ResearchFest

The 32nd annual research symposium, ResearchFest, introduced incoming first year students to our program,

faculty, staff, and fellow students. The keynote address was given by Dr. Robert Herbst, PhD '10 (Maroney Group). Herbst has worked at ImmunoGen since 2010 and currently leads the Technical Operations team, which spans development, manufacturing, and supply chain.

The alumni Career Panelists were Muhammad Abdullah, PhD ’21 (Kittilstved Group), Meaghan Germain PhD  ’08 (Knapp Group), Paul Homnick, PhD ’14 (Lahti Group) and Mahdieh Yazdani, PhD ’20 (J. Chen Group). Abdullah is a Principal Engineer at Technology Development at GlobalFoundries. Germain was a postdoc at Tufts University, taught Chemistry at Braintree High School, is an adjunct professor at Massasoit Community College, and started Meaghan Germain Fitness. Homnick is a serial innovator with more than 9 years of corporate R&D experience, and over two dozen US patent applications, currently working as a principal scientist at Bausch and Lomb. Yazdani works with an interdisciplinary team of structural chemists, an Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME) group, and medicinal chemists on drug discovery projects.

The Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Oral Presentation was awarded to Michael Lu-Díaz (DV Lab) for his talk “Finding the Common Thread: Factors that Impact Coulomb Interactions in Doped Organic Semiconductors.” Yumeng Zhang (J. Chen group) received the Paul Hatheway Terry Endowment Award as first-runner up for his talk titled “Towards Accurate Coarse-Grained Simulation of Protein Phase Separation: Roles of Backbone Interactions and Residual Structures.” Ahsan Ausaf Ali (You group) and Kimberly Pereira (Walsh group) were each awarded the William E. McEwen Scholarship Fund Award as joint second-runner ups for their talks. Ali’s talk was titled “Advanced DNA Probes for Imaging and Modulating Cell Membrane Dynamic Interactions” and Pereira’s talk was “Accessing Metastable States with Shock Compression.” The oral presenters were selected by a faculty committee through a nomination and evaluation process.

The Marvin D. Rausch Scholarship Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation was awarded to Ruptanu Banerjee (Martin group) for first place in the morning session. Daniil Ivanov (Kaltashov group) was awarded the William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation for first place in the afternoon session.

Seven students received the William E. McEwen Award for

Outstanding Posters. Securing joint second positions were Jithu Krishna (Thayumanavan group) and Cristina-Maria Hirschbiegel (Rotello group) for the morning session, and Irina Sagarbarria (Hardy Group) for the afternoon. Scott Thiel (Walsh group) received third for morning session, and Theo Prachyathipsakul (Thayumanavan group) for the afternoon. Nicholas Baker (DuChene group) and Gaurav Mitra (Kittilstved group) were voted People’s Choice for Outstanding Poster Presentation, and received the Dr. Paul Hathaway Terry Endowment Awards.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support we received for this event from the UMass Amherst Department of Chemistry, Marvin D. Rausch Scholarship Fund, Dr. Paul Hatheway Terry Scholarship, William E. McEwen Endowment Fund, and alumni. We also thank the following vendors who came to show us what their companies had to offer: Airgas, Azenta, Buchi, Heidolph, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. If you are interested in contributing to this event, please contact Vicki Hubby at vicki@chem.umass.edu.

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