“I’m thrilled to be presenting the Turnbull Lecture this year. The annual Fall MRS meeting is always a great opportunity to share and learn about the latest exciting developments in materials research.” – Dr. Sharon Glotzer

Dr. Nicholas Kotov, along with University of Vigo Prof. Luis M. Liz-Marzán and University of Antwerp Porf. Sara Bals, have been awarded €9M ($10M) by the European Research Council to develop nanoparticles that recognize proteins.

BI had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Romee, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Haploidentical Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Congratulations to Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Sharon Glotzer, on being awarded the 2025 Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics for demonstrating the critical role of shape entropy in colloidal assembly.

The researchers within this article, including Dr. Lowenstein, generalize a recently formulated particle-field approach to investigate the genesis and evolution of oncostreams in both glioblastomas and gliosarcomas.

After 18 years of excellency at Michigan Chemical Engineering, Vennema Professor Lola Eniola-Adefeso takes her leave to become the new dean of the University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering.

Dr. Willsey is the Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Biomedical Engineering. The Willsey lab focuses on intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) as a potential therapy for paralysis.

We’re excited to have Dr. Willsey join our team, and we can’t wait to see his impact on the Biointerfaces Institute!

We are pleased to announce that EI Therapeutics (a startup spun out of BI) has been named the Runner Up for the Audience Choice Award at the Nucleate Midwest Showcase 2024! Congratulations to Priyan Weerappuli (BI postdoc) and Sam Currier (UM MBA student)!

This award is presented to those faculty that showed significant contributions and leadership in fields ranging from firearm injury prevention and multi-scale computation to Earth remote sensing and molecular imaging. Dr. Luker’s work focuses on the discovery of how cell surface receptors for chemokines and growth factors regulate breast cancer metastasis, and how they are regulated by the tumor microenvironment and metabolic environment.

“Our immune system has to learn about a virus to generate the antibodies to fight back against infection, but by that time it may be too late for some people,” – Dr. Nicholas Kotov

A new fabrication process for helical metal nanoparticles provides a simpler, cheaper way to rapidly produce a material essential for biomedical and optical devices.

“One of our motivators is to drastically simplify manufacturing of complex materials that represent bottlenecks in many current technologies,” – Dr. Nicholas Kotov

“We were looking for more sensitive markers of cancer that we could use to closely monitor treatments. In some cases, only about half of cancer patients respond to the treatments, leaving the rest with poor outcomes. Treatments may also be expensive and cause adverse reactions in some patients, so it’s important for clinicians to know early on whether a treatment is going to be effective—or whether they may be better off with a different treatment.” – Dr. Sunitha Nagrath

“This study found that bioinspired particles with complex shape mimicking spiky particles encountered in many parts of biology can hold 70 times greater charge than the simple sphere-like particles. This unique property was used in the next generation of charge storage devices needed in many areas of technology from drones to prosthetics,” – Dr. Nicholas Kotov

We recently assembled a team of 6 labs from the US, Australia, and France to develop a method of probing the brain to assess seizure risk in real time. We will test our method using advanced data analysis, four types of computational modeling, four animal models, and a pilot human study. The results would pioneer a new method of testing whether seizure treatments work without waiting for seizures to occur, allowing efficient treatment optimization. We named our project PREMONITION: PREictal MONitoring of seIzure risk for Treatment optimizatION”