Principal Investigator
Samira M. Azarin
Associate Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 612-301-3488
B.S., Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011
Postdoc, Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University, 2012-2014
Graduate Students
Paulina Eberts
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering. University of Notre Dame, 2017
Co-advised with Casim Sarkar
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My current research is centered at the interface of stem cell engineering and molecular biology where I study the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer's disease and beyond.
Zi-Ting Feng
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 2019; M.S., Chemical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 2021
Email: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research centers around biomaterial-based immunotherapy for ovarian cancer, focusing on developing biomaterials that can recruit and eliminate cancer cells to trigger in situ vaccination responses.
Andrew Frederickson
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, 2017
Co-advised with Alptekin Aksan
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research utilizes novel biomaterials to investigate the mechanisms contributing to cellular dormancy in ovarian cancer in order to develop more effective cancer therapies.
Victoria Jones
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 2019
Co-advised with Prodromos Daoutidis
Contact: [email protected]
Aditi Karmaker
Education: B.S. Chemical Engineering, Texas Tech University, 2022
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research focus is to work on ultrasound-mediated destruction of metastatic ovarian cancer cells with the help of nanomaterials.
Kristen Lemke
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017
Co-advised with Casim Sarkar
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research focuses on development of relevant stem cell models of the human placenta and intestine and using those models along with targeted protein engineering approaches to improve drug delivery across barriers.
Pranati Mondkar
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019
Co-advised with Timothy Lodge
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research integrates soft materials and biological systems to better understand the mechanisms by which polymeric therapies restore cellular function in neurological injuries and diseases.
Janani Narayan
Education: B.S. Chemical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 2019
Co-advised with Wei-Shou Hu
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research utilizes engineering approaches to scale up cell therapies by studying the NK cell-feeder cell interaction and applying insights to design a feeder-free system for significant expansion of NK cells.
Joseph Vallin
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, Notre Dame University, 2018
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: My research seeks to understand fundamental mechanisms of the innate and adaptive immune response to focally ablated cancer cells, with the goal of improving upon in-situ cancer vaccines by designing supplemental, immune-activating biomaterials.
Harish Venkatachalapathy
Education: B.Tech., Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2016
Co-advised with Casim Sarkar
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: Synergistic computational and experimental approaches to understand and control biological noise in cell decision-making, particularly in the context of preventing breast cancer recurrence
Postdoctoral Fellows
Pedram Motallebnejad
Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, 2015; Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota, 2020
Co-advised with Wei-Shou Hu
Contact: [email protected]
Research Interests: I am interested in investigating mechanisms of NK cell activation with the aim of elucidating the key signals required for their robust expansion using next generation sequencing technologies such as RNA sequencing and ATAC sequencing.
Group Alumni
Dr. Francisco Pelaez (Merck) - Ph.D. 2019
Dr. Hak Rae Lee (AbbVie) - Ph.D. 2020
Dr. Jennifer One (Bristol Myers Squibb) - Ph.D. 2020
Dr. Jeanette Caronia (Takeda) - Ph.D. 2020
Dr. Pedram Motallebnejad (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota) - Ph.D. 2020
Dr. Hannah Seo (Bristol Myers Squibb) - Ph.D. 2021
Dr. Tiffany Lam (Boston Scientific) - Ph.D. 2021
Dr. Qiuge Zhang (3M) - Ph.D. 2022