Researchers within ND Energy are thinking creatively about problems surrounding nuclear materials and are searching for solutions to reduce waste, decrease the cost of nuclear energy production, and increase efficiency and safety of the entire process.
Brian Baker, Rev. John A. Zahm Professor and Department Chair, was struck with an idea for potentially treating cancer when he considered the relationship between a type of treatment that was being tried on babies with blood cancers and a molecule that attacked the hepatitis-C virus in a liver transplant patient.
The department is pleased to announce the promotion of three faculty members: Steven Corcelli to full professor, and Haifeng Gao and Vlad Iluc to associate professor with tenure.
Chemistry graduate student Sarah Lum recently won the Young Scientist Award at the MSB 2017 conference, a gathering of scientists in the Netherlands that focuses on microscale separations and bioanalysis. The Young Scientist Award was established to recognize researchers under the age of 35 in the field who set an outstanding example for other scientists. The award specifically recognizes Lum’s work on developing new forensics technology.
Researchers have discovered a way to make influenza visible to the naked eye, by engineering dye molecules to target a specific enzyme of the virus.
The research fellowships were awarded to undergraduate, Masters, and Ph.D. students from the University of Notre Dame and from five universities in Ireland.
Clyde Daly, a fourth year graduate student in the lab of Steve Corcelli, has been selected as the 2017 recipient of the Sister Jean Lenz, O.S.F. Student Leadership Award. This award recognizes a post-baccalaureate student who has displayed leadership in promoting a diverse, inclusive community on campus for all students.
The WHO names Tuberculosis (TB) as one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide and over 95 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. To improve the global health community’s understanding of TB and provide information that could help treat it, Notre Dame researchers have developed a new strain of the bacteria along with a new method to better study this deadly disease.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Emily Tsui will be joining the faculty at Notre Dame as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry this summer. Dr. Tsui is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington with Prof. Daniel Gamelin, studying the surface chemistry and photophysics of doped semiconductor nanocrystals. In 2014, Dr. Tsui received her Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where her work focused on biomimetic multimetallic clusters, under the advisement of Prof. Theodor Agapie.…
Notre Dame Research has provided eight researchers or research groups from three Colleges and Schools with awards from the Equipment Restoration and Renewal (ERR) grant program for 2017.
Biochemistry graduate student Sasha Padilla has been awarded a 2017 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. Padilla works in the laboratory of Brad Smith, Emil T. Hofman Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Her research focuses on the development of near-infrared active chemical probes to enable the improved imaging of thin and buried nerves.
For the first time, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a list of “priority pathogens” which constitute a current and extreme threat to human health. WHO is seeking to promote new efforts in the discovery and development of new antibiotics to address a growing threat of antibiotic resistance.…
Amanda Hummon, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and member of the Harper Cancer Research Institute, has been appointed to the board of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) as Member at Large for Publications.
Paul Bohn, Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, has been selected as the winner of the 2017 ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Electrochemistry. This prestigious award recognizes a scientist who advances the field of electrochemical analysis through conceptualization or development of unique instrumentation, elucidation of fundamental electrochemical events or processes, and/or authorship of important research papers that impact the field.
NDnano is hosting a one-day symposium on Thursday, ​March 30 entitled "Nanotechnology in the Treatment of Neurodegenerative Disorders." The keynote will be given by Kevin Tracey, M.D., President & CEO of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Students are welcome and encouraged to attend the technical session and/or present their own related research in the afternoon poster session.
Small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) proteins are small peptides that get added on to other proteins to regulate their activity. While SUMO has many regulatory roles in cells, it is especially important for controlling gene expression during early development. Just a few years ago this connection between SUMO and gene regulation was relatively unknown, but now, Notre Dame researchers are exploring how a disruption to the SUMO protein’s ability to regulate embryo development may be linked to congenital heart defects.
Brian Baker, the Rev. John A. Zahm Professor of Structural Biology and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been appointed Chair of the Naughton Fellowship Committee.
Brian Baker, Rev. John A. Zahm Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, was recently awarded a $4 million, 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how to best engineer a patient’s own T cells in their immune system to target the patient’s specific cancer.
Over the last decades, immunologists have been gaining greater understanding of the relationship between cancer and the immune system—more specifically, how the immune system defends against cancer. For example, immunologists know that patients with weakened immune systems (recipients of organ transplants, HIV patients, etc.) have greater occurrences of cancer. The question “How does cancer escape the immune system, take hold, and progress?” has been studied for many years and has led to new approaches, including successful new drug therapies like the immunotherapy treatment former President Jimmy Carter received that has rendered his metastatic melanoma in remission. Understanding the relationship between the immune system and cancer has led to these new drug therapies, which “take the brakes off” the immune system to allow a more complete and effective anti-cancer immune response.
The next frontier of immunotherapy involves custom engineering immune treatments for each patient. According to Baker, “An important class of cells in the immune system are cytotoxic T cells—killer T cells—because they attack and kill viruses, pathogens, and even tumors. What we are working toward is engineering those T cells to target a specific cancer with great efficiency and potency.”
The Notre Dame Integrated Imaging Facility (NDIIF) has launched a new website, imaging.nd.edu. The new website provides a clean, modern look that aims to serve faculty and students, as well as external customers, who are seeking imaging research services.
NDnano is now accepting applications for the Center's summer 2017 NDnano Undergraduate Research Fellowship (NURF) program.