Ram presents his work at Gordon Conference

Ram was selected to present a poster based on his RSC Applied Polymers paper at the Gordon Research Conference (Drug Carrier Design for Cell and Tissue Specific Delivery) in Portland, Maine. Ram was awarded a Postdoctoral/Research Associate Travel Grant from Mines to attend this conference. Congratulations, Ram!

Caitlyn is awarded a $50,000 research supplement by the NIH

Caitlyn has been selected for supplemental funding by NIBIB. She will be developing and testing polymer brushes for growth factor immobilization.

We have received the Children’s Hospital of Colorado/School of Mines Collaboration Pilot Award

We are grateful to the Children’s Hospital of Colorado and the RTT office at Mines for a $10,000 pilot award to design mucopenetrative nanocarriers for inhalable gene therapeutics for treating cystic fibrosis (CF) and primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD).  We are excited to collaborate with Dr. Scott Sagel, who directs the the CF and PCD Clinical and Research Centers at CHCO.

Claire and Caitlyn win top honors at the Mines Spring undergraduate research symposium

Claire took home the first prize, edging out 11 other Mines students in the oral presentation competition. Caitlyn’s poster was recognized as the best poster among freshmen. Check out the results here

Ramya is invited to deliver a talk at the Scripting Life for a Healthy Planet GWG Conference 2021. Thanks to the Genome Writers Guild for the invitation. Listen to the talk.

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Poly(zwitterionic) Coatings for Stem Cell Engineering

Ramya examined the relationship between poly(zwitterionic) brush properties and stem cell self-renewal rates and discovered that gel architectural differences can be exploited to maximize stem cell proliferation. To access optimal architectures, Ramya developed a property prediction tool that mapped the relationship between…

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High-throughput Experimental Platforms for Polymeric Vector Discovery

Recognizing the urgent clinical need for synthetic vectors, Ramya implemented an unbiased materiomics approach to polymer-mediated gene delivery. She faced two obstacles: 1) the intricacies involved in the rapid synthesis of precisely designed polymers through controlled radical polymerization techniques and 2) the paucity of experimental platforms that unite throughput, analytical rigor and precision.

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Data-driven Design of Polymeric Vehicles for Gene Editing

Rational polymer design is impeded by the “curse of dimensionality” since elucidation of the mechanistic roles played by numerous design variables such as polymer composition, architecture, length and formulation parameters is confounded by non-linearities. Intuition-based methods of pattern recognition and traditional hypothesis-testing statistical frameworks cannot alleviate challenges arising from a complex multidimensional design space.

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Accelerating Polymeric Vector Discovery via High-throughput Experimentation and Cheminformatic Models

Ramya has extensively employed data-driven approaches to map relationships between polymer properties and biological responses, such as proliferation rate, cellular uptake, toxicity and delivery efficiency. She is interested in establishing high-throughput experimental (HTE) workflows for biomaterial discovery and in applying statistical learning methodologies on large experimental datasets to derive structure-activity relationships. 

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Physical Design Approaches to Polyplex Libraries by Integrating Particle Engineering with Polymer Chemistry

Ramya is deeply interested in investigating physical pathways for polyelectrolyte complexation (or polyplex formation) by integrating particle engineering, polymer chemistry, and process intensification. This modular approach will create multidimensional libraries of nanoparticles wherein particle morphology and size distribution will be decoupled from the surface composition.