News

3/2026: Riley Kemna, an undergraduate student at Mizzou majoring in the Biological Engineering honors program, will join us as a student research assistant. Riley will focus on the biophysical characterization of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins on model biomembranes. This includes working with both newly acquired Langmuir monolayers and supported lipid bilayers, utilizing our newly commissioned neutron reflectometer.

2/2026: Our lab has been officially approved for Biosafety Level 2 by the MU Institutional Biosafety Committee. The approval is valid for three years. We can now conduct our work on human cells and tissue reconstructions.

12/2025: Dr. Bac T. Le, a virology expert, joins us as a research specialist. Dr. Le will facilitate the lab setup for cell culture and develop protein expression with deuterium labeling. This capability will nicely complement our neutron scattering experiments at the GANS neutron reflectometer.

9/2025: Jessica Ruffing, an undergraduate student from Mizzou's Biomedical Engineering honors program, will join us as a student research assistant. Jessica will not only help establish our new lab at MURR but will also continue our collaboration with Dr. Cui's research group at Dalton. Additionally, she will receive training in cell handling from their team.

9/2025: We got the lab space for our research group at MURR.

5/2025: Veronica Ivanovskaya, an undergraduate student from Johns Hopkins University's Materials Science, joins us under the 1st Nuclear Career Academy summer internship at MURR. She will primarily conduct cell cultures and scratch assay experiments at the Dalton CardioVascular Research Center, perform dynamic light scattering at the Bond Life Center, and conduct small-angle X-ray scattering experiments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Exciting!