ResearchFest

The 34th annual research symposium, ResearchFest, introduced incoming first year students to our program, faculty, staff, and fellow students. The keynote address was given by Dr. Travis Benanti, PhD '08 (Venkataraman Group). After graduation, Benanti worked at a solar cell start-up company and then for Penn State's Center for Nanotechnology Education and 

Utilization (CNEU). In 2011, he joined Chemtura Corporation (now LANXESS) as a process development chemist and worked on lubricants for next-generation refrigerants, and currently leads the process development and synthesis group.

The alumni Career Panelists were Bishnu Joshi, PhD ’22 (Farkas group), Gaurav Mitra PhD ’25 (Kittilstved group), Hemali Rathnayake, PhD ’08 (Lahti group), Britto Sandanaraj, PhD ’07 (Thayumanavan group), and Qian Tian, PhD ’24 (You group). Joshi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Gel4Med at the Harvard Innovation Lab Company. Mitra manages the workflow of UMass Amherst's Office of Institutional Effectiveness. Rathnayake is a full Professor of Nanoscience, and the founding director of BRIGHT Institute at Univ. of North Carolina Greensboro. Sandanaraj is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeastern University. Tian works at Dyne Therapeutics Inc. as a Platform Development Scientist.
 

The Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Oral Presentation was awarded jointly to Cristina-Maria Hirschbeigel (Rotello group) for her talk “Multi-scale materials to provide bioorthogonal treatment of bacterial wound biofilms” and Ryan Lu (Thayumanavan group) for his talk “Polymeric lysosome-targeting chimeras (PolyTACs): extracellular targeted protein degredation without co-opting lysosome-targeting receptors.” Joint second place awards for the Paul Hatheway Terry Endowment Award were presented to Benjamin Adams (DuChene group) for his talk “Elucidating the relationship between metal band structure and plasmonic photocatalysis” and to Lan Mi (You group) for her talk “Genetically encoded fluorogenic RNA-based bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) sensors.” The oral presenters were selected by a faculty committee through a nomination and evaluation process.
 

The Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation was awarded to Isabella Jankowski (Thompson group). Oyeshik Mukherjee (You group) was awarded the William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation for first place in the afternoon session.

Six students received the William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Posters. Securing joint second positions were Neumiah Massenat (DuChene group) and Mohamed Salam (Strieter group) for the morning session, and Moly Rani (Chen group) for the afternoon. Emmanuel Rivera-Iglesias (Farkas group) earned third for morning session and Muhammad Aamir Hassan (Rotello group) for the afternoon. Yagiz Anil Cicek (Rotello group) and Anirudh Devarajan (Thai group) were voted People’s Choice for Outstanding Poster Presentation, and received the Dr. Paul Hathaway Terry Endowment Awards. 

Alumni Series Poster Awards were given to Soham Chakraborty (Rotello group) and Mitchell Willsey (DV group) for Overall Outstanding Posters.

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: Chemglass Life Sciences, Waters, Millipore Sigma, Gilson, Thermofisher Scientific, Buchi, Airgas, Celltreat, and Nanotemper. If you are interested in contributing to this event, please contact Vicki Hubby at [email protected].

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