Four Grad Students from Riccio College of Engineering Labs Receive IALS Assistantships
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Four pioneering graduate students from laboratories in the Riccio College of Engineering have received prestigious IALS Translational Graduate Student Assistantship (IALS assistantships) from the UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences to support cutting-edge research that advances human health. Grad students Pritom Chowdhury, Ziyuan Zhou, and Ziyue Zhu from the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department and Kashif Chowdhury of the Microbiology Department – who works in the laboratory of his mentor, Professor Neil Forbes of our Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) Department – obtained the year-long assistantships.
According to the IALS, Funding for assistantships is earmarked for promising and applicable translational research projects and is awarded as one-year working assistantships starting in Fall 2026 for up to 20 hours per week. Each assistantship includes working on the “translational research” that each recipient is currently carrying out for his or her lab. As the IALS explains, “We define translational research as work that aims to inform or to develop product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being.”
As Pritom Chowdhury explains about the translational research he will be doing during his IALS assistantship, “This project advances an ear-worn bioimpedance platform that uses ultrathin graphene electrodes to preserve subtle features of the arterial pulse waveform for stable, continuous, cuffless, blood-pressure tracking during unconstrained daily life. The system aims to support longitudinal outpatient [and] home monitoring of continuous blood-pressure trends across sleep, stress, recovery, and routine activity in an unobtrusive form. This platform could enable study of cuffless blood-pressure dynamics during stress testing, autonomic modulation, or behavioral interventions.”
Chowdhury concludes that “This [assistantship] will advance the transition from validated sensing research to a deployable wearable platform that captures otherwise unobserved blood-pressure dynamics missed between traditional cuff measurements, with the goal of impacting real-world cardiovascular care beyond academic publication.” He works in the 2D Bioelectronics lab with his supervisor, Assistant Professor Dmitry Kireev of the BME department, and earned his M.S. from Dartmouth College and his B.Sc. from BRAC University in Bangladesh.
Zhou does research in the lab of BME Professor Joyita Dutta and develops generative artificial intelligence (AI) for medical images with a primary focus on nuclear medicine, including imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).
In that context, Zhou’s IALS translational research focuses on a robust image-enhancement framework for a specific “prostate-specific membrane antigen” by applying a SPECT denoising and deblurring technique using generative AI models. He says that “This innovative project addresses the critical and unmet need for reliable SPECT-enhancement techniques for radiopharmaceutical therapy in clinical settings and significantly improves the utility of SPECT imaging for accurate and personalized treatment.”
Zhou, who also earned his M.S. from UMass, says that in general “I develop multiple deep generative AI models for medical-image enhancement, including generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, and transformers.”
Zhu, who works in the laboratory of BME Assistant Professor Jingjing Gao, explains that “My research focuses on engineering injectable microgel-based platforms for long-acting delivery of protein therapeutics.” Specifically, Zhu is developing a tunable and cargo-adaptable microgel framework designed to support localized and sustained protein delivery while preserving protein functionality. Rather than relying on a single formulation strategy, the platform combines tunable material properties with cargo-specific formulation approaches to accommodate proteins with diverse physicochemical characteristics and release requirements.
According to Zhu, “This work advances a formulation-driven strategy for long-acting protein delivery that complements molecular half-life engineering approaches. By evaluating the platform across proteins with distinct physicochemical properties and biological functions, we aim to establish generalizable design principles for controlling protein release while preserving function. Ultimately, this adaptable framework could reduce dosing frequency and broaden the applicability of long-acting delivery across diverse classes of protein therapeutics.”
Kashif Chowdhury explains that “My research focuses on engineering tumor-tropic bacteria as programmable platforms for cancer therapy. Specifically, I develop genetically engineered [non-toxic Salmonella bacteria] capable of delivering radiopharmaceuticals and intracellular immunomodulatory proteins directly to tumors.” His research for the IALS assistantship targets pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest human malignancies.
According to Chowdhury, who earned his B.S. from Purdue University, “Successful completion of this work [on PDAC] will establish the first programmable bacterial theranostic platform capable of delivering tumor-selective α-particle radiation while simultaneously inducing immune-mediated tumor clearance. More broadly, this work will lay the foundation for a new class of programmable microbial radiotheranostics with broad applicability across solid tumors and strong translational potential for patients with otherwise refractory disease.” (September 2026)