Congratulations to this year's PPG Foundation Fellowship Award recipients! Our PhD students benefit from the PPG Foundation's commitment to supporting the next generation researchers through meaningful stipend assistance.
Nicholas Baker (DuChene): Research focuses on the adaptation of colloidal metallic nanoparticle syntheses into electrochemical syntheses through the study of reaction kinetics and nucleation control. I use a variety of techniques such as Tafel analysis and multiphase galvanodynamic electrochemical depositions.
Priyanka Bhattacharyya (You): Development of DNA based probes for integrating intercellular tensile forces over time. The other goal is designing DNA based probes to regulate these forces to modulate downstream signaling pathways in different biological processes.
Xi Cheng (Lin): Research uses graph neural networks to predict geometry-dependent range-separation parameters for molecular systems. By capturing conformational sensitivity, this approach improves structure-specific ω prediction and enables efficient, geometry-sensitive electronic-structure calculations for optical property modeling.
Elizabeth Cote (Walsh): Explores how extreme pressure can change chemical structure, revealing exciting material properties and novel structures that are otherwise inaccessible. By studying materials synthesis under these extreme conditions, this work aims to discover novel behaviors and expand our understanding of advanced materials.
Arnab Das (Metz): Investigates the interactions between transition metal cations and methane molecules through infrared spectroscopic measurements of mass-selected cationic complexes in the gas phase. By integrating experimental observations with DFT calculations, he has elucidated the landscape of C–H bond activation.
Badal Singh (Thayumanavan): Focuses on selectively degrading disease-relevant cell surface proteins. Our platform, polymeric lysosomal targeting chimeras (PolyTACs), employs multivalency to internalize and degrade extracellular proteins without relying on the conventional lysosomal targeting receptors. This approach expands the repertoire of membrane protein degraders, which in turn could open new therapeutic avenues.
Mitchell Willsey (DV group): Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (PROTACs) degrade proteins rather than inhibit them, amplifying off-target effects, especially among protein homologs. We show that selectivity is not a fixed consequence of ligand choice, rather a configurable feature dictated by linker engineering.