Gautier wins first place in Spring Undergrad Research Symposia
Gautier’s poster takes the top prize at the Mines undergrad research symposia.
The lab welcomes a new PhD student: Alyson Camacho
Alyson Camacho (1st year PhD student, Chemical and Biological Engineering) joins the lab after an outstanding performance in her PhD qualifiers. Alyson did her undergraduate work at Brigham Young University, where she performed research in Prof. William Pitt’s lab. She will be designing experimental workflows and computational pipelines for machine-guided polymer discovery for genome editor protein delivery.
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 
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…
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.
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.