on Bluesky at @dvgroupumass.bsky.social.
Walsh Group
The Walsh Lab is excited to welcome Anshu Anshu to the group! Anshu joins us from the Indian Institute of Technology, BHU (Varanasi), where she conducted research under Prof. Yogesh Chandra Sharma, investigating the removal of organic dye Orange G from wastewater using biowaste-derived adsorbents. Anshu will be a key contributor to our experimental high-pressure synthesis team, helping us navigate the complex interplay between structure, electronic properties, and emergent quantum phenomena.
We had a busy summer with our four “Founding Folks” group members successfully defending their PhD theses! Dr. Paul Marshall defended on July 26, 2024, and is now a postdoc with Alison Altman at Texas A&M. Dr. Scott Thiel defended on July 29, 2024, and is now a postdoc with Stefano Curtarolo at Duke University. Next came Dr. Nicholas Manganaro, who defended on July 30, 2024. He is now at Bates College as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the chemistry department. And last but not least, Dr. Kimberly Pereira defended on August 15, 2024. She has since joined Coherent Corp. as a Senior Laser Product Engineer. Congratulations to all of our graduates!
The group also celebrated the publication of Paul Marshall, Scott Thiel, Liz Cote, and John Arigbede’s manganese carbide paper in the May 2024 edition of Chemistry - A European Journal, as well as Scott Ambos, Nick Manganaro, Scott Thiel, and Wyatt Mitchell’s paper in the December 2024 edition of Journal of Inorganic Chemistry C.
The Walsh Lab has had a busy year of travel to numerous national facilities. Liz and Tracey Nelson performed experiments involving the diamond anvil cell synthesis of transition metal carbide systems at the Advanced Photon Source in Chicago, IL as well as the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, CA. They also carried out beamtimes at the National Synchrotron Light Source II on Long Island, studying novel carbide synthesis using a large volume press. Scott and Tracey had the opportunity to perform neutron diffraction experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and Scott also visited there for a workshop on neutron diffraction and single crystal data analysis.
The QUICKPress system is now fully operational, significantly enhancing our capabilities in large-scale synthesis and recovery of our newly discovered carbides. This high-pressure apparatus enables precise material discovery and characterization, allowing us to explore critical properties such as catalytic activity, hardness, and magnetism. We are thrilled to integrate this tool into our workflow and look forward to the discoveries it will facilitate.
Liz Cote and Tracey Nelson each won poster prizes at ResearchFest 2024. Liz won the Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation, while Tracey won the Dr. Paul Hatheway Terry Endowment Award for Outstanding Poster. Congratulations to John Arigbede on receiving the Advanced Science Conference Grant (ASCG) and the Chemical Engineering Departmental DEI Fund to attend the 51st NOBCChE Conference: Sustainable Momentum, which took place in Orlando, FL. At the conference, John delivered a podium presentation on his work on the discovery of new carbides for potential catalytic activity.
John also was elected President of the Graduate Student Government (GSG). With a commitment to stronger governance and student advocacy, John has spearheaded key initiatives, including restructuring the GSG framework to establish legislative, executive, and judicial branches—a transformative step toward a more effective and representative student government. As he leads this new chapter, we look forward to the impact of his leadership, and we wish him success in driving meaningful change. Congratulations, Mr. President!
Liz and Tracey led APDC to another successful ResearchFest as Co-Presidents. This will be Liz’s third year serving in the leadership of APDC, and Tracey’s second year. They look forward to working with the new leadership to continue to further the professional development of our graduate students.
Wu Group
It has been a very exciting year for the Wu Lab. We’ve fully set up our laboratory in the Life Sciences Laboratories Building and started our research journey at UMass. Our research focuses on developing molecular tools to understand the function of RNA molecules in living cells and leveraging this understanding for therapeutic applications. To this end, graduate students Daisy Pham and Omoyemi Ajayi have made some very exciting progress. We’ve developed an imaging system that enables real-time tracking of different RNA molecules and their interactions in living cells. This will help us to understand how the spatiotemporal distribution of RNA contributes to cellular function. Additionally, our collaborative work on a near-infrared fluorogenic RNA for in vivo imaging and sensing was published in Nature Communications.
The Wu Lab has continued to grow. We welcomed three graduate students, Jiaze He, Benjamin Adams, and Yimeng Sun, to our group. As our lab grows, we are excited to embark on more RNA research and are looking forward to another productive year!
You Group
This past year the You lab has continued our effort in developing next-generation RNA-based biosensors for cellular imaging and regulation, as well as DNA probes to measure mechanical forces at cell-cell junctions and membrane dynamic interactions among lipids and proteins. We have published one book chapter and seven manuscripts this year on these topics. Some critical achievements include Ru Zheng et al., publishing in Nucleic Acids Research with the development of a novel sequential multiplexed imaging strategy for RNA and metabolite detection in living cells; Murali Mohana Rao Singuru et al., publishing in Nano Letters with the demonstration of DNA nanovehicles that are responsive to cell surface receptor-mediated tensile forces, which can then correspondingly deliver anticancer drugs in situ for the first time; and Ahsan Ausaf Ali et al., publishing in Nature Chemical Biology a News and Views article regarding a recent advance in developing DNA nanodevices to allow non-mechanosensitive membrane proteins to transmit force-induced cellular signals. These efforts have been supported by an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, an NSF CAREER award, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and a Dynamic Imaging grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Meanwhile, this past year, we received a new two-year grant from NSF to develop DNA probes for regulating protein-protein interactions on live-cell membranes, together with the renewal of our NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award for another five years.
Our lab members have also obtained several awards and achievements. Priyanka Bhattacharyya received a William E McEwen Scholarship Award for outstanding poster presentation during ResearchFest 2024. Lan Mi received a student poster award during the SLAS 2025 conference. Sima Khajouei received a travel award from the Biophysical Society to attend the BPS annual meeting and will also start an internship at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in 2025. Lan Mi and Zhaolin Xue have taken a summer internship at Malvern Panalytical and Biogen, respectively in 2024. Ru Zheng finished a 5.5-month co-op at Dyne Therapeutics. Sima Khajouei and Priyanka Bhattacharyya passed their original research proposal defense and became PhD candidates. Prof. You continues to serve as an associate editor of Frontiers in Chemistry, and on the editorial board of Membranes and Biosensors. Meanwhile, he is guest-editing a special issue in Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews about DNA nanotechnology for drug delivery and disease therapy.
Two new chemistry major graduate students, Alison Hecht and Oyeshik Mukherjee, and a Materials Science and Engineering graduate student, Ali Ebrahimi Darsinouei, joined the lab this year. We also welcomed four new undergraduate researchers, Lucy Luong (as a Lee-SIP scholar), Chang Yuan (from Mount Holyoke College), Jiawei Wu, and Jeffrey Chen. On the other side, we graduated two PhD students from the lab: Ahsan Ausaf Ali is now a research scientist at Spear Bio, and Ru Zheng who will be a scientist at Amphastar Pharmaceuticals. Five College undergraduate, Qinge Liu, will join Caltech for her PhD study. We will miss all of you!
We are expecting another fruitful year for the You Lab! For more information, please visit our website: https://elements.chem.umass.edu/youlab/
Stay in touch with your mentor or share your alumni updates at [email protected].