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.…

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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.

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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.

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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.…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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NDnano is now accepting applications for the Center's summer 2017 NDnano Undergraduate Research Fellowship (NURF) program.

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Diabetes is a metabolic disease in which the body has an inability to produce enough insulin. In the United States alone, it is estimated that the illness affects nearly 30 million diagnosed and undiagnosed people, and treatment often includes patients using an intravenous or IV method to get insulin into their system. This uncomfortable and inconvenient form of treatment can require anywhere from two to four injections a day, but a Notre Dame researcher is working to combat this problem with a less frequent, oral delivery system.

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Robert Stahelin’s laboratory aims to advance understanding of how the mechanisms of lipid signaling are controlled in lung and other types of cancers.

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Notre Dame doctoral candidate, Nicholas Myers, placed second in an elevator pitch contest at the Micronutrient Forum 2016 global conference in Cancun, Mexico. The Micronutrient Forum aims to be a global catalyst and convener for sharing expertise, insights, and experience relevant to micronutrients in all aspects of health promotion and disease prevention. It brings together researchers, professionals, students, organizations, and stakeholders to converse and collaborate in order to end malnutrition worldwide. The particular focus of the 2016 global conference was the positioning of women’s nutrition at the center of sustainable development.

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Notre Dame’s third annual symposium on soft materials research was expanded this year to a two-university event.  On October 8, nearly 70 faculty, postdoc and student researchers attended the first Notre Dame-Purdue Symposium on Soft Matter & Polymers at Notre Dame’s Eck Visitors Center.

“The symposium functions as a platform to share research between schools in Indiana, to network between research groups, and to seek opportunities for collaboration,” said event co-organizer Haifeng Gao, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Notre Dame.  “We plan to include other nearby research universities in future events, such as the next one at Purdue University,” said event co-organizer Jianguo Mei, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University.

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The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame and the Faculties of Chemistry and Biosciences at Heidelberg University came together at a mini symposium on October 20 and 21 in Heidelberg, Germany.

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Newly inducted into the MEDI Hall of Fame this year, alumna Ann Weber ’82, graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame with a B.S. in chemistry and earned a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from Harvard University. She is currently Senior Vice President – Drug Discovery at Kallyope Inc., a New York City-based biotechnology company focused on harnessing the potential of the gut-brain axis.

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A collaboration between Jon Camden, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, David Masiello of the University of Washington, and Philip Rack of the University of Tennessee has directly observed hybridized magnetic resonances in plasmonic nanostructures for the first time. The achievement is a critical step toward developing materials that interact with light in unexpected ways and that may someday cloak military equipment throughout the visible spectrum or underlie future PV technology optimized to capture energy from the sun’s infrared rays. Their paper on the work, “STEM/EELS Imaging of Magnetic Hybridization in Symmetric and Symmetry-Broken Plasmon Oligomer Dimers and All-Magnetic Fano Interference,” was published in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters.

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On Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 2016, the Association for Women in Science–Notre Dame (AWIS-ND) hosted its inaugural conference for female graduate students, which was the first of its kind in the Midwest region.

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