Jessica took the top prize for student talks at the International Symposium for Field Flow Fractionation at Washington DC last week. The organizers recognized Jessica for her outstanding presentation with this award. Congrats!
Ramya has been recognized with the undergraduate research mentor award. This award was presented during the 2026 Spring undergraduate research symposium.
Kyra Jordan, a QBE sophomore mentored by Alyson Camacho, has been selected for the prestigious Beckman scholars award! This support will help Kyra continue her work on building high-throughput tools for characterizing interactions between polymers and genome editor proteins. We are grateful to Beckman foundation for their generous support!
Congrats to Cora, a freshman being mentored by Jessica Lawson, on taking third place in the 2026 Spring symposium. Cora beat out several talented upperclassmen to win this award for her talk “Quantifying Polymer, DNA, and Protein Interactions with FRET“. See details here. Congrats!
Our collaborative work with the Villa-Diaz lab at Oakland University was accepted at ACS AMI, a top material science journal. This is the first paper from the Kumar lab featuring undergraduate first authors; Claire and Caitlyn are co-first authors. Congrats to Claire and Caitlyn on this impressive feat!
Grant Wheeler was recognized as the most outstanding researcher of his graduating class by the Quantitative Biosciences and Engineering (QBE) program. Congrats, Grant!
Caitlyn’s poster “Sulfonated Polymer Brushes Sequester Fibroblast Growth Factors and Promote Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Proliferation” was awarded third place. See the full list of winners here.
We were awarded $1,993,748 for our NIGMS R35 project “Directing and Deciphering Macrophage Polarization through Biologically-Inspired Surface Design of Polymer Brush-Coated Cell Culture Substrates”. This Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award will support our work in developing polymer brushes to answer fundamental cell biology questions.
Adam’s talk won first prize in the materials science session at the Graduate Research and Discovery Symposium (GRADS) while Alyson’s poster was awarded first prize in the Bio, Health, and Social Sciences category. Congrats to Adam and Alyson for representing the lab strongly at GRADS!
Gautier’s poster takes the top prize at the Mines undergrad research symposia.