Month: August 2022

It’s great to see another year starting with classrooms full of students… Good luck to all of them!

The Department of Chemistry would like to announce the recipients of the 2022 Interdisciplinary Fellowships. These fellowships, which provide $2000 per student, are supported by a quasi-endowment managed by the Clemson Graduate School and aiming to support interdisciplinary graduate work focused on defined University emphasis areas. This year’s recipients are:

Soham Panda

Research topic: African sleeping sickness, caused by the eukaryotic parasite Trypanosoma brucei and transmitted by blood-feeding tsetse flies, is endemic to 36 sub-Sahara African countries and, if untreated, is typically fatal. This research focuses on treating African sleeping sickness by inhibiting the enzymes responsible for energy generation in T. brucei. Benzamidobenzoic acids (BABA) were found to be particularly effective in inhibiting these enzymes, and the BABA scaffold is being further optimized using structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies, not only to improve its efficacy but also to gain a better understanding of the cellular mechanisms governing the delivery and the uptake of these compounds in Trypanosomes.

Read more about his contributions at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=2CUlktQAAAAJ 

Sarah K. Wysor

Research topic: Sarah is currently working with two-dimensional liquid chromatography to isolate, quantify, and determine charge variants of immunoglobulin G using protein A and weak cation exchange chromatography. This project looks at incorporating a low-cost workflow in a single platform for biopharmaceutical manufacturing by using cost-effective capillary-channeled polymer fiber stationary phases (< $5/column) as compared to expensive commercial columns ($100s – $1000s).

Read more about her contributions at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RM_-B4UAAAAJ&hl=en

Vigjna Abbaraju

Research topic: We are developing a novel Ultrasound Luminescent Chemical Imaging (ULCI) system to monitor biochemical changes in pH or oxygen in the microenvironment of bacteria infected orthopedic implant/ tumor tissue. For this purpose, a sensor is prepared that shows different emission characteristics with changing chemical concentrations where the detected photons are used for mapping the chemical concentrations using matlab.

Chuanlei Wang

Research topic: Monoclonal antibody-modified buoyant beads and magnetic beads are used to form a Buoyant and Magnetic (BAM) complex by specifically targeting and binding to SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein. The Matlab program tracks the BAM complex’s motion under a magnetic field’s influence for further quantitative analysis.

Read more about his contributions at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LLS5u10AAAAJ&hl=en