People

Principal Investigator

Azarin

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

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

ZiTing_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

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

Jones

Education: B.S., Chemical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 2019

Co-advised with Prodromos Daoutidis

Contact: [email protected] 

Aditi Karmaker

AditiKarmaker_Photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pedram

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