Hundreds of Clemson students gathered at the Watt Family Innovation Center to share their research at the 18th annual Focus on Creative Inquiry (FoCI) Poster Forum on April 5-7. The event allows students to showcase their work and gain skills to help communicate their work to the general public. The three-day event featured 240 student projects.
Hundreds of students presented at 18th Annual Focus on Creative Inquiry poster forum
FoCI Printed Poster Award
3rd place: “AI Prediction of Novel Autism Risk Genes by Genomic Data Mining” Mentor: Liangjiang Wang, genetics and biochemistry Students: Dany Rizkalla and Baylie Sisk, biochemistry; Snehal Shah, nursing; Tanner Street, chemical engineering
Clemson Student Research Forum
1st place: “Peptide Based Nanoplatform for Cas9/gRNA Ribonucleoprotein Cellular Delivery and Gene Editing?” Mentors: Angela Alexander, bioengineering; Jessica Larsen, chemical and biomolecular engineering Students: Joey Lavalla and Alyson Schwartz, bioengineering
For more information about any of the projects presented at FoCI and the Clemson Student Research Forum, visit the digital program.
Ana C. Alba-Rubio specializes in designing and synthesizing catalysts, which are materials that speed chemical reactions. Some of her more recent work has focused on turning carbon dioxide into alcohol that could be used as fuel. The idea is to create a closed system so that carbon dioxide can be recycled instead of being released into the atmosphere, which would contribute to climate change.
* Early Career Fellow for the class of 2023 by the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
* A 2022 Emerging Investigator by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Catalysis Science & Technology.
* A 2022 Energy and Fuels Rising Star by Energy & Fuels, a publication of ACS.
Clemson University researchers are helping lay the groundwork for computer simulations that could eventually be used to match cancer patients with the medicine that will help them get well.
A team of 11 researchers that included six from Clemson recently reported on its work in the journal Nature Communications. The research is a step forward for personalized medicine, helping raise hopes that clinicians will one day be able to plug patients’ data into a computer model to find the best possible medicine for each individual.
The paper’s authors built on previous work to develop a new way of creating and altering mechanistic models that bring together large datasets with minimal computer coding.
Marc Birtwistle, left, and Cemal Erdem are corresponding authors on a recent paper that helps advance personalized medicine
Cemal Erdem, a postdoctoral fellow in Clemson’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, said the paper will be of most interest to other researchers, especially those at pharmaceutical companies and those studying computational modeling or signaling networks.
“The impact of this paper is that we are trying to make it much, much easier to create these types of models,” he said. “We have this open-source tool now, with the code available on the internet. Researchers can take this code, create their own models and run simulations on their desktop computers or supercomputers.”
Marc Birtwistle, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Clemson, said his overarching goal in building models is to match drugs to patients. He said that his work is aimed at helping medical researchers answer design questions, similar to how an airplane manufacturer would run computer models of airplane designs before building an actual airplane.
“Medicine and pharma don’t have those types of design tools because they don’t exist yet,” Birtwistle said. “In a broad sense, that’s why this kind of work can be impactful. We’re trying to build that foundation so that those sorts of simulation models could help clinicians make decisions about patients.”
“This work forms a foundational recipe for increased mechanistic model-based data integration on a single-cell level, an important building block for clinically-predictive mechanistic models,” researchers wrote in the abstract.
Most published mechanistic models are small in scale and limited in their abilities, and it can be a struggle to incorporate multiple datasets, researchers wrote. Large-scale models “can provide a more extensive representation of cellular interactions and are thus well-poised for data integration that complement shortcomings of machine learning approaches,” they wrote.
Birtwistle said that computational biology researchers now have a way to very easily build on the team’s work.
“The way the model is programmed and built is very simple and easy to use,” he said. “Before, it was very difficult and almost inaccessible, but now it’s accessible. I think we’re going to be able to recruit much more of a research community into building these sorts of approaches.”
