Congratulations to Kaylee, Ruth, Melissa, and Zach, who are now all officially Ph.D.candidates! They all passed their preliminary exams this summer and are very glad to have that over with.

As summer comes to an end, we said goodbye to Dr. Kate Berg, who defended earlier this summer, and Dylan Cavey, who was with us for 10 weeks with the chemistry REU program. Kate will be staying in Fort Collins, working for Legacy Biodesign LLC while Dylan will return to Adams State University to finish up his senior year of undergrad. We are sad to see them go and wish them best of luck for the future!

Back in June, Chuck, Eka, Zach, and Ruth attended the 2019 Gordon Research Seminar and Conference in Hong Kong: Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics. It was a great week learning about the newest research in microfluidics, making connections, and having fun.

Congratulations to Dr. Kate Berg, who defended her thesis “Carbon-Based Electrodes for Environmental Health Applications” last week! She will be started her new job at Legacy BioDesign LLC soon. We wish her luck in her future endeavors!

On April 23, CSU Ventures hosted their 7th annual Demo Day. It is a day for students to present their research in a form that showcases how the research will create a positive result in society. Ruth and Cody presented their research, and Cody won the Innovation in Natural Sciences Award. Congrats!

One of our engineering graduate students, Alec Richardson, was recently named as one of the recipients of the 2019-20 Gaussi fellowship. This is an interdisciplinary training program to develop the skills and tools necessary to process, analyze, visualize, and understand large datasets from biosensing and next generation DNA sequencing.

Congrats Alec!

The National Science Foundation recently recognized some of our research that was done in collaboration with Brian Geiss and David Dandy in the Microbiology and Chemical & Biological Engineering departments at CSU. Together they developed a new technology that uses a a capacitive microwire sensor to detect small amounts of antibodies in a person’s blood. See below for links to the NSF article and the journal article.

CSU researchers discover new technique to test for viral infections

An ultra-sensitive capacitive microwire sensor for pathogen-specific serum antibody responses

We just returned from a great week at Pittcon 2019, held in Philadelphia, PA. It was a great opportunity to learn about the newest in analytical chemistry and make connections in the field. A few students gave talks and Chuck received the Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award from the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry. Congrats to all!

Chuck – Electrochemical Paper-Based Analytical Devices for Infectious Disease Detection
Ruth – Pesticide detection Using a Self-pumping Microfluidic Herringbone Mixer
Kaylee – Polycaprolactone Thermoplastic Electrodes for Patternable Carbon Enzyme Sensors
Cynthia – Tubular Band Thermoplastic Electrode Arrays for Small-Volume Immunoassays
Sid – Paper-based Nuclease Protection Assays for Pathogen Detection
Cody – Electrochemical Resazurin Assay for Bacteria Detection in Milk
Chuck – The Rise of Microfluidic Paper-Based Analytical Devices

Awards: Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award, from the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry

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As the fall semester comes to a close, our group has grown by three! In November, Lauro Pradela joined us as a visiting scholar from Brazil. Two first year graduate students have also joined the lab: Kate McMahon and Jeremy Link. We are looking forward to working with them over the next few years.

This week we had our annual holiday celebration: lots of good food and a fun white elephant gift exchange!

Dr. Kat Boehle, who recently graduated from our group, did a lot of work regarding the detection of falsified antibiotics. Click here for a news release about her work, or see below for a video made by a team at CSU about her work.