NSF/GOALI supplemental award: Bringing Nano to Undergraduates @ Fisher

Hello NRG!

Thanks to Jim McGrath and NSF, St. John Fisher College students and myself will have the opportunity to conduct research at URNano and the McGrath Lab this summer.  I am an Assistant Professor at Fisher in the Biology Department, and my  background is in cellular immunology, with a focus on sterile inflammation.  Why  nano then?  As a postdoc I did some work on producing liposomes to deliver silencing RNA to cells, and since I have been interested in using nano-tools to ask biological questions.  In my lab we currently produce 100nm qdot-liposome conjugates and then deliver them to macrophages in culture.  Mind you, our work is carried out with an approximate annual budget of $5k, and the experiments are performed exclusively by undergraduates.  Students have two ways of exploring nanotechnology at Fisher:  joining my lab (with all of its limitations) or taking the Nanobiology elective I teach in the Fall.  So my team is excited to join you for these 10 weeks and we look forward  to taking full advantage of all the resources offered at the U of R and to collaborate with you.

The team is formed by:

Niecy Cameron –  Niecy will be working primarily at Fisher, she is the expert at extruding nanoparticles and will also be working with tissue culture.

John Crean – John just graduated near the top of his class in Biology, and is very interested in graduate programs in bioengineering.

J. Ryan McDowell –  Ryan is a rising senior; he just spent all of last semester thinking about anti-inflammatory nano emulsions and is looking forward to playing with microfluidics.

This is it for an introduction, we will be pestering people in the McGrath lab (particularly Henry) for the next 10 weeks (and hopefully catching some World Cup games too) and we intend to learn tons and get some concrete stuff done.   My second post will talk about the kinds of things we plan to work on.   If you are interested in checking out our very modest website, you can go to: https://sites.google.com/a/sjfc.edu/nanobiology/home

Cheers,

Fernando