Aurore Amrit, a fifth year pharmacy student at the University of Paris, was able to start running a model within days of starting her work as an exchange student in Birtwistle’s lab. Before the team developed its new system, it took a postdoctoral researcher six months to do the same work.
“I added some models for anti-cancer drugs,” Amrit said. “It’s very straightforward.”
David Bruce, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, congratulated the team on publishing its work.
“This collaborative, multidisciplinary research helps keep Clemson at the forefront of health innovation,” Bruce said. “Thanks to the team’s work, the research community is better positioned to answer one of medicine’s most challenging questions– how to treat cancer as painlessly and effectively as possible.”
Corresponding authors on the paper were Erdem and Birtwistle. Co-authors from Clemson also included: Arnab Mutsuddy, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Ethan M. Bensman, who was an undergraduate in the School of Computing at the time of the research; William B. Dodd, an undergraduate in Clemson’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Alex Feltus, a professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry.
Co-authors from other institutions were: Michael M. Saint-Antoine of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Delaware; Mehdi Bouhaddou, of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco; Robert C. Blake of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Sean M. Gross and Laura M. Heiser of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University.
Graduate and undergraduate students showcase their teamwork at the Annual Research Forum of Creative Inquiry at Clemson University.
Clemson students team up with other college students from South Carolina in 10-week summer research.
In Dr. Ming Yang’s group, the current research projects in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to value-added products through thermal and electrocatalysis are sponsored by NSF, NASA, and ACS. These research projects have become a fertile platform for graduate and undergraduate students to pursue their individual developments and to serve our community. In the past 2021-22 academic year, student researchers from Yang Lab received eleven awards from Clemson University and external organizations to elevate their research outcomes. These include the Undergraduate Research Awards of Clemson University to John Yeager and Nicolas Glisson, the Palmetto Academy Research Awards to Bridget Bruce and William Howl, the Undergraduate Research Award by NASA EPSCoR for Julia Wood, Graduate Student Travel Awards of Clemson University for Ewa Chukwu, Zehua Jin, and Alexander Adogwa, the Kokes’ Award by North American Catalysis Society for Ewa Chukwu, 1st Place Presentation at the Annual Postdoctoral Symposium of Clemson University for Dr. Manjeet Chhetri, and Advancing Science Grant by NOBCCHE for Ewa Chukwu. Congratulations to the team!
Missoury Lytle is ending her second year of Ph.D. studies on a high note, receiving an award that recognizes her advocacy for women at Clemson University. She won an Award of Excellence for the Advancement of Women in the graduate category from the Clemson University Commission on Women.
Missoury received her Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering under the advisement of Dr. Eric Davis of Clemson. Missoury’s research focuses on making polymer membranes for water purification and drug delivery.
Missoury co-founded the Clemson chapter of Women in Chemical Engineering, co-chaired the organizing committee for the 2022 Women’s Celebration Month and led an effort to provide free menstrual products to women in Earle Hall.
“It was really nice to be acknowledged, but I get help from a lot of people,” she said.
Missoury said Dr. Davis connected her to Women in Chemical Engineering, a sub-organization of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Women in Chemical Engineering has partner organizations at several universities across the country, and Missoury’s efforts helped bring a student chapter to Clemson. “As part of a lab group that is mostly women, it seemed like the perfect opportunity,” Missoury said. “We wanted to make sure that non-chemical engineers and non- women were also partaking in the advocacy. It was a very good idea, and I was glad that our advisor brought it up.”
In her free time, Missoury enjoys playing competitive disc golf, and her advocacy for women extends to the sport. Men far outnumbered women at the recent 2022 College Disc Golf Championship in Marion, North Carolina, she said. “It was really cool hanging out with women in that context, while also receiving this award, because we were all lifting each other up as we’re competing against each other,” Missoury said.
Not only did Missoury receive the award from the Comission on Women that acknowledge her drive to support women, but she also received the Darnall and Susan Boyd Fellowship for her doctoral studies. The Darnall W. and Susan F. Boyd Foundation, Inc. works to support passionate students as they earn degrees in STEM fields so they may go on to successful careers. Missoury was nominated for her work in the Clemson community to support her peers. Her leadership as the President of Women in Chemical Engineering and Director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee in the Graduate Student Government does not go unnoticed.
