2022

The 32nd Annual Department of Chemistry Research Symposium was held on Tuesday, August 30 th 2022 at the Integrated Sciences Building. 

It introduced incoming first year students to our program, faculty, staff, and fellow students. The keynote address was given by Dr. Cornelius Taabazuing (Knapp Group ’15), a Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.  The alumni Career Panelists were Connor Boyle PhD’18 (DV Group), Riddha Das PhD ’19 (Rotello Group), Mike Tarselli BA’03 (PhD’08 North Carolina – Chapel Hill) and Catherine Tremblay PhD’21 (Vachet Group). Boyle is an Assistant Professor in Residence of General and Organic Chemistry at the University of Connecticut in Waterbury. Das is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard Medical School focusing on imaging the pharmacology of lipid nanoparticles to apply in cancer immunotherapy. Tarselli is the Chief Scientific Officer for TetraScience, a Boston-based startup, building the life sciences R&D Data Cloud. Tremblay is a Mass Spectometry Applications Specialist in the demo lab at Waters Corp. and works in the BioPharma group focusing on large molecule applications.

The winners were: The Marvin D. Rausch Scholarship Award for Outstanding Oral Presentation was awarded to Jessa Makabenta (Rotello group) for their talk “Polymer Nanotherapeutics to Combat ‘Superbug’ Biofilm Infection.” Erik Nordquist (J. Chen group) received the Paul Hatheway Terry Endowment Award as first-runner up for their talk titled “Predicting Protein Function by Integrating Physics-Based Modeling and Experiments with Statistical Learning.” Ruolan Fan (Andrew group) and Tongkun Wang (Auerbach group) were each awarded the William E. McEwen Scholarship Fund Award as joint second-runner ups for their talks. Fan’s talk was titled “On-site Identification of Ozone Damage in Fruiting Plants using Vapor-Deposited Conducting Polymer Tattoos” and Wang’s talk was “The Charge Balancing and Structure Directing Roles Played by Fluoride in Zeolite Synthesis.” The oral presenters were selected by a faculty committee through a nomination and evaluation process. The Marvin D. Rausch Lectureship Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation was awarded to Ritabrita Goswami (Rotello group) for first place in the morning session. Kimberly (Bolduc) Pereira (Walsh group) and Jeerapat Doungchawee (Vachet group), the joint first place winners in the afternoon session, were awarded the William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation.  Eight students received the William E. McEwen Award for Outstanding Posters. Securing joint second positions were Katie Wahlbeck (Thompson group) and Bhavna Kalyanaraman (Farkas group) for the morning session, and Jithu Krishna (Thayumanavan Group) and David Bilger (Andrew group) for the afternoon. Ruptanu Banerjee (Martin group) and Theo Prachyathipsakul (Thayumanavan Group) received joint third for morning session, and Yanfeng Li (Streiter group) and Zhaolin Xue (You group) for the afternoon. Jessica Allen (Thompson group) and Gaurav Mitra (Kittilstved group) were voted People’s Choice for Outstanding Poster Presentation, and received Paul Hathaway Terry Endowment Awards.