After receiving her Ph.D., Missoury would like to teach at the undergraduate level.
You might call Ricardo García Cárcamo of Clemson University a “model” student.
Not only is Ricardo good at what he does, but he also works exclusively with computer models.
Ricardo is a Ph.D. student in the lab of Dr. Rachel Getman, the Murdoch Family Endowed Associate Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
The students in her lab specialize in creating sophisticated models of chemical reactions to lay the groundwork for more efficient, more effective and less expensive catalysts.
While the Hollywood idea of research may involve test tubes and bubbling chemicals, the students in Dr. Getman’s lab do all their work on computers. Ricardo focuses on how water influences catalytic reactions.
“It’s kind of different,” he said. “Most researchers are experimentalists, and they have a lab. My office is my lab.”
Ricardo received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from El Salvador’s Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas.
He started his career as a chemical engineer at a sugar factory. While working there, a friend who had received a Ph.D. from Clemson and had returned to El Salvador told Ricardo he would be a good fit for the chemical and biomolecular engineering Ph.D. program at Clemson.
Ricardo is now nearly three years into the program. He said his experience has changed how he approaches research, helping him see the big picture.
Dr. Getman has taught him to focus his ideas, follow a research plan and teach.
“She is passionate about students,” Ricardo said. “She tries to adapt herself to every student’s style.”
His proudest moment as a Tiger so far was passing his oral qualifier, an exam doctoral students take to determine if they are prepared for a Ph.D. program.
The Getman lab, he said, is a supportive environment.
“We are all in the lab most of the time, so we can chat, and we can help each other,” Ricardo said. “We stick together for a good part of the day.”
Ricardo is on track to graduate in about two years. He said he liked the fast pace of industry but is open to other opportunities.
Ana Alba-Rubio received an NSF grant of $250,000 to fund research to continue the development of a sensor that will aid in the detection of cancer.
Hydroxyl free radicals are found in the human body, but an excess of them can damage the cells resulting in serious health issues, including cancer, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s diseases. Therefore, these species have attracted great interest in health care and medical areas as biomarkers that might indicate the initiation and progress of these diseases.
While being a faculty at the University of Toledo, Dr. Alba-Rubio, together with Dr. Dong-Shik Kim and Dr. Surachet Duanghathaipornsuk, developed a sensor for the in situ real-time detection of hydroxyl free radicals which was considered challenging due to the extreme reactivity and short lifetime of these species. Inspired by their findings, the team participated in the NSF I-Corps program which aims to help researchers gain valuable insight into entrepreneurship.
After interviewing more than a hundred experts in the field, the team concluded that further development of the sensor could help surgical oncologists to easily determine the margins when removing cancerous tissue from a patient. In this regard, the team has just received a two-year Partnerships for Innovation-Technology Translation (PFI-TT) grant ($250,000) from the National Science Foundation to study the viability of the sensor in partnership with pathologists and surgical oncologists. The rapid on-site detection of cancer cells in the operating room is expected to help both patients and hospitals reduce pain and economic burden.
Gov. Henry McMaster is honoring Jessica Larsen of Clemson University with an award that recognizes the research she is conducting to better understand and treat diseases of the central nervous system.
Larsen, a Dean’s Assistant Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has won the 2022 Governor’s Young Scientist Award for Excellence in Scientific Research.
“It’s exciting, almost validating in a way,” she said. “I’ve got five Ph.D. students and 25 undergraduates, and it feels good to be recognized for all the work we’re putting in.”
April Heyward, South Carolina Academy of Sciences President-Elect, Jessica Larsen, ChBE Assistant Professor, and David Bruce, ChBE Department Chair, after Larsen received her award.
Larsen and her students conduct research in the field of polymeric nanotechnology. They work to develop materials that respond to diseases in the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord.
The research can lead to new materials to better diagnose disease, deliver drugs and regenerate tissue, she said.
The group has a special focus on GM1 gangliosidosis, an inherited disorder that progressively destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. The disorder affects 1 in 100,000 to 200,000 newborns, Larsen said.
David Bruce, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson, said the award underscores that Larsen is an exceptionally talented, hard-working researcher and educator.
“Dr. Larsen is conducting innovative research that shows promise for easing suffering and saving lives,” he said. “Her work also provides opportunities for students to work on the cutting-edge of health innovation. She is highly deserving of this award.”
Larsen joined Clemson in 2017 after receiving a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Auburn University.
This video was created after Jessica Larsen received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
“When I visited Clemson, I saw the collegiality of the people in my department, and this whole Clemson family feel was very true inside of this building,” she said in Earle Hall, the department’s current home.
Larsen has racked up several honors in recent years, including the Outstanding Woman Award in the faculty category from the Clemson University Commission on Women. She received funding for her GM1 gangliosidosis research through a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Larsen said her favorite part of being on the Clemson faculty is the opportunity to advise top-notch students, who she has found to be inquisitive, excited and passionate. A bulletin board in her office is covered in hand-written thank-you notes from students.
“Those are the moments that really get me– when they send me these emails or letters letting me know the impact that I’ve made on their lives,” Larsen said. “I have to remind them that they give themselves the opportunity. I just provided the space.”
Anand Gramopadhye, dean of the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences, said Larsen’s award from the governor is well-deserved.
“Dr. Larsen is expanding knowledge in the field of health innovation, helping create an engineering workforce of the future and helping raise Clemson’s national and international profile,” Gramopadhye said. “I offer her my wholehearted congratulations on this honor.”
The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is proud to announce our senior award recipients for the class of 2022.
Trinity Pominville was selected as the recipient of the Western S.C. Section AIChE Scholastic Achievement Award by the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences. Pominville served the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering as a student ambassador, encouraging prospective students to become tigers with her bubbly and welcoming personality. She is an active member of AIChE, the Society of Women Engineers, the Catholic Student Association and a Grand Challenge Scholar. She is also a recipient of the Intel Society of Women Engineers Undergraduate Scholarship, a Dixon Fellow, the Arthur and Lillie Shands Scholarship, and was named the ChBE Junior of the Year in May of 2021.
Kara Bane was selected by the ChBE faculty as the Top Senior for the Class of 2022. During her time at Clemson, Bane completed three co-op rotations with BASF Seneca, a summer internship with Milliken Chemical, and served as the Vice President for Clemson University’s chapter of AIChE. She also made the Clemson University President’s List each semester and received the 2021 Western SC AIChE Clemson Scholarship. During her free time, Kara enjoys playing soccer, going on long walks with her dog, and spending time at the local restaurants with her friends. Following her graduation, Bane will be moving to Houston, TX to work for Siemens Energy in their Engineering Management Acceleration Program. She is very excited for this next chapter of her life and will always be grateful to the ChBE faculty and fellow students for making her time at Clemson the best it could possibly be.
Chlo Forenzo tied with Elijah Taylor (pictured separately) as the Outstanding Undergraduate Student Researcher. Forenzo joined the Larsen Lab in the Fall of 2020 as a junior. Since that time, Chlo has become a leader within her research team. Her project focused on delivering gene-editing tool, Cas9 ribonucleoprotein using polymer-based nanoparticle delivery systems. In these efforts, Chlo was selected to give an oral presentation at the 2021 Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. This honor is typically reserved for top-performing graduate students and the highest quality undergraduate students. Chlo has decided to continue her research here at Clemson University in the Ph.D. program, working under the advisement of Dr. Larsen.
Nicholas Gregorich received the R.C. Edwards Outstanding Graduate Student Award given by Clemson University’s Division of Student Affairs on April 28, 2022.
The award is given to the “all around best” graduate student who has exhibited both high scholastic achievement and commitment to the Clemson community through leadership in university organizations.
Gregorich is a 5th year PhD Candidate under the advisement of Dr. Eric Davis